The duo responsible for that track, Rupert Keiller and Adrian Cartwright, became a mainstay of the Big Day Out’s Boiler Room, put out several albums, and danced up a storm all the way into the mid-2000s. But after releasing a best-of in 2005 and doing the festival thing one last time, they vanished.
“I went off travelling in 2006 after Big Day Out and I never came home,” Keiller says. What began as a holiday became seven years in Canada, where he was content to live the life of a ski bum in British Columbia. “They have quite amazing mountain biking in the summer. I ended up just staying there and riding my bike a lot in the summer and snowboarding in the winter, all the while thinking that I was gonna continue on with writing music just by myself. But [that] never really happened.”
Instead, Keiller began DJing for tourists, banking on the fact that Australian skiers of a certain age would have fond memories of Sonicanimation. “I knew that there were quite big Australian crowds at the ski hills – there’s several really good quality ski hills all over British Columbia – and I thought I could probably DJ, go off the back of ‘DJ Blah from Sonicanimation’. That was cool for a couple of years, but then I noticed the age group of people that I was playing to, they were people that hadn’t heard of Sonicanimation. It was quite often, ‘Who are they? Who’s this band, who’s this guy?’”
So Keiller was inspired get the band back together, before they were forgotten completely. Cartwright was immediately up for it, and the third slot in the group, which they’d given to a rotating cast of DJs back in the day, was filled by Sexton Blake, who Keiller had met and worked with in Canada. A slot on last year’s Homebake lineup followed, as did work on a new album, Once More From The Bottom, which Keiller says is as eclectic as any of their earlier work. With luck, it will restore them to their rightful place in history: somewhere between Itch-E & Scratch-E and B(if)tek, among the first wave of Australian dance music to reach the popular consciousness, and laying the groundwork for the likes of Pnau, Cut Copy and The Presets.
“I don’t give that kind of thing a lot of thought, but we do get people saying that to us a lot since the last record that we did,” says Keiller. “I’ve met a lot of people who’ve said, ‘When you guys stopped there was no one for a while and then The Presets came along and they were like the new version of Sonicanimation and then someone else came along’ – but I don’t really apply that to myself… I don’t know, it’s always different from the inside. I feel like I just do what I love doing, and hope that people listen to it and want to come see us.”
BY JODY MACGREGOR
