Custard Flux braves the elements and visits new worlds on Enter Xenon.

The Detroit band ventures to Arctic locales and distant fantasy realms on its latest prog-rock album.

“That’s what I like to create with my art,” said Gregory Curvey, Custard Flux’s vocalist, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist. “I like everyone to look at it and see something different. I didn’t have anything in mind like that … but it all does flow that way artistically.”

Enter Xenon seamlessly flows through 10 tracks, which feature intriguing tales about aspiration, uncertainty, and loss alongside cinematic instrumentals.

“I’m not trying to guide anyone anywhere, but I’m working with themes,” Curvey said. “I’m putting together things that are cohesive. I’m not necessarily making a concept album with a thought-out story. I’ve always loved how Richard Butler and The Psychedelic Furs use the same lyrics in different songs, so I’m kinda doing that.”

For its sixth studio album, Custard Flux also seeks inspiration from the element xenon and the 1980 sci-fi pinball game Xenon.

“All of the albums, except for Echo, have been named after elements,” Curvey said. “I was gonna use xenon because I thought it was cool. In the pinball game, a female voice says, ‘Enter Xenon.’ Back then, my friends and I would go to the arcade and blow all of our money. I wanted to make it my own thing.”

To learn more, I spoke with Curvey about his background and the inspiration behind the album.

Q: How did your musical journey start in Kalamazoo, Michigan?

A: My grandmother had a piano, and there are pictures of me as a toddler by the piano. My dad had a [Lowrey] Genie organ in the ‘70s, and I played that all the time. When I was 16, I begged for my first guitar, and it grew from there. When I was 17, I bought a drum set, and then I started. I wasn’t in band in school, and so during my junior year, a lot of my friends were in band, and they said, “Curvey, you should try playing drums in band,” so I did. I ended up playing in the band for the last two years of school. It was good because it taught me discipline in rehearsals.

Q: What artists influenced you while you were growing up?

A: When my aunt moved to college, my grandmother said she was getting rid of her stuff, and I took all the records. I had records by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The McCoys, and The Monkees. That was in kindergarten, and then I went through the KISS thing. By the time high school happened, when FM was FM radio before there were commercials, I would hear the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, Genesis, and those types of bands, so I got into prog. Then the ‘80s hit, and punk rock happened, and I was totally into that. I was also into XTC, The Pretenders, and The Psychedelic Furs.

Q: What brought you to Chicago in 1983?

A: After high school I went to Kendall College of Art and Design [in Grand Rapids, Michigan]. It was an awesome school, but I only did one semester because I got an offer from some friends in Chicago who had an all-keyboard band and were opening for [artists] like Lene Lovich, Kraftwerk, and The Human League. And it was the time of the standup drummer, so in 1983, I moved to Chicago to play rock ‘n’ roll.

Q: How did that lead to pursuing music in Detroit and forming Custard Flux?

A: When I was living in Chicago, every time a Detroit band would come [there], or when we would play here in Detroit, the Detroit bands would blow me away. Every band we’d play with in Detroit, I’d think, “Holy shit, these guys are a few steps ahead of what we’re doing.” I always wanted to play with some Detroit musicians, and moving here [in 2017] gave me that. That was my idea, and I thought, “I’m gonna put together a band of Detroit guys with these awesome musicians.”

Of course, I was already in my 50s by then and it’s harder to meet people. One of my friends in Chicago was working at an estate sale, and at the estate sale was an old pump organ. He said, “Curvey, you gotta come and see this pump organ. You’re gonna want it.” And I said, “OK,” and of course I drove down there and fell in love with it.

Q: How did the pump organ spark writing and recording Helium?

A: I bought this pump organ, but the cool thing I thought immediately was, “This thing sounds a lot like a Hammond B-3 [organ].” And then I thought, “Well, that’s probably where the Hammond B-3 was the next step of the electric version of a pump organ.” It has this little paper thing that flips around in the wood and gives it a slight vibrato to the sound. I fell in love with this pump organ, and then my idea was to do an acoustic version of prog.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the Canterbury scene with Jethro Tull and these acoustic bands. I was thinking of it from a green perspective without electricity. I thought, “Let’s see what we can accomplish with this,” but nobody was really into it. So I said, “I’m gonna make my first record,” and eight years ago was when I made Helium. It ended up being a double album, and I played everything on there, which wasn’t my intention, but that’s what happened. And it did great.

Q: How did you choose the name Custard Flux for the band?

A: It’s literally cluster fuck—it’s punk rock. The funny thing is the English took it differently. They loved the name [of my former band], The Luck of Eden Hall, because it was named after a goblet and has connections to English folklore. But for the name Custard Flux, they equate it with phlegm or a bad stomach ache. I often hear [English] people saying, “Oh, I’ve just had a bad case of Custard Flux.” There was a Custer Flux [name] out there, but no one had used Custard Flux.

Q: Custard Flux soon evolved from a solo project to a band. How did you bring different musicians into the fold?

A: By the time the second one [2019’s Echo] came out, I grabbed Tim [Prettyman] because he was playing bass and he could play standup bass, which fit into my acoustic [sound]. Tim’s son Walt plays violin, and he’s a really good violin player. I had those two guys, and then I met Vito [Greco], who was back in Chicago. I knew him from the old days, but I’d talked to him about the project, and he was really into it. That’s when it all started to come together. On the second record, I still played a lot of the stuff because I couldn’t find a drummer, but I was starting to bring the band together.

I had a previous band, The Luck of Eden Hall, in Chicago. We toured the U.K. a few times and were on labels in Italy, The Netherlands, and England. The label we were on in England, Fruits de Mer [Records], I met a lot of people through that label. Jay [Tausig] is a guy out in California who plays everything, and I needed a flutist for a song, so I contacted Jay for that.

Mars Williams was the saxophonist in The Psychedelic Furs, and I had met him in Chicago when he played on a couple of Eden Hall records. I thought, “This is acoustic, this is gonna be perfect,” and so Mars was into it and played on two of the records, Oxygen and Phosphorous. And then he passed away from cancer [in 2023].

When The Luck of Eden Hall would go to England, we had a Mellotron player named Andy Thompson. We would bring our guitars, but we needed to find gear over there because we couldn’t afford to ship drums and everything. We found Andy, who had a Mellotron, and we would rent his Mellotron when Eden Hall would go on tour over there. And then I did a solo gig there, and Andy played Mellotron with me. When Custard Flux went over there last summer, he played Mellotron with us, and because of that, I’ve had him play on the records.

Q: On Enter Xenon, “Winter” highlights someone’s escape from an Arctic climate and confronts their guilt of leaving others behind. How did a story from a cold northern climate inspire this track?

A: The second song I wrote was “Winter” because it was early winter and bloody cold out. It was before Trump took office, but he had won. It’s this 1984-type theme with people saying, “We’re gonna escape from this,” so they get in their snow machines and take off. Also, one of our fans in Alaska had posted a photograph on Facebook of winter. That inspired the song “Winter,” and it also inspired the song “Icy Tranquility.”

Q: “Icy Tranquility” explores missing someone who’s left and feeling isolated and lonely back home. What inspired this tale of isolation, loneliness, and anticipation?

A: “Icy Tranquility” also came from my friend in Alaska, who had posted a photograph. I needed to write some lyrics, and that flowed out of me. I thought of him working because he works on a boat and goes out into the ocean.

Q: “Tomorrowland” is about packing for a move and dreaming of a new life in another place. How did your daughter inspire this song?

A: “Tomorrowland” is about my daughter going off to college. She’s in Georgia at Savannah College of Art and Design and wants to be an interior decorator. Her artistic capabilities have improved tenfold since she’s been there—it’s just amazing.

Q: Two of the album’s instrumentals, “The Escape” and “Enter Xenon,” feature otherworldly, dreamy, and serene soundscapes. How did you arrive at those sounds for the songs?

A: Everything on “The Escape” I did with the ARP synthesizer—the wind sounds and the spaceship sounds. I went to the BBC library, where they have a sound library, and I got a polar bear sound and put the bear on that track. It could be any large animal because it sounds like a big, roaring [beast]. The other sound on there is the crash, and that was a BBC-recorded crash. And then there’s tape-loop music.

When I put together an album, I love the album format. I’m not necessarily a single guy. I want to put the needle down and listen to the whole side, and I want it to be cohesive. Once I start putting songs together, I’ll start to think and say, “Ah, I need an instrumental here, or there’s a lot of rock songs we need something mellow to mellow this out.”

That’s how “Enter Xenon” came to be. I have a reel-to-reel tape machine, and I put some old tapes on. I recorded them in Pro Tools, chopped them into sections, made loops, and turned them around backward. I came up with this feeling, and then I played Mellotron over the top of it.

Q: What was it like to compose “The Floating Chamber” and “Les Machoires de la Mort,” or “The Jaws of Death,” for the album as well?

A: “The Floating Chamber” is probably the most progressive song on the album and there’s a long instrumental at the end of it.

“Les Machoires de la Mort” is a track about a good friend named Patrice Hawkes-Reed. She just passed away this last year. I’ve known her for a long time, and she was my connection in the rock ‘n’ roll world. We met at The Metro one night in Chicago. I had on an Alice Cooper shirt, and Patrice walked up to me, and she said, “I know him,” and then we talked all night long. On Aerosmith’s Rocks album, if you take out the album, there are photos on the sleeve, and she has photo credits on it. She knew everybody.

Q: Tell me about your creative process for Enter Xenon and how the album came together at Rabbithole Studio in Detroit.

A: I always write the music first, so I’m a guy who sits around either on a piano or with a guitar, and I come up with riffs. My phone is filled with riffs. I will finish a song, and then I will write the lyrics. For recording, it’s several months simply because we’re all busy. For my parts, I throw them down because they’re scratch tracks, and I throw my vocals down. Sometimes I’ll go back in … and double-track the vocals just for effect.

Tim [Prettyman] came here and recorded his basslines. Vito [Greco] came here a couple of times to record his guitar parts, but Tim and Vito both have recording capabilities at home, so they’ll do their stuff and send me the tracks. Nick [Pruett] is very into his drums and has a beautiful drum set. He has microphones, and I have microphones, and between his microphones and my microphones, we have a nice setup to record the drums here in my studio.

Q: Enter Xenon features Vito Greco on guitar, Timothy Prettyman on bass, Nick Pruett on drums, and Andy Thompson on Mellotron. How did they help shape the album’s overall sound?

A: I’ll say, “Here’s the track, so put your bass part on it.” If one of them comes from it at a bizarre angle that doesn’t work with my initial idea, then I’ll say, “No, it has to be more along these lines.” With the drums especially, when I compose, I hear it all in my head, and since I can play everything, I’ve had to tell myself, “Don’t think of a bassline.” Because once I start to think of it it’s there in my head. It’s already become part of the art, so I’ve been very disciplined in not writing anything except my vocal parts and guitar parts.

When Nick comes over, and if he doesn’t feel it right [away], I’ll say, “Oh no, this one has to be a fast-tempo song.” When I write it, it’s not dictating any of those things of what the drums should be doing or what the bass should be doing. And a lot of times, he’ll hear something slower, like a half-tempo, and I’ll say, “No, no, no, that’s double speed.” And then, it changes his whole perception of the song because the music is very detailed. I’m giving people riffs, and they can’t [always] tell what the rhythm is [from those]. And Vito is the one who takes it somewhere else, and he has a Portuguese guitar—he’s really good.

Q: What’s up next for Custard Flux?

A: When we played in England last year, our gig in London, Kavus Torabi opened for us, and he’s the singer in the current incarnation of Gong. When Gong came over and played last year [at The Token Lounge in Westland, Michigan], we opened for them in Detroit, and the whole band loved it. They said, “We want you to open for us when we come back.” They’re doing a West Coast tour now, and we’re doing some shows with them.