Ways in Waves is the brainchild of Brian Raine, a multi-instrumentalist and music producer living out of Edmonton, Alberta. With malleable form and the spirit of experimentation at its core, the group began as a live duo, and eventually expanded to a five-piece live band with Raine picking up vocals as well as guitar and keys parts.
Their upcoming album is set for release next month (September 2024) and combines aspects of rock, art-pop, and electronic music together into a mixture that propels the listener through controlled chaos. With drums engineered by Quinn Cyrankiewicz of Royal Tusk and performed by Joel Joeske of Whale and the Wolf, the newest releases from Ways in Waves (including “Who in War,” “Everything Taken,” and “Ovum Nova”) are explosive and driven while maintaining an ethereal backdrop.
There’s a lot of breakup songs out there, but most of those are about romantic relationships. The feelings that came out of feeling this distance growing between myself and people I used to love was very painful, and made me contemplate just… starting over, imagining leaving everything and everyone behind and beginning life again as a new person, with no ties to anyone or anything. – Brian Raine
Throughout “Death of Others,” you’ll hear a series of samples that sound like a slot machine, and those are from a sampling session I did with my bandmate Murray Cameron Smith, where we rolled this toy around on a snare drum. It has some bells inside of it that trigger at different angles and so I chopped those up and distorted them quite a bit to create that sound. BUT! The actual cool thing about this is that it ended up being the sound that inspired the visual artist Molly Little to go with the pachinko machine concept for the music video that she created alongside Max Amerongen! – Brian Raine
