JUNO ECLIPSE
- 15 hours ago
- 6 min read
Words: Joseph Maranta
Images: Joseph Maranta
Serenity is not always found in consistency and calm, within a storm, can be found outside the eye.
As blue skies and warm days become the norm in summer, afternoon supercells lift the burden of expectation, at least momentarily. As their dark grey clouds form, there’s an unintuitive, almost morbid desire for them to draw closer despite their violent nature.
Their arrival brings wrath and chaos, but so too a sense of placidity. As carnage rains outside, the comfort of having a refuge becomes far more pronounced.
It’s a comfort akin to the sounds of Sydney quartet Juno Eclipse.
Despite the visceral screams underpinning a heavy blend of emo and shoegaze, the four-piece always maintain their vulnerability, rarely evoking emotions of anger or bitterness.
Composed of Sonny Hanson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Aleksei Ilin (lead guitar), Aleks Keats (drums, vocals) and Lewis Gardiner (bass, vocals), Juno Eclipse create sanctuary through a sonic snake pit of layered guitars, feedback and shrieks.
We sat down in a Darlinghurst alleyway to catch up with them.
JOE: Thanks for welcoming me to Eora fellas! Are you all from here originally?
LEWIS: I’m from Wollongong but I live in Sydney now. I only moved about a month ago.
ALEKSEI: I’m local-ish, I live Parra ways. I think the reason I’m here is because I used to play in a band called Monkey Dot which played with another band called Our Mutual Friend, and we all just became good friends through playing on the same bills.
SONNY: Yeah, we were all playing together early on.
JOE: What is it about emo music that compels you?
ALEKSEI: There’s something about emo music that translates in a very special way live. Live emo shows always distinguish themselves compared to any studio versions. There are so many YouTube videos and live videos which you won’t find elsewhere compared to other genres.
SONNY: Emo music compels us because of the scene and the likeminded people we’ve met and the friends we’ve made. It makes me feel safe, and comfortable to be who I want to be. I think that goes for everyone though and that feeling gets reflected in the music.
JOE: What’s one live concert you’ll always revisit on YouTube after a night out?
ALEKS: The Alex G basement set. It’s a random show from like 2012.
ALEKSEI: That’s exactly what I was talking about before.
LEWIS: I’d say the YouTube Channel hate5six, I always go back to that. Our friend Joel runs bski productions, an archive of local music, and he records a lot of bands in our scene, here in Sydney and in Wollongong. That’s a good one to check out because it hosts all of our friends.
ALEKSEI: I’d say mine would be Bring Me The Horizon’s early shows, and then Twenty One Pilots live at the Apple Store. There’s a debate on whether or not Twenty One Pilots are emo or not, but I think they’re emo.
JOE: Why do you think emo is doing so well in Sydney especially?
ALEKS: I think there are just so many bands here, it’s a real community.
SONNY: A new band pops up every week, there are so many young people and it seems to just be on an exponential wave of growth. The more bands there are, the more kids and young people see them and get encouraged to start bands of their own.
JOE: Why do you think emo and shoegaze blend so well?
SONNY: I think what shoegaze has become now is almost a subgenre of emo music, they’re complementary genres. We have a shoegaze element in our music, but I think it’s more so about the mood of it.
ALEKSEI: There are a lot of sounds that convey the meaning alongside the vocals. I’m pretty sure vocals were used as a textural element more than anything in shoegaze originally. Like I don’t even know our lyrics, but I connect with the music nonetheless. Not to discredit our lyrics or anything.
JOE: Speaking of lyrics, why is the word ‘Spun’ a consistent refrain in your music?
ALEKS: Sonny and I were recording vocals and I thought it’d be funny to scream spun.
SONNY: It became a bit of an inside joke between us, Spun.
ALEKS: There’s an unreleased rap at the end of the song Spun.
SONNY: I actually released that rap version accidentally the first time we released that song. I realised a few days after and freaked out. I deleted that shit instantly.
ALEKS: Everyone else thought it went hard but Sonny was just embarrassed by it.
JOE: What do you think was each of your entry points into the world of emo?
ALEKSEI: When I heard Song About An Angel by Sunny Day Real Estate, that was my entry point. It’s not well recorded, it isn’t a conventional song structure and it wears its heart on its sleeve. I’d never heard a song like that and it spoke to me like nothing else had before.
I feel like that sent me into a spiral.
ALEKS: Blink-182 Adam’s Song.
LEWIS: Bullet for My Valentine.
SONNY: Mine would be How It Feels to Be Something On by Sunny Day Real Estate. That or a song by Dinosaur Jr.
JOE: There’s a lot of great vocal fry screams in your music, do you ever have to stop because of throat pain when you’re recording?
SONNY: When I’m recording, yeah, I can’t do it for too long. But during sets it's fine.
LEWIS: In my other band Airline I scream during the backing vocals of live sets. There’s actually some similarities between Sonny and my other bandmate Andy. They both seem to be really good technically with their screams, they both sit at the right note to get that fry.
JOE: Your band is named after a character from Star Wars, so in the Star Wars universe, which character would fuck the most with the music of Juno Eclipse?
JUNO ECLIPSE: Darth Maul.
ALEKSEI: Wouldn’t it be Juno Eclipse?
LEWIS: No, still Darth Maul.
But I could definitely imagine an Anakin / Padme edit set to My Friend Always.
JOE: You released your first project ‘Blue With You’ halfway through last year, was that a cohesive project or a compilation?
SONNY: I made that as an album before anyone else was in the band, I had a bunch more songs but I didn’t end up liking them, so I cut those and released it as an EP.
ALEKS: Yeah, Juno Eclipse was initially a Sonny project, and we were the live band.
JOE: After that project came ‘How To Take a Fall’, can you explain how that project came to life? Because there seems to be a lot of collaborators on it.
SONNY: We just wanted to make a split album with our friends' bands, pretty much.
ALEKS: So there was Juno Eclipse, Should Be Sweet who Sonny plays drums for, Siphon who I play drums for and then our friend Charles Carnabuci.
Shoutout Charles.
JOE: Then one of your biggest songs ‘VCR’ is a collaboration with ‘Our Mutual Friend’ so is Juno Eclipse just very fond of working with other bands in the scene?
ALEKS: [Laughs] Yeah, Our Mutual Friend is mine and Sonny’s other band, and our friend Eva who is the vocalist in that band.
SONNY: It’s fun, I like having the audience of my other bands hearing tracks from this band.
JOE: So outside of an upcoming tour with Deadshowws, what else is on the horizon for Juno Eclipse? Are there any singles coming up?
ALEKS: We have songs but Sonny doesn’t want to release them.
ALEKSEI: It’s a battle between us and Sonny, but maybe we can do another split EP?
SONNY: We’ve done too many splits, fuck splits.
ALEKSEI: We’d be keen to do one with I Promised The World though. Please hit us up, please. We’re cool enough.
SONNY: I think it’s more of an issue of knowing what to do next. We have a couple songs that are basically done, but I just don’t know what to do with them.
ALEKSEI: I feel like I’m very sporadic with what I want to do, but I think we just need time like with any other project. Rushing things is never the right thing to do. A resurgence I’ve been seeing is bands dropping demos on Bandcamp, constantly dripfeeding content. I fuck with that a lot, and it could be something we can look at.
But quality takes time and we’re in no rush. I’m enjoying the live shows and I love playing with these guys.
SONNY: We released a lot of stuff last year, an EP, a single and the split EP.
ALEKS: We all have different projects too, which can be very time consuming.
JOE: Just finally, is there anything else you want to cover?
ALEKS: Yeah shoutout Georgia, Sonny’s partner - she’s our engineer and mixes all of our stuff.
ALEKSEI: I want to ask Georgia what it’s like mixing our songs.
GEORGIA: Sonny is a very fussy person, knowing him for a long time, but I get it though, you want it to be perfect.
But honestly, I love it - I had so much fun mixing the split EP, it was some of my best mixes of all time, I had so much fun doing it.
ALEKSEI: I do want to make a closing remark as well, and that is how much I love our audience.
I have never had this much fun playing live before, and that’s thanks to a very diverse audience full of amazing women and queer people who are all working towards the same goal of making the scene a very beautiful and diverse place.
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