What inspires Sunlight Ascending to continue creating music?
I think we were all lucky enough to grow up surrounded by people who played and knew about good music, so that eventually led us to wanting to start a band of our own. And for a few of us, this is the first band we’ve ever been involved with. For me personally, I actually learned how to play my instrument from the ground up as the band formed and progressed throughout these last 3 years.

As to why we continue playing music, we’re always pushing ourselves and looking for ways to improve as musicians and write music that satisfies our expectations, and that’s really what it’s all about for us; just writing the best music possible within our abilities. We still have a lot to learn, but we’re finally to the point where we realize that we have it in us to take it to the next level.

Your last release, All the Memories, All at Once, was a great success, what’s next?
We’re about to release our next EP, which is called “You Don’t Belong Here”. It’ll feature 4 new tracks and will be around 30 minutes in length. After that, we plan on playing out a ton and booking a few small tours, writing a bunch of new music, and just spreading the word around as much as possible. We’re also hoping for another full-length to be released early next year.

Post Rock generates creative (and often lengthy) band and track names, how does Sunlight Ascending come up with these?
After we have a certain song written, we’ll come up with a particular theme or an emotion that we’re feeling towards it and just decide on a name that we can all agree on. We’ll admit, thinking of song titles is not something we pay a whole lot of attention to until after our songs are completely written. But that’s not to say they don’t have any meaning to us, I think the meaning is just different for everyone, and that’s how we like it.

How does Sunlight Ascending decide which tracks will be on a release? testing them at gigs, or a different method?
Basically, we’ll jam out certain ideas that we come up with and fill in the blanks until we have something that flows well, and then we run through it again and sometimes rewrite it until it feels complete. After that, we play the song live a few times before we form a solid opinion on it, and we usually end up keeping them if they’re performed live. Writing songs is mostly just a spur of the moment thing with us though; when it happens it happens.

What have you been listening to recently that you would recommend to your fan base?
This list could probably go on forever, but here’s a few albums I’ve been enjoying lately:

Orbs – “Asleep Next to Science”
Have a Nice Life – “Deathconsciousness”
Owen – “New Leaves”
Eluvium – Everything
Om – “God is Good”
MewithoutYou – “It’s All Crazy! It’s All False!”
Unwed Sailor – “The Faithful Anchor”
Anathallo – “Floating World”
Efterklang – “Tripper”
Phoenix – “Wolfgang Adadeus Phoenix”

The obligatory digital media question: We all know that digital downloads (legal or not) are changing the music business, would you say this is a challenge or an opportunity, and why?
When we were about to release “All the Memories…”, no one knew who we were or really cared about what we were doing, so we decided to take it as an opportunity to spread our music around as much as possible. In the end, having our CD available for free download through our label’s website (plus several others, including all types of torrents and blogs) led us to having a great deal of success with the amount of people spreading our music around the web. We always figured, for us, it would be better to have all of our music available for free anyways, and if people wanted to purchase it we would have physical copies available too. The more people who listen to it for free, the more people who might want to buy it. Since then, we have completely sold out of physical copies of “All the Memories…”.