Kangaroo Skull formed in 2011at New Zealand’s now defunct Camp A Low Hum when Australian post rock-band My Disco’s guitarist Ben Andrews and drummer Rohan Rebeiro performed an improvised techno collaboration.
“Yeah we did, I had forgotten about that! It was kind of a random Camp A Low Hum thing. It was good like that because it allowed people to get up on stage and do experimental stuff and at the time we were doing a live drums and laptop improv set and in the last couple of years it turned in to the techno thing.”
However, in recent times Andrews has left Kangaroo Skull and nowadays it is solely Rebeiro’s project as Andrews’ explains.
“Me and Roh just sort of went in different directions – he wanted to do not so much four on the floor dance music and he is doing all these alien sound now, it’s a pretty abstract German influenced rhythm and sound manufacturing. Where as I am concentrating on my Arabic sort of droney music with Assad,” states the beautifully well-spoken Andrews – his speech is steady in tone but abundant in warmth.
Andrews now marvels at Rebeiro’s idiosyncratic production techniques in making Kangaroo Skulls music. “He works very differently to most producers, myself included, where we will get an Abbleton package and then start using 808 kick sounds and so on. Whereas he uses a program called Max/MSP where everything starts clean and you build your own sequences and there is no patches or sound templates in there already so this process may take eight hours to come up with an idea and then decide if it’s good or not good,” explains Andrews before observing, “It seems like a lot of work to not even know if you are going to use something but it does ensure that the productions are very interesting sounding and unique.”
Nowadays, Andrews is residing in Indonesia where he is doing a bit of music and ‘other weird stuff’, he explains how Rebeiro and his other band’s recording schedule made this month’s Low Conga party possible. “I booked the party because I am back here [Melbourne] recording with My Disco and then it turned into the big launch for Kangaroo Skull because Roh had or should I say will have the Live Palace Of Nothing 12” ready in the next couple of weeks and Assad is just doing a show,” states Andrews.
The remainder of the Low Conga lineup reads like a who’s who of Melbourne’s electronic music producers who are truly pushing the perceptive boundaries of electronic music, they are Elisabeth, Assad, Jamal Amir, Cale Sexton, Kangaroo Skull, Jake Blood and more. As the curator of this line-up, Andrews, attempts to describe what words he would use to describe the overall stylistic tone of the lineup.
“I mean Cale, Elisabeth, and James (aka Jamal Amir) are, to me, the new breed of live techno in Australia. James is a bit different in that he uses a lot of analogue hardware to make more like dark house music, whereas the others are kind of doing pretty straight down the line digital techno and then Roh is out on as he always, the new Kangaroo Skull stuff is kind of hard clinical beats but really disjointed, ostensibly they’re a bit alienating from a dance perspective,” concludes Andrews with a wry awkward chuckle.
BY DAN WATT
