Recently announced as part of the 2013 Laneway Festival, Alt-J are counting down the days until each and every one of them visit our country for the first time. In the meantime, Gus spoke to me about the band’s writing and recording process, why genres shouldn’t exist, their issue with band photography, and just how an alpha symbol came to be one of the most well thought-out band names that we’ve seen in a long time.
“We actually used to be called Films and we had to change our name because there was a band already called ‘The Films’. So Will, the guitarist, actually came up with the name; he came up with the idea of a delta symbol for the name, and then we kinda thought that it was really cool, but how would we pronounce it? So we named it after the keyboard shortcut ‘alt-j’, and we thought that it was quite a good band name.
“The genre, the sound, I don’t think that we’ve really given ourselves too much with labelling music. The way I see it is that, these days, you don’t really need to know what kind of music you’re going to listen to before you listen to it whereas, you know, a couple of years ago, before you actually went and bought a bad record, you might have wanted to know what kind of music it was. But now, somebody says ‘Check out Alt-J’, and you can go and do it straight away online, so the whole genre or labelling of music is slightly redundant in a way. It’s so easy to check out new music without having to worry about whether it’s the kind of music that you think you’ll like or not.
“In terms of how we found our sound, it comes down to our first band practice. Something sort of clicked really quickly, and it really worked. We didn’t really stop to question what sort of music we were aiming to make, or what sort of music we were making, because it was just kind of working, so we thought not to question it but to just carry on, and we pretty much haven’t looked back since then.”
Unlike many new and upcoming bands, however, Alt-J took it upon themselves to ensure that it was their music that brought them to the limelight.
“We were finding that we were getting a little bit of attention with press and stuff, and we didn’t really like the tradition of band photos – we found them really boring, and we [were] sort of like, ‘Well why do people need to know what we look like?’ What’s important is the music, not whether or not we’re all really good looking…which we’re not,” he laughs.
“It was partly that; you know, trying to break those conventions, I suppose. But also, we find it more interesting if you don’t show your faces, you sort of have to find new ways to make a band photo relevant and interesting, and you actually have to get much more original results if you’re working within those parameters, instead of being told to stand against a wall and look at the camera.”
Continuing on with their lack of, what they believe to be, “conventional behaviour”, Gus explained that their debut record, An Awesome Wave, wasn’t just one of those albums that had “hundreds of songs written for it and then choose the best ones. That works for some bands, some really good bands. But, for us, we tend to sort of work really slowly on our ideas and sort of bring them together over a period of a few months.
“It’s an album that, in a way, took a few years to make. Like ‘Matilda’ was recorded three years ago, and it’s quite old…By the time we got signed last November, we had about six tracks that we knew we wanted to have on the album, so we kept making the album. We booked some studio time in January of this year and recorded sort of another half a dozen tracks, and that finished the album.”
Getting ready to play alongside the likes of Bat For Lashes, Chet Faker, Flume and Melbourne’s very own Alpine at next year’s Laneway Festival, Alt-J are getting all mustered up to bring their A-game for their fresh audiences.
“We’ve been working on a couple of things. We have a cover in the works which may involve a really well known Australian singer – I won’t say more than that. But yeah, there definitely might be a couple of surprises for you guys.”
BY SIMONE ZIADA
