“That was a crazy Wednesday,” he laughs. “I had a recording studio in Brunswick and I was in there making some beats. This mad French guy I knew, Baptiste Polyglock, just happened to wander by a warehouse where he overheard Emily singing. He grabbed her and said ‘man you’ve gotta come to this studio and meet my friend’ and dragged her over to meet me, even though she didn’t even know who he was. So, I stuck a mic in front of her – she’d never sung on a recording before that. She thought about it for 20 minutes or so and then just started singing and we were like ‘Whoa, where has this chick come from?’”
The next stroke of luck was that O’Leary had just caught Juniper on her way to Tasmania, so making the most of the limited time they had available before she split, they laid down a handful of tracks and put them on Soundcloud. In a short space of time, the tracks generated a Soundcloud frenzy. However, Juniper was off the grid during her absence and was unaware until she got back that they had sparked so much interest. “Yeah, she got back to about 500 million voice messages and emails from me saying ‘You’ve got to look at Soundcloud’,” O’Leary recalls, somewhat sheepishly.
O’Leary’s had an extensive musical background. He reckons he’s played just about every genre going, which included doing a stint in a heavy metal band at high-school. He then worked as a sound engineer for a number of years but got sick of being stuck behind a mixing desk at gigs when he knew there was more fun to be had on stage.
Bearing this in mind, he started playing again, focusing mostly of electronic-based production. However, O’Leary also started to collaborate with folk as needed and the practice continued with The Wednesday Experiment. For instance, they’ve just made a track with a dude in Romania and the band has a standing request for tunes and sounds to tinker with, the response to which has been both kooky and fun – one guy sent them a sample of his grandma’s washing machine, which O’Leary describes as “dubstep on spin cycle.”
Despite the band’s good fortune, it’s not all beer and skittles – The Wednesday Experiment work bloody hard. For instance, although they had intended to launch their debut album, The Verse of You and I, earlier this year, perfectionism took hold and pushed them to plug away at it further. “It’s taken us longer than the universe has been in existence to finish the album,” jokes O’Leary, somewhat wearily. “The album’s basically a collection of tracks that we’ve made over quite some period, so they were all made at different times with different people and on different programs. It’s been quite a mission. To master it was basically a non-stop job, so I’m happy to have it finalised.”
“It’s funny because we’re not perfectionists in any other area of our lives – it’s just in relation to music. I mean, I’d be quite happy sleeping on a couch in a corner of a studio without all of the elaborate 21st century comforts, but when it came to the album, we just had to keep going over and over it. Every time I listened to it in a car or on a different speaker system, I’d hear something else. I’m glad I set a release date, otherwise it could have all kept spinning forever.”
In terms of sound, think Bjork, Massive Attack and Portishead. O’Leary’s not averse to those comparisons either. “If anyone was to compare us to any of those three acts, I’d consider it an honour. There have been some of those comparisons and I’m not unhappy about it. Take Portishead – they’re one of those acts that everyone can love – even metal guys love it late at night.”
Having said that, there’s some heavier industrial sounding stuff on The Verse of You and I – take Play with Something, which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Bauhaus or Peter Murphy album and O’Leary and Polyglock weren’t overreacting – Juniper’s voice is heaven-sent.
While they’re clearly geared towards electronica, there’s always an instrument thrown into the mix or another vocalist or MC, which again opens opportunities for collaboration. Further, although it’s easiest to peg them as trip-hop, they’re not penning themselves in: in fact the band’s credo specifically says that they’re “without genre.” So, in light of that, it’s not unknown for Juniper to do an acoustic number on stage with her guitar, they’re right into their glitch-hop and it’s not too big a stretch to say that some of their songs are in a bluesier vein – it’s all part of the broader experiment. “There doesn’t have to be any rules,” O’Leary explains. “I think too many people are trapped by ‘this is your music’ or ‘this is your genre’, often because they’re too scared that people won’t like it. We’re not as bothered – if we want to do it, we’re just going to do it and if people like it, that’s awesome.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
