Melbourne dance producer Roland Tings falls into the former. The bookish Rohan Newman, who is behind the non-de-production-plume of Roland Tings, is such a committed technician to the lore of electronic music production, he speaks of his latest banger, the 12” Who U Love,like a dearly loved child who he politely pushed in a banger direction – or as your correspondent described it – ‘Disco-core’.
“That’s a fantastic description – I really like that. My songwriting is quite an intuitive process. Who U Love started on the plane on the way to Japan for my first tour when I realised that I didn’t have anything that you’d play in a nightclub at peak time,” explains the timid Newman – timid in the sense he didn’t want to say he didn’t have a BANGER per se.
“When I got to Japan I started playing what I had composed on the computer and continued to play when I headed to Europe. Through this process Who U Love went through many different changes, and then I recorded it and it just sort of did what it needed to do. When I look at the finished track, I have no fucking idea how I got there – but I did,” contends Newman with a wry chuckle.
Now that Newman’s music has found an audience, he has found himself in the company of a booking agent and a manager that has led to his first Australia and New Zealand tour. Newman discusses what it’s like being able to focus solely on his performances as opposed to being the artist, manager and booking agent.
“So far I have been to Auckland, Hobart, Adelaide and up to Splendour, it’s been all over the shop but a lot of fun! I’m working with a booking agent now for the first time and a manager so they are doing all that stuff for me – that is kind of nice because before that it was just me trying to hustle shit together, but now I have hustlers doing it for me. It’s a really good feeling to know you have someone going into bat for you.”
Someone who went in to bat for Newman early in his career is Melbourne music pusher and host of Triple R’s Noise In My Head Michael Kucyk, who sent Roland Tings’ early material to a bunch of international dance and electronic music heads with none other than Prins Thomas signing Roland Tings to his Internasjonal label for Newman’s debut album, due out later this year.
The Melbourne leg of this tour is taking in Little Collins Street’s Boney – a venue that has become a centre of underground dance in Melbourne. Newman closes the interview by letting us in on the attitude he takes to compiling a club set.
“The set will be improv heavy; I’ve got like a modular synth and a drum machine. It’s still really really raw so there’s skeletal parts of tracks I have set out but the improv side can go anywhere from fast techno-y stuff to slowed down acid house. It depends on what is happening in the room. It’s a great feeling to go into a room and know that you are going to create something that is never going to happen again!”
BY DENVER MAXX