“Obviously the music industry has changed a lot…” reflects John Deller, enigmatic front-man of musical project The Teardrop Phase. Emanating from their base in Barnes near Richmond, London, the project was born in 2019 as an off-shoot from the long-running and very popular West-London act The Paperchain Babies.

“I finished up with my last band, we had been working together for like, as you know Leo, 25 years. So I had written loads of songs and the previous project had slowed down a bit, it was taking ages to write and record songs and such, so I decided to start something new. I got a guy called Donal and a girl called Lou… to work on some new songs and originally it was supposed to be maybe a 10 song project, but it turned into a double-album. Now it has turned into a double-double album.”

The first installment of the epic Quadrilogy, entitled ‘I’ and ‘I (V2)’, have just released on Bandcamp on April 8th. Speaking of the writing process and physical media options, John highlights that “… It has been a bit of a labour of love for the past three years and we’ve got plans… I’m looking at my vinyl collection now thinking wouldn’t it be nice to you know, hold something up that’s physical.

I’ve done a lot of visual accompaniments to all the tracks too – I think that other than two tracks, everything has a video that I’ve created for it. It has been a project that we’ve been really proud of actually.”

As a multi-talented, multi-discipline creator, the audiovisual content for the project is largely written, developed, recorded, produced, engineered and mastered in-house with the support of John’s local network of talent. “I do quite a lot of it, but also there are a few people that I know who are photographers, artists that collaborate. It’s a musical project, but it is one of those things that it is not a band… we’ve got a drummer, Rob (formerly of Paperchain Babies) and just like-minded people who really love music. People we’ve grown up with, people who we’ve known over the years and many people who have come along on the scene.”

With the first part of the quadruple album featuring 13 tracks ranging from one and a half minutes up to about seven minutes and the (V2) component mixing these into 30 minute ‘acts’ with a three minute interlude, we asked whether soundtracks for movies may be a pursuance of the project.

“Well, I bought myself a synthesizer… I’m really a guitarist, but it’s definitely like a movie with music. I kind of hear it but also see it as well. There’s a lot music that I like, say Pink Floyd, where you will go to one of their concerts they were never the most extrovert on stage, they used to use visuals to aid the experience of the gigs. So I suppose I’ve tried to create a project for a Stadium, but I still have to find the stadium, which is the big ambition with my music I suppose. Whether I could get a band together to do it is another question. It is not the sort of music that can be too organic, you have to play how the record is. Obviously you can have a little improvisation, but not too much.”

Catch the full interview with John On-Demand at Phluid Vision:

https://vision.phluidrecords.co.uk

‘I’ and ‘I (V2)’ are available right now over at:

https://theteardropphase.bandcamp.com/

and you can follow the project on Facebook, just search for ‘The Teardrop Phase’.