Geography of the Moon are back in Cambodia, but just where have they been and what have they been up to since we saw them last? LengPleng intrepidly asks Andrea and Virginie these and other questions.
Virginie: We stayed in Cambodia until May 2020.
Andrea: After being stuck on Koh Rong Samloen for two months.
Virginie: It was actually good in hindsight. It was probably more interesting than being stuck in Scotland by ourselves. Then we got a flat in Glasgow that we found on Facebook by chance. We got out of the railway station with all of our stuff, moved into the flat straight away.
Andrea: Discovering there was no central heating.
Virginie: Scottish people are tough, they don’t need central heating
Andrea: We set up a studio, we started to do all the things we couldn’t do on tour. It was really nice to be there for the first six or seven months, then after: boring, really boring.
Virginie: We really needed to rest, really needed a break. We were disappearing thin after touring, so it was nice to stop. And then it was a slow descent into depression and loneliness. Our lockdown was from May 2020.
Andrea: Then it opened up for a couple of months and then closed down for nine months in a row.
Virginie: From October, then started to reopen in May, June, then finished opening fully in July. So we had almost a year and a half with two months break in between. Being on your own too long is really difficult. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments.
Oscar’s on the Corner, 25 December, 2018
The creative lull created by lack of inputs meant there was space to get their album released, get the admin up to date, and start picking up fans like Belle & Sebastian and Robert Carlyle.
Virginie: We pressed a record, Fake Flowers Never Die. The digital version in June, and then we pressed an actual record. Some people make babies, we made a record.
Andrea: We had to take care of the digital distribution of the record, taking care of the social media. But after a while not enough to fulfil the soul.
Virginie: You run out of inputs. So you have no output. But then again, we had it good compared to a lot of people. I feel like we became very dry in terms of creativity, and very depressed. But we had a place to live, we had food every day, we had our studio, we were okay. We survived. But mentally it was difficult.
Andrea: I did a course to learn how to mix and master. Eating with my parents every week – normal things, very nice actually. But artistically it was quite tough. When they opened all the museums back in the summer of 2021 we went everywhere.
Virginie: I feel bad complaining about it, we saw more and more people queuing at food banks, we never had to do that. It was much harder for many people.
Another release they made, through the label/platform Teen Freaks, was a charity album, Music for Mutual Aid, featuring a range of different musics from Cambodia and elsewhere.
Andrea: It was so cold, I was seeing people living under bridges, how can I help them? Lots of people participated in the project, there was good feedback, it was very fun.
Virginie: We also put out Live in Cambodia. We started to write the new EP in July, after we got married, when things were starting to reopen. We started to see friends we hadn’t seen, we started to feel a bit more alive again.
Andrea: We started to rehearse a little bit more.
Alchemy, 29 November 2019
So tell us about the new EP.
Virginie: There are four songs. Two songs that we wrote about in the summer: one is about my happy place being a tropical island, one is about the freak-out and unravelling towards the end of lockdown, Then we went to cat-sit in Italy for a month and a half, with a house to ourselves. We set up our little studio, and we recorded those two songs. Then we wrote two other songs in one day and recorded them straight away. In a year and a half four songs is really meagre, but there will be more coming.
Andrea: We also had to work a lot on Fake Flowers Never Die, we ended up being played on BBC6, BBC Scotland, made the list of 21 best bands in Scotland, blah, blah, blah. We did radio all over the place. In the Kampot Radio Top 100 2020 we were number nine with Dead Beat Poet. We beat Metallica, so that was good. [Ed’s note: in the 2021 countdown they had two songs, Moonlight Tan at 19 and Dead Beat Poet at 10; they beat Metallica again].
Virginie: We are releasing the first single in January, on the 21st – we are waiting for the video to be ready.
Andrea: It’s being shot in Grenoble in France, near Lyon. A very beautiful location.
Virginie: An abandoned university on top of a mountain.
Andrea: Very nice, very cold. When we shot the video, I was in just a shirt, I was dying of cold.
Virginie: Then we’re going to release the EP in February. We’ll do a release party in Phnom Penh, just to play the tracks to people, and maybe do a gig as well.
Andrea: We worked with Jason Shaw on the EP, so it’s been nice to work with him again, another Scottish piece of Cambodia.
What light can you shine on this entity Teen Freaks?
Andrea: Teen Freaks is a label, a platform for Geography and many other bands – there are some very interesting bands coming on. It originally started around 15 years ago, in the north of Italy, an alternative to there being too many cover bands playing everywhere. It’s called Teen Freaks because we’re all freaks, writing our music, good bands, bad bands, really good bands, really bad bands. During lockdown I thought why not revive it. Started to do a few events here and there using the name. Whatever I like I share it – I’m not a critic, it’s just my personal taste.
Virginie: There’s labels that do a lot of hip hop, there’s labels that do just psych, there’s Teen Freaks that does whatever you like.
Andrea: I discovered some really great bands through putting some posts on Twitter and Instagram, asking for demos to review. I was surprised – I received a thousand or more submissions. And I did listen to everything, I promise. Out of that, 50, 60 bands, on a regular basis I was sharing the music, tried to talk to people. I interviewed Dana Colley from Morphine. And I interviewed Italian punk legend Massimo Zamboni, from the band CCCP, who was really interested in what we were doing with Geography. I did a show on Kampot Radio and played a CCCP song, and somehow he heard about it, and contacted me to thank me, saying he listened to the entire show. He complemented all what I played. I was trying to promote Phnom Penh and Cambodia to the rest of the world: Professor Kinski, Sochi and Stan, Kampot Playboys, Cambodian Space Project, and so on.
Virginie: We’ve been trying to explain to people that in Phnom Penh there’s a really good music scene, because nobody knows about it. It’s a really random thing. The best kept secret of the world. Especially how inclusive it is.
Andrea: When I speak to musicians about where we’re going to stay, what are you going to do as a musician, and we say I go to Phnom Penh, everyone looks at you: what are you doing? Once we discovered it we wanted to come back, because it’s genuinely great. For over 20 years I was touring a lot, playing in London, Berlin, France – but the way I’ve been treated in Cambodia.
Virginie: Cambodia is the best. It’s hard to be here sometimes, it’s a tough place. But once you’re on stage everything makes sense. The people, the way we are so welcomed here and loved, everybody is so supportive, it’s incredible.
Andrea: We just write music, play live, and manage ourselves and our label.
Virginie: Music is our life. We don’t do anything else. We sacrifice everything else to our music.
Geography of the Moon are at Botanico@Odom Garden on Friday and Oscar’s on the Corner on Saturday, with much more to come.
Little Susie, 23 December, 2021