When not on the road, Australian producer Emmanuel and other half to the duo, Indonesian vocalist Melati Malay, divide their time between Brooklyn and Upstate, though it seems the countryside has become something of a stronghold for the pair. “We’ve been Upstate most of the time, in and out, for the last year or so. We came up to do the album, but then we fell in love a little bit and ended up spending most of our time up here.”
“It’s a modest bedroom studio set up here, it works for us. We record everything ourselves, we’ve always done it that way; we just find it a lot easier to get ideas down quickly and in the moment. It also means you can travel with a portable set-up as well which is something we’ve always really enjoyed – being able to do things while we’re moving and not being locked to one space and time.”
Their sophomore full-length, Breathing Statues, sees Young Magic stepping away from the traditional musical processes of writing and recording an album to experiment with the element of spontaneity. “We were trying all these different things this time around, trying new things like blind recording,” he explains of the process. “If I make a track, the first time Melati would hear the song she’d have headphones on and the microphone record light on so that the very first thing she could respond to was her singing whilst hearing the song for the first time.
“It’s about getting a really spontaneous response. It’s a really beautiful thing to craft something and make something over time, but there’s also something really nice when you’re first responding to something too. Something unique and very idiosyncratic like that. It was really fun doing things that way. I felt somehow like they were more honest responses.”
Young Magic’s videos have taken on an experimental path of their very own, and serve well to illustrate the fine line that’s often tread between music and art. A standout among their clips that comes to mind is the journey one’s taken on in Fall In: shot in Las Pozas, it’s something of a fairytale garden built by Edward James – a patron of the arts, who supported artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst – where natural waterfalls are juxtaposed by Surrealist sculptures in a tropical rainforest setting in the mountains of Mexico.
“We had this long dream to visit Las Pozas, this eccentric entrepreneur’s palace that he built there in the middle of the jungle,” Emmanuel explains. “We had this last minute show offer to do a festival in Mexico and were going to be a couple of hours away from [Las Pozas], so we jumped at the opportunity to shoot a video there. We messaged [videographer] Angus Borsos on a whim – I’m a big fan of the work he’s done with Julia Holter and Braids – and he was keen to work with us on the clip.
“The first time we actually met him was at 5am in the middle of the jungle in Mexico and I can’t explain how weird it was, how difficult it was to get to this place. We said, ‘You’ve got to fly into Mexico City and then get a bus for ten hours, and then get another bus for six hours, and then another shuttle in the middle of the night and then get the taxi driver to drive all the way up the hill and jump out at this little spot and we’ll be waiting there.’ And somehow he found it,” he laughs. Evidently, the end result was well worth the journey.
Whether it’s working on videos with Montreal’s Angus Borsos or artwork with Melbourne-bred/London-based visual artist Leif Podhajsky, Young Magic have been casting their creative net far and wide. This has seen them embark on an impressive number of collaborations and remixes in recent times, with homegrown talents like Banoffee and Oscar Key Sung, to international acts The Acid and Purity Ring. “We always try to work with people whose work we really admire,” says Emmanuel. “Since we’ve been back from tour, we’ve been doing a bunch of remixes over the last three or four weeks, which is kind of new for us but also a really interesting process. You’ve got to keep it fresh.”
With their take on Banoffee’s Ohhhh Owwww dropping last week and their remix of Oscar Key Sung’s Holograms slated for release in the coming weeks before they head to our shores for an east coast tour at the end of the month, these guys show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
BY ALI HAWKEN
