“I was sick of the constrictions of dance music. I just felt like I was boxed in, so me, Lauren and Melissa Livaudis from Telepathe just came into it for fun and didn’t really have any goals in mind.” Although Livaudis stepped aside before anything comprehensive was achieved, an obvious spark emerged between Flax and Dillard, prompting them to continue.
“I had written a couple of skeletons of songs and I showed them to Lauren and she was like, ‘Oh I like this,’” says Dillard. “We went back and forth then showed that song [2010 single Days] to our friends and people seemed to like it, so we were like, ‘You know, maybe we’re onto something here.’”
The unplanned project has now come a long way, gathering creative momentum while interest from peers and the public spreads. Released this week, the duo’s debut LP Echoes features an impressive assemblage of collaborators, including Lamb’s Lou Rhodes, The xx’s Romy Madly-Croft and the familiar whispering rap of Tricky. Echoes comes almost three years after the group’s first single and Dillard indicates that, while they didn’t have a determined vision to do an album, it became apparent an album’s worth of material was upon them.
“We don’t really set out to do things, necessarily. I don’t want to say [things] ‘just happen’, because that sounds lazy, but basically things happen organically and we like things to progress naturally and that’s what happened with the record,” she says.
Australia’s Sia Furler also makes an appearance, adding a gutsy vocal to the album closing power-ballad Dim The Lights. Lauren Flax actually co-wrote Sia’s 2009 hit You’ve Changed and she explains that Sia was her first choice to handle the song’s emotional urgency.
“When we wrote Dim The Lights it was a particularly challenging time for me and it’s just a meaningful song and I couldn’t hear anybody on it [other] than Sia. I wrote [to] her and poured my heart out and told her exactly what the song was about and she was just like, ‘Honey I’ll do it, of course I’ll sing on it’. She moved to LA from New York so she did it in LA and sent us the parts.”
Securing the inimitable vocal talents of UK trip hop pioneer Tricky for the track Call Her (which also features School of Seven Bells’ Alejandra de la Deheza) is a particular honour for the girls and Flax reveals it was essentially a case of serendipity that led to working with him.
“I had talked about him in an article because everyone always asks, ‘Who are your dream collaborators?’ Apparently he noticed it and was down to work on something with us.”
Tricky is a very busy individual, releasing his tenth record False Idols this year while continuing to collaborate widely and seemingly his high productivity rate is a result of a swift execution method.
”Tricky was like the fastest turnaround time as well actually, out of anybody, which is crazy because I wouldn’t expect that,” says Dillard. “We wrote the track in Berlin and sent it to him and he just threw down some vocals on it and sent it to us and we were like, ‘Oh man, perfect,’” adds Flax. “It was pretty cool. Definitely like a childhood dream come true.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
