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With half of us based in London and the rest of us in Toronto, the Flowers Of Hell are a trans-Atlantic rock orchestra made up of 16 or so experimental independent musicians. We mix orchestral and rock instrumentation while mainly creating wordless pieces that explore the meeting points of classical and blues-based music. Our name comes from the old blues ideal that the pleasure of the listener is born from the misery & toil of the musician.

July 2008 will see the UK release of a split EP from us and Will Carruthers of Spacemen 3/Spiritualized/Spectrum. It’ll be out on 3 inch CD on the Awkward Silence label and the tracklist is the full four parts of our Opus 66 (clocking in at 9 mins) plus two tracks from Will Carruthers. On Opus 66, Will plays bass and former Spiritualized sax man Ray Dickaty plays alto & tenor sax, while the string section is comprised of Abi Fry of British Sea Power & Bat For Lashes, Mel Draisey of The Clientele, and Julie Penner of Broken Social Scene & Do Make Say Think, plus occasional Tinderstick Tom Hodges plays flute & baritone sax. Will's tracks All Moon and Davy Love’s Locker are a spacey deviation from the songbased work of his Freelovebabies albums and the latter track was done with former Spectrum/Spiritualized/Darkside guitarist Kevin Cowen. All are unavailable elsewhere.

Our second album, Come Hell Or High Water, will be out later this year (still figuring out when & with what label) and it’s somehow turned out rather epic. The writing & arrangements were done by following synaesthetic visions and it involved recording 30 musicians in over 40 sessions that we pulled together over a year in London, Toronto, Prague, Detroit, & Abilene, Texas. A lot of the people on it have played in acts vastly larger than us, including the Patti Smith Group, John Cale’s band, Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, Broken Social Scene, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks, The Early Years, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra amongst others. But we’re no supergroup - we’re more of an amalgamation of sideplayers with a few mainmen brought in as guests.

The Flowers Of Hell was started by Greg Jarvis as a studio project in 2002, expanded into a live band in London in 2005, and extended across the ocean to Toronto in 2008. Released in the UK and Japan, our 2006 self titled debut received critical praise for creating classical tangents from The Velvet Underground & Nico and the late Spacemen 3/early Spiritualized sound. It was produced by Tim Holmes of Death In Vegas at the Contino Rooms with guestwork from Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom.

For bookings contact: info@flowersofhell.com
For press contact: duff@duffpress.co.uk