Sonic Winter Q&A

Your name:
Jean-Marc Millière (Vocals/Guitars/Sound design).

Where are you from?
Paris, France.

Name of band: 

Sonic Winter.

Who else is in your band?

Francis Girola (Vocals/Keyboards/Sound design)
+ Guest members
Laurent Duval : Bass (France)
Emile Millière : Bass (Sweden)
James Neilson : Bass (Scotland)
Mr Drum Machine : Drums (Machine Land)
Gary Gilmour : Drums (Scotland)
David Watson : Bagpipes (Scotland)
Valérie Ajacques : Sound Design (France)
Seved Malm : Vocals (Sweden)
Philippe Duval : Vocals (France)
Scott Malley : Vocals (Scotland)
Dan The Pass Bus Ticket : Vocals (Scotland)
Benjamin Løzninger: Vocals & Keyboards (France)
Zoé Løzninger: Vocals & Choirs (France)
Paul Cassidy: Vocals (Scotland)

How would you describe yourselves?

Sonic Winter is a French-Brazilian band from Glasgow UK, originally created by two friends sharing their different musical universes.
French Guitarist Jean-Marc Millière and Brazilian Keyboardist Francis Girola met in Glasgow UK and became friends there.
Sonic Winter work as a two-piece band. We like to explore as many ideas of music as possible, Sonic Winter is a massive laboratoire where all sound experiences are welcome. We have plenty of friends from different countries "Guest Members" who play on our music, they bring their ideas, sometimes we just send an instrumental backing track and they put their musical world on it. Sometimes the songs are written and already recorded, they just need to play the missing instrumental parts that we want, mainly it's always bass and drums we need, sometimes new vocals.
  

Who are your main influences musically?

Uriah Heep, Rush, King Crimson, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Van der graaf generator, Goldfrapp, John Lee Hooker, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Air.

What do you hope to achieve in music?

We want Sonic Winter to become an international community with musicians contributing from every continent and share all kind of music background with them to send Sonic Winter on new sonic adventures.

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?

So far as the band is only over one year old the highlight has been to be signed by the French record company KIWI MUSIC a new label dedicated to pop/rock music for our debut album "Magical Silver Bullets and Hell Birdsongs". They contacted us on internet via Facebook.
The release of the CD is on the way. Another highlight was the great quantity of Sonic Winter songs played on radios (USA, UK, France etc...) directly from the start as soon as they were sent to radio djs, they really helped us to promote our music.

And what’s the moment you want to forget?

For now there is not really a moment we would like to forget apart from the fact that at the start of the band when looking for musicians many of them never showed up for rehearsals, so it is why we decided to do everything as a two-piece band and asked our musicians friends instead to help us by playing their part on our music as guests.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why?

It would be the track "Miles Away" because it was the first I ever wrote for Sonic Winter and you can hear all our influences, Blues type of lyrics, Heavy Black Sabbath riffs, keyboard in between the Doors, King Krimson, E.L.O, drums groovy very 70's, bass influences like Gary Thain (Uriah Heep), soaring guitar solo. 

Where can we listen to it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh75fj4WYZ8

Where can we find out more about your music?

https://www.facebook.com/SonicWinter
http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicwintermusic/videos
http://www.reverbnation.com/sonicwinter
https://twitter.com/SONICWINTER
http://soundcloud.com/sonic-winter
http://sonicwinter.bandcamp.com/album/first-winter
http://sonicwinter.bandcamp.com/album/sonic-winter-twice
https://www.facebook.com/groups/349560948476299/

Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask?

We would love to do live gigs, loads of listeners or fans ask us to, but to do justice to the type of music we play we would need that clubs and promoters up their game and put their money where their mouth is by not asking bands to provide impossible numbers of ticket sales before getting paid or even to pay to be on the bill. Bands invest already a lot of their time and own money onto rehearsals, recordings, equipment and nearly all of them are struggling to carry on to play the music they love.