Phantastic Ferniture on Fronds Forever tour reconnecting with songs from their debut self-titled album

Phantastic Ferniture. Image credit: @phantasticferniture

Jordan Royal (Sonic Alien 4ZZZ) recently sat down with Ryan and Elizabeth from Phantastic Ferniture to chat about their Fronds Forever tour, reconnecting with songs from their debut self-titled album and some of their most memorable gigs.

Interview aired on Sonic Alien 4ZZZ 22 Jan 2025.

Jordan: I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say when you announced the Fronds Forever tour, I was so excited. How's it been so far?

Ryan: Really good. I think we were all a little unsure how it would be received after not playing for a while, but it's been great to see people come out and really enjoy listening to the music. It's been a lot of fun to play together again. We've been rehearsing before the show, so I think we're about six days in of playing every day in a row. We're a little bit tired, but we're doing good.

Jordan: Phantastic Ferniture began from a casual conversation in 2014, so it's been a 10-year-long project. It must be really nice to have such a cornerstone to come back to and revisit, but you guys all have pretty intense solo projects. How'd the idea come up for the Fronds Forever tour, and was it tricky to align all of your schedules?

Elizabeth: The idea came up in—it wasn't a very interesting way, actually. We had a meeting on Zoom, and Ryan suggested that we do a tour, and we all said yes. So that's pretty much how it happened. Aligning schedules, I guess, is part of the reason why we did it, because there was a window of time where we were all free, which is difficult to have these days. So that's part of the reason we did it as well. And here we are.

Jordan: How does it feel to come back to the project and step back into this collaborative band dynamic, reconnecting with songs that are over six years old?

Elizabeth: It’s been really great. I remember the day I started practicing the songs again, and I was thinking, how am I going to remember all these? It was like riding a bike—they just came back straight away. Playing them now, they don’t feel exactly the same. It feels like they’ve got a little bit of a different energy, new life to them. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been playing them for years and years—they feel brand new in a way, because we took so many years off, which is a pretty cool feeling.

Jordan: Is there a particular song that, over the past six days, has been really exciting to reconnect with?

Ryan: I think the whole record has been exciting to reconnect with. I don’t know if there’s one particular song. Every song has different things to it that we all enjoy doing. For Liz and me, figuring out how to make those sounds again that we made on the record has been really fun, and we’re still changing that every day at the minute. The whole record has been fun to reconnect with.

Jordan: When you were writing your self-titled debut album, you embraced instruments that you weren’t as skilled at or wasn’t your main instrument. Is there a wacky, weird instrument that you’ve always wanted to play or somehow incorporate into a song?

Elizabeth: When I was younger, I went through a lot of phases of wanting to play different instruments, but I really wanted to play the double bass for a while. That never really happened, and it's pretty hard to get around with a double bass.

Ryan: I like to play lots of different instruments. For the record, I played a tiny Casio keyboard a lot, which was really fun, because I have no idea how to play piano, so I just hit notes until they sounded right and put them through pedals. 

Elizabeth: Some of them sound like guitar sounds, but they're actually keyboard sounds that Ryan made and put through various pedals. 

Ryan: Maybe I should learn to play the piano one day. That's not really wacky, but maybe I should.

Jordan: It must have been challenging at times to try and remake those sounds on the record then, if they were put through the piano and processed into guitar sounds. How was the process of re-learning that?

Phantastic Ferniture. Image credit: @phantasticferniture

Ryan: A lot of them Liz has been able to recreate with pedals and other noises. But the way we play live, we're not always trying to recreate exactly what's on the record. We're trying to create an experience at that time. It may not sound the same as the record, but so far, no one has seemed bothered by that, and we like the fact that it's different. 

Elizabeth: They're not going to be super different, but those nuances—transitions between songs or atmospheric sounds—we just try to replicate in other ways to keep the experience as live as possible.

Jordan: Your first gig was titled The Phantastic Ferniture Christmas Extravaganza: First and Final Gig, which is an awesome name for a gig, and it was meant to be a Christmas band. Is there a gig that sticks out to you as particularly memorable or fun?

Elizabeth: That first show will always have a special place in my memory. It had so many unusual features that it's hard to forget. It was in a small venue upstairs in Sydney, and there were only maybe seven people in the crowd. We only had three songs—or maybe two. We had two songs ready and a Mariah Carey cover, ‘All I Want for Christmas;. When it came to gig day, we were like, what are we going to do to fill the time? Oh, we'll just play everything twice. People really liked it, so we were like, okay, maybe we're just bringing the energy and the vibe, so we can go off that. It was meant to be our first and final gig, so I'm not sure how we ended up playing after that, but Phantastic Ferniture came back after that gig as well.

Ryan: There are a lot of funny experiences at gigs. That one was definitely memorable. Every show we do has always been really fun because they're always different. We prepare, rehearse, and get ready, and then the shows are always just different. Everyone is a fun gig to play. I really enjoyed the time we got up on stage after Julia's set. That was fun because we hadn't been together in a long time. We all got up there and played one track—one song. 

Jordan: You guys are from Sydney, and have spoken about loving the Sydney scene and how it supported you when you revisit the project. Are there any Sydney bands that have inspired you or who you’ve really formed a strong connection with in the scene?

Elizabeth: We've got Georgia Mulligan opening, and we've known her for a really long time. She's opening at The Lansdowne shows. Julia and I met her when we were doing the open mic scene. There was a particular open mic we used to go to in Glebe all the time, and she started going to that as well. That was quite a few years ago now. We've really seen each other grow in the scene through the years, and we're really excited to hear what she's going to be putting out in the future because she's just recorded another album. A guitarist I'm really excited about is Hilary Geddes. She's in The Buoys, and she also does various other things as well. She's a really exciting guitarist, and I'm super keen to see where she goes with her career.