“Well, the first one was really, if I’m being brutally honest, it was really just a glorified demo,” he admits. “The first six or eight tracks [came from jamming] when we first got together. We recorded that one on a very shoestring budget, basically in a mobile recording studio in a squat house that was scheduled for demolition, in a two-day period. It was really only meant to be a demo but it turned out a lot better than we expected, so we ended up releasing it through MGM.
“This one, we were really happy with the material, we’re really proud of the songwriting, so we really wanted to take it up a level on this one,” he continues. “We worked with a producer this time, and we really wanted to make it the best representation of our sound and our aesthetic that we could.”
Ultimately, Andrew and the band are extremely happy with the results of their extensive labours on the project. “Really excited,” he states enthusiastically. “We put a lot of work into it, we were writing and rehearsing the material for about eighteen months, two years. We rehearsed really hard in the lead up to the recording sessions. We’re really happy with it – it’s a real strong representation of us. It was really what we were going for, we managed to capture the feel of the band, and we’re just happy to release it to the world!”
The band are launching the album this coming Sunday evening at the Workers Club in Fitzroy. They are very excited about the launch, and have some exciting stuff planned for punters rocking up on the night. It promises to be an aural and visual feast.
“It’s going to be an amazing night,” he foretells. “We’re working with some experimental projectionists, called Dr Projectionists, who use a range of kaleidoscope and vintage, and also contemporary, techniques to create mesmerising visuals. We hope it’s going to be a really good night, with a lot of really interesting audio-visual type stuff going on for people. We’re really interested to see what the projectionists come up with.”
According to Andrew, it’s important for an all instrumental band such as themselves to provide the fans with that extra visual element when they come to a live show, since there is no vocals/lyrics for people to identify with. And aside from that visual aspect, the band promise a very powerful but dynamic live show.
“We’re an instrumental band, and that can be difficult to put across the an audience without a singer,” he opines. “You don’t have that kind of immediate link through the human voice to the audience. We’re pretty loud, it’s definitely a rock sound, we kind of go for the overwhelming rock sound at times, but it’s also balanced with the lighter, more kind of classical influences through the quiet passages with the piano.
“So it’s a blend of light and dark,” he continues his description. “It’s loud at times, but it’s also pretty and quiet at times, and I guess we just try to put across an emotional connection. Our whole thing with our live show, because we can’t rely on a vocalist or lyricist to do that, we try to create that emotional connection with an audience through the instrumentals…communicating something through pure sound.”
All that said, the band actually harbour possible plans to add a vocalist one day, or take some of the vocalising upon themselves. “I think that’s probably on the cards at some stage,” he states. “I think we’ve kind of taken the three piece format as far as we can with this record. So I think we’ll probably be looking to do some new things…that’s the plan for next year.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
