“The beautiful thing about that place is what happened at night time,” Martini recounts. “We’d have people come over for meals and there was a piano and a guitar and we’d start playing music. I was more interested in that, which used to happen in every house 100 years ago. Everyone played music and the way people talked and had conversations. There was no TV so to tell stories, you’d pick up a guitar and tell each other stories. I saw that happening at the Pound a bit. It’s a great idea to build from. I’m trying to make the music really conversational.”
In the art gallery halls of the State Library, Martini stands in his dirty work boots having just finished a day earning the cash needed to run Poundby digging holes as a labourer. The second title he released was his own album, Vienna 1913, which he’ll be presenting at this year’s Stonnington Jazz Festival. An excursion into stripping back all production values to reveal the music’s raw humanity, the vinyl-only release is accompanied by a 46-page graphic novel of intriguing ball point pen illustrations by Michael Camiller. It’s not uncommon to hear the squeak of a chair or footstep on the record as Martini chases the perfectly imperfect, with a similar stripped back production going into Hue Blanes’ Sad Songs Make Me Happy and Archer’s upcoming release.
“I don’t think it hurts to chase perfection but I don’t think it’s wrong to let things flow where they flow,” Martini ponders. “Let things end up where they’re going to end up, Like with Archer, When we were recording his record he would never do a take more than once and I would be like, ‘No you nearly nailed it! Let’s do it again. He’d say, ‘Nah fuck off.’ He’d only play it once and we’d still be setting up trying to get the mics to sound right and he wouldn’t do it again. I think that’s a beautiful way to approach music as far as communicating with song. He just wants to sing you the song. He doesn’t believe you should sing it again and again. The words become pointless.”
The idea of a tight community and slowing down our lives is something that pervades Martini’s conversation and his music. The advancement of technology seems the main culprit with the new ability to pack so much into a day making our real world relationships suffer. Martini sums this thought up perfectly at the end of his song, The Car,finishing on the lyric, (“If the car was never invented, we’d all have better sex lives.”)
“The idea behind that song is that everything used to be really local,” Martini explains. “If you were a butcher, if you were a carpenter or if you dug holes for a living, you wouldn’t have to dig it more than a couple-hundred 100 metres from your house because you’d only work for everybody in that community, whereas now you’ve got people driving from Rowville all the way to Point Cook. An hour-and-a-half in traffic even though you could find someone in Point Cook to do the same job. It’s just shit. Technology has enabled us to work harder than we should.”
BY RHYS MCRAE
