White Noise Sound Reborn: Dreamscapes in Psych and Shoegaze
White Noise Sound emerged from the misty hills of Wales, conjuring a debut album that pulses with life and mystery. Recorded in shadowed hotel bars and smoke-filled studios, the six-piece crafted a chimeric wall of sound, where shoegaze meet drone-laden psychedelia which drifts like a dream.
Nights spent with Pete Kember and Cian Ciaran shaped the record into something alive, a space where sound seemed to arrive on its own, unbound and unpredictable. Layers of synths, sitar, and ethereal vocals fold together, moving between trance-like repetition and ecstatic release. Strings, brass, and woodwinds add depth, drawn from musicians who answered a simple call from a hotel bar. The music on vibrates with ritual and instinct, inviting listeners to dissolve into its currents. Over a decade, it has grown into a cult classic, a record that whispers, and burns with the energy of something otherworldly. Rocket Girl Records reintroduces this amazing recording to a new generation of musicheads, and you can also pre-order Fold-In Time, slated for release on October 17th, 2025.
“The idea was to create a space where something could arrive”
Fifteen years, huh? That’s a solid chunk of time. How does it feel digging out this debut album now? Does it hit differently in 2025 than it did back in 2010, especially with everything that’s happened in music since then?
Fifteen years feels like both a flicker and a lifetime.
We didn’t make the album for anyone else; it was about channeling something that we could disappear into. So reissuing it doesn’t feel like looking back; it feels like a continuation. Like a tape looping with no real beginning or end.
The context has changed, as have we. There are listeners old and new, which is an amazing thing, but how people access music has changed totally.
That said, the album was kind of made outside any particular time frame, so the energy remains.
Maybe the record makes more sense in 2025 than it did in 2010?
You guys locked yourselves away in Swansea to cook up this “wall of sound.” What was that like, really? Were there any weird rituals, specific records on repeat, or just a whole lot of jamming until something clicked?
The initial sessions were in Coventry with Pete Kember – night sessions, starting at sunset and ending at daybreak.
We set up stall in an old hotel bar in Swansea thereafter.
Windows blacked out. Lights out. Dream machine spinning.
The idea was to create a space where something could arrive, rather than try to force it into being. Tune into something unbounded and follow it.
Certain records stayed close – Suicide, Neu!, Loveless, Playing with Fire – but we all came from different angles, with different tastes. We were just as informed by non-musical influences – Burroughs’ fold-in and cut-up methods, Gysin’s dream machine, Nietzsche – as we were by any specific records.
Working with legends like Pete Kember and Cian Ciaran must have been wild. What kind of vibe did they bring to the studio? Any cool stories or unexpected moments from those sessions that really stuck with you?
It was a total privilege to work with Pete and Cian; they both taught us to open our minds and explore. They helped unlock WNS.
Pete walked in with a Synthi and a Raagini, but certainly not with any agenda. We laid the foundations of the record in those sessions; it felt like we began the process of channeling or receiving these sounds from somewhere else.
Night sessions in a darkened, smoke-filled studio with a dream machine spinning in the corner saw various contributors falling by the wayside as the hours progressed, but we’d always come round at some point and go again.
Cian took the recordings to another level in the mix at his studio in Cardiff Docks.
It was incredible to see a master at work on our material, finding clarity within the wall of sound.
At one point, Rhys Ifans wandered in, his own glass in hand, and declared our track ‘Blood’ made him “want to smash glasses.”
We took that as high praise.
“Everything was built from instinct and immersion.”
Your sound’s a wicked mash-up of shoegaze, drone, and psych. How did you manage to weave all that together without it feeling like a genre pile-up? Are there any tracks where you feel that blend really shines or takes an unexpected turn?
Thank you.
We never thought in terms of genre.
Everything was built from instinct and immersion. If it resonated, we kept going.
Maybe ‘There is No Tomorrow’ best illustrates that harmony. It lays on a bed of Sequential Circuits and DM7 drones, and builds through a dream-like trance into a wall of sound that bends beneath a psychedelic fanfare.
We sent a speculative email to Cardiff University’s Music Department and some proper musicians. We were surprised when some of them actually showed up at our hotel bar/studio. All of the strings, brass, and woodwind stuff for that track and the whole album got done in a couple of sessions.
But each track is an alchemical mix in its own right.
We made the album that we wanted to make, and without an agenda.
A decade of quiet, and now this reissue is kicking off a whole triptych of releases. What sparked this return to the spotlight now? And how do the upcoming remix and live albums connect with or build on what you started with this debut?
Returning wasn’t calculated.
Rocket Girl reached out about reissuing the first album, and the past didn’t feel like the past anymore; it felt present, unfinished.
The remix album and the live release are continuations of the WNS energies.
The remixes stretch and morph the original transmissions; they reveal new frequencies and possibilities. A fold-in time. We love them, and we’re looking forward to sharing them.
The live album captures some of the energy of WNS when we were traveling around Europe. A living ritual, never to be repeated. The circle is red, charged and distorted by time.
Together, the three form a kind of triptych, drawn from the same source.
It’s cool how your music found its way to people like Anton Newcombe, Daniel Avery, and Andrew Weatherall – total legends from different corners of the music world.
All very humbling connections. People that we look up to. Mind-blowing, really.
I guess the names you mention are from different corners of the music world, but they share the fact that they’ve all followed their own sonic compasses.
Maybe they see that in our music.
Music is a kind of transmission. People who really feel it recognize others who share that energy.
“Music’s not for everyone,” as a great man once said.
‘Sunset’ is the track leading the charge for this reissue. Why that one? Was there something about it that just screamed “welcome back”? And what’s the story behind the video – anything you were trying to say with it this time around?
‘Sunset’ always felt like a portal. An end, where light fades, but where something else begins.
The video shows the band in flight, summoning something in a darkened room, dream machine spinning.
You’re on Rocket Girl now, after the original release on Alive Records. How does that feel? Does Rocket Girl’s vibe sync up better with where White Noise Sound is at these days, or with the album’s whole story?
We’ll be forever grateful to Patrick and Alive Records.
They’re an amazing label, and they put an incredible amount of faith in us, off the back of a Myspace account, four tracks, two pictures, and a piece of paper very loosely entitled “biography”.
The world was a smaller place in 2009, so to be sat in a hotel bar in Swansea conjuring 8-minute drones with dilapidated, borrowed gear, and then be signed by a label in California who proceeded to send you out across Europe, was all a bit of a blur. It was wild, as were we.
Rocket Girl feels like a natural home in 2025. They have a beautiful, borderless catalogue. Vinita has nurtured outsider sounds for years; she’s a visionary who never tries to flatten her artists into trends. That’s why RG and WNS fit.
Thinking about all the ambient and experimental stuff popping off today, do you ever feel like White Noise Sound was a bit ahead of its time? How do you see it sitting within the current scene of those kinds of sounds?
I’ve been paying more attention to new sounds recently, and I’ve heard lots of great stuff.
We were never trying to predict or fit. We were tuning into something; it just happened to come through like that. If it’s coming through for other people in similar ways now, cool. It’s all part of the same circle.
Beyond just getting the music out there again, what’s really being “resurrected” for you personally as a band? And what do you hope new listeners will really dig into or discover in this album that might have been missed before?
What’s being resurrected is the energy.
For listeners old and new, we hope they feel the record, that they find space inside it to dissolve and lose themselves.
This is not for everybody. It was never meant to be.
But if you tune in, and it vibrates, then you’re part of it too.
Klemen Breznikar
Headline photo: White Noise Sound (Credit: Sophie Maund)
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