All posts tagged dance

  • A Conversation With Yannis Philippakis of Foals, 2010

    I interviewed Yannis Philippakis [pictured right], singer/guitarist of the British pop act Foals, for Scene Magazine in late December 2010, ahead of their Australian tour as part of Laneway Festival 2011 (which I reviewed for The Vine).

    Our interview originally ran in condensed form as the cover story of Scene Magazine #811. Here’s the full interview transcript.

    Andrew: I’ve got a confession to make. [Foals’ second album] Total Life Forever is one of my favourite albums of 2010.

    Oh, thank you very much.

    I discovered [Foals’ 2008 debut album] Antidotes a couple of years ago, but Total Life Forever sounds like an entirely different band. I like this band more. Do you?

    Yannis: It’s not a different band…

    I know it’s not, but the sound definitely has changed quite a lot.

    Yeah. I mean, I don’t really like the idea of making albums adversary to each other. I find the whole ranking, hierarchy that happens every year kind of repellent and equally… I don’t really have the same perspective on it, obviously, as an externalist, but to us in the band it’s a very linear progression. It never really felt like we had a break, even after we finished Antidotes. I think the production is a hell of a lot more fully realised on Total Life Forever. At least to me, I still have a fondness for a lot of the songs on Antidotes, but I don’t listen to that record largely because of the production. I think that it’s great that people are acknowledging the progression, but to us it is one linear thing. We want to make a body of work. It’s not us trying to eradicate our past, as such.

    Was there any self-doubt within the band, when your style of song writing started shifting after Antidotes?

    There’s self-doubt every day. Of course. Not to do with writing new things, but there’s just… most of them comes from a wish to complete something that isn’t whole. Self-doubt is part of the game. It’s been there always and unless we write ‘Symphony No. 3’ by Gorecki – which we can’t, because it’s already been written – I don’t think we’re ever going to feel sated or complete. It’s just part of the fun as well, the masochistic element of it.

    The moment we stopped recording Antidotes, we started doing b-sides for Antidotes, it started to change a lot, and there was much more experimentation. We started to implement a lot of the things that we learned from Dave Sitek, and make stuff that I think actually bridges the two albums quite closely. There are some b-sides; one in particular called ‘Gold Gold Gold‘, and another two called ‘Titan Arum‘ and ‘Glaciers‘. That’s what I mean; it felt linear. It didn’t feel like we ever stopped, we just always worked on stuff.

    All that really happened was that, at the beginning when we started the band, there was a very definite and conscious process. It was a conscious aesthetic, that we wanted, and it was to do with techno, it was to do with a style of guitar playing, a visual aesthetic. Everything was very conscious and we wanted to have parameters on it. We were in love with the idea of bands like Devo that had a distinct world that they occupied.

    Everything since then, once we felt like we attained that, everything now is about undoing that process and getting to a point which is kind of the reverse of that, where nothing is conscious and if I had the choice, I’d have a lobotomy and cut out the conscious part of my mind, so that I could just make music direct from the gut. I don’t know. Did that answer your question?

    For sure. You mentioned the style of guitar playing the band has. I’ve always been fascinated by those little needly, palm-muted riffs that you guys come up with. Were there any particular artists that inspired that style of playing?

    I think it was just something that we heard. I think there are a lot of bands, a lot of styles of guitar or even just playing strings [instruments], everything from string players in a classical piece, to [‘math rock’] bands like OXES and Don Caballero, and African Senegalese guitar. I think the main thing, at least personally for me, there was something about that way of guitar playing that just attracted me. I was never that fascinated by chords, and I actually neglected to learn how to work chord sequences and stuff. Instead, everything became about these ‘guitar tattoos’. It was more I had a lot of different types of music and different types of bands and wanted to cannibalise it and make it our own.

    That’s always been a main bit of the band. We start playing stuff lower down the guitar. We play with chords sometimes now, but I think that will always be part of the sound because that is just the way that I play, naturally. It’s become muscle memory, now.

    It’s certainly one of the band’s most distinctive elements. Did you always intend that to be the case, or did it arise when you started playing together?

    You kind of progress, but yeah, it’s always been there, it predates the band. It’s how I learned how to play the guitar. I used to mimic and ape the guitar lines I liked, and they usually were like staccato, tight little phrases, that’s how I liked it. As I said, I was never really attracted to chords, or distortion pedals. I like the idea of a transparent guitar sound; a guitar sound that’s unashamed to be a clean guitar. I think that you can get as much power out of a clean guitar as you can out of a distorted guitar.

    You’ve been touring pretty heavily this year, as we discussed. You’ve played a lot of shows. I’m interested to know how you keep it sounding fresh and feeling fresh night after night.

    Just do loads of drugs, basically. That’s pretty much it. [laughs] Do you mean like the shows, or the actual lifestyle, or my body odour? What do you mean?

    The music. If you’re playing the same songs each night, does it feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over?

    It depends. I definitely think there’s a point at which bands stop touring and sometimes you can’t tell when that point is going to be, and you have to keep on playing for a bit longer. But that rarely happens. Each show is different, and we don’t play exactly the same set every night. Even if we were playing a similar set, we have quite a lot of room to improvise… well not improvisation, exactly, but we have negative space that we’re allowed to do different things. We allow space for chaos in the set, so that it’s not so tightly rehearsed, that it’s mechanical. It’s not choreographed, in that way.

    I think that helps keep it fresh. I get tired of touring sometimes, but it’s not really often to do with the shows, more to do with the kind of… I don’t know, I’d probably be able to answer that question later on in the year because we’ve still got two more tours [note: this interview was conducted in mid-December 2010]. At the moment I feel pretty good about playing. I’m starting to feel restless about writing new things. I’ve been writing so many things and I think the more that appetite opens, the more pedestrian touring seems in comparison. The further we get away from the completion of the last record, the more difficult touring becomes, I think. Not because of playing the same stuff, just because there’s a new appetite that emerges, of wanting to do things.

    When I was researching for this interview, I was surprised to discover your age. You’re two years older than I am. Was it a challenge to get people to take a bunch of teenagers seriously when the band first started?

    How old are you?

    22.

    What do you mean? For who to take us seriously?

    People in the music industry, as you were getting introduced to labels, and so forth.

    I don’t know. I think that for a lot of young bands, that’s when the prime is, sometimes. I think people are savvy to that in the music industry. They kind of want to feed off young blood. You have a naivety. You’re not jaded in any sort of way. I think, if anything, it wasn’t an issue of persuading them, it was more like trying to have them not suck our blood. I’m the youngest, but I wasn’t that young. We’ve all been playing in bands for a long time. I don’t know, I didn’t really feel that. I don’t feel as young as I used to, though.

    Do you feel that as you get older you’re being taken more seriously?

    It depends on what you mean. Are we talking about people that listen to records, are you talking about critics?

    All of the above.

    Yeah, I think so, in some way. I think the critics, there is something that make critics recoil if you seem like a young, cocky upstart. When we started doing interviews and stuff, I really didn’t have that much of a filter on my brain. A lot of time I really didn’t know where I was, in terms of how things would be relayed in the press. I think that with time comes an understanding. I understand myself better now. I think as you get older – what were you like when you were 19?

    I was a dumbass.

    [laughs] Things change. I think it’s not just to do with age. It’s to do with the fact that we made the second record, and hopefully it didn’t stink, and the people believe in you that little bit more because you’re not just putting out a hype record that, in theory, is a one-hit wonder, and also a compilation of songs that you spent 10 years to write. I think that we’ve conducted ourselves, at least since the beginning, in a way that we feel proud of, and hopefully people have a belief in a certain type of integrity – or an attempt at integrity – which will mean that we gain some respect in that field.

    Yeah, sure. Before we finish up, I wanted to ask you about Oxford briefly. Earlier this year I came across a documentary called Anyone Can Play Guitar, which I note you’re involved with. I’m particularly interested in Oxford because I love both Ride and Swervedriver.

    Right.

    When you were growing up in the city, was there a sense of wanting to follow in the footsteps of other Oxford bands like those two perhaps?

    Yeah, it wasn’t those two, but there were other ones. There was a band that was pretty much our contemporaries, but a little bit older: Youthmovies. Oxford definitely was like a big factor in the way we started to think about music. I obviously knew about Radiohead and Supergrass, but Ride and Swervedriver in particular, I wasn’t that aware of. When I was growing up I paid attention to local fledgling bands. Those bands [Ride and Swervedriver], I don’t think they were really playing Oxford when I was growing up, so I wasn’t that aware of them. A band called Youthmovies had pretty much the biggest influence on Oxford in general and people my age, and it’s still being felt now. I think it’s a very interesting place to live, if you’re not an academic.

    Is there a sense of being able to give something back to the scene that helped foster Foals, now that you’ve got some attention?

    Yeah, we take bands that we like on tour with us, and I try to talk about them in interviews. But not really out of a sense of… there’s nothing magnanimous about it, it’s just that we like the bands and a lot of them are our friends. I’d rather talk about my friends, because it’s more personal to me.

    Last question. A friend asked me to say “pretty please, will you leak the Dave Sitek mix of Antidotes?”

    [laughs] Ehh, maybe.

    Okay, good. Thanks for your time mate.

    A pleasure. Thank you.

    ++

    For more Foals, visit their website. The music video for their song ‘Blue Blood‘‘ is embedded below.

    Elsewhere: a review of their 2010 album, Total Life Forever, for The Vine.

     

  • Mess+Noise album review: Art Vs. Science – ‘The Experiment’, March 2011

    An album review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Art Vs. Science – The Experiment

    On debut album ‘The Experiment’, Art Vs. Science understand that repetition is the foundation of dance music – but it’s a trick that wears thin, writes ANDREW MCMILLEN.

    Popular culture generally exists to meet demand. Most artists spend their lives attempting to offer works that resonate with as wide an audience as possible. By tapping into popular sentiments, savvy artists can short-circuit the often lengthy process of artistic acceptance. Case in point: Art Vs. Science, who – legend has it – formed on the spot while its three members stood watching Daft Punk playing in Sydney some years ago. The crowd was going bonkers for two dudes in robot suits atop a glowing pyramid. They probably stood and wondered aloud: “Why not us?”

    Following on from a high-profile spot at Splendour In The Grass in 2008, thanks largely to debut single ‘Flippers’ – whose goofy chorus was comprised entirely of “Hey! Ho! Use your flippers to get down!” – and nearly topping the 2009 triple j Hottest 100 with ‘Parlez Vous Francais?’, Art Vs. Science have emerged with their first album, The Experiment. True to form, it’s packed from top to tail with brash electronica, delivered with their now-trademark dance-punk attitude. Here, we hear guitars furiously tapping away at fretboards during oh-so obvious breakdowns that lead into slamming synth-led choruses; all custom-made for hands-in-the-air dance festival sets. (By the by, this is a band who’s known for performing live covers of ‘Where’s Your Head At?’ and ‘Boom! Shake The Room’ to tents full of peaking munters).

    In isolation, The Experiment is a dull record, because these songs won’t come to life until they’re heard and felt in a live environment. A five-minute instrumental rave-up like ‘Meteor (I Feel Fine)’ sounds foolish playing on your home stereo (though interestingly, it’s the closest they’ve gotten to sounding like Daft Punk). Several songs here are based around single words or short phrases – ‘Higher’, ‘Bumblebee’, ‘Sledgehammer’ – which seem to be included for the sole purpose of giving crowds something nonsensical to shout amid the pulsing synth din.

    For the full review, visit Mess+Noise. For more Art Vs. Science, visit their website. The music video for their song ‘Finally See Our Way‘ is embedded below.

  • The Vine interview: Kim Moyes of The Presets, February 2011

    An interview for The Vine. Excerpt below.

    Interview – The Presets

    Alongside labelmates Cut Copy, The Presets have arguably been the most influential Australian band of modern times. After meeting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1995, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes quickly ditched the ambient electronica they were fussing about with in instrumental band Prop, in favour of a more playful electronica, tinged with darkness. The duo’s EPs in Blow Up (2003) and Girl and the Sea (2004), gave way to debut album Beams (2005), released via Modular Records, which delivered their first club (and festival) hit, ‘Are You The One?’.

    The band’s sound soon found favour with a mainstream shifting away from the tired posturing of guitar rock; one moving towards a more hedonistic, celebratory club-like culture that began pervading everything from festivals to the local pub. Whether it was right-place right-time, or something more intrinsically linked to the band’s quickly growing fanbase, The Presets second LP Apocalypso was released in 2008 right as a newly branded mainstream were feverishly scrolling for new icons. Preceded by the mega-hit ‘My People’, which quickly became a generational anthem, sitting in the ARIA Top 100 singles for over 18 months, the album struck a chord,. That year, Apocalypso was second only to AC/DC’s Black Ice in sales terms. (It’s now gone three times platinum in Australia). The band embarked on a solid two years of touring, packing out halls, accumulating international fans (the Black Eyed Peas will.i.am claimed that ‘My People’ was a “huge influence” on that bands album ‘The E.N.D’) and making mockeries of festivals “dance” tents. Apocalypso cleaned up at the 2008 ARIA Awards, winning Best Dance Release and Album Of The Year, as well the Artisan Awards for Best Cover Art and Producer of the Year, a sweep which brought an intense, bizarre period for the band to a neat close. After five years of touring and recording, they retired for a much-needed break.

    With a third album to be released sometime this year, and ahead of their re-emergence on the live scene as part of the Future Music Festival touring across Australia next month, Andrew McMillen connected with drummer and keyboardist Kim Moyes to discuss his change in addressing music, the weight of expectations and the ugly side of Australian culture.

    Hey, Kim. Besides a few shows in January, you spent most of last year out of the public eye. Was that a good year for you?

    Yeah, it was a great year. The whole last five years – up until the end of the last few shows of Apocalypso – we were touring non-stop. If we weren’t touring, we were making a record, and then we were touring again. It was great. It was a huge experience in my life and career, but at the end of that I think we needed to have a few months off to defrag, enjoy some home time with our partners. We both became fathers in that year. We started working again about a year ago, and it’s been a steady, long slog since then. Right now we’re getting to a point where we have an album starting to take shape and just trying to put the final touches on it. We’re ready to go back out there and face that public eye again.

    Was it a bit of a shock to the system to live through five years of non-stop creativity and touring, and then come home and adjust to the everyday pace of life?

    Not really, because – without going into it too much – having a kid is kind of like a whole other pace of life [laughs]. There were a few moments where we got to really unwind and enjoy nothingness, and that was not unusual at all. It was bloody awesome. The rest just kind of…I feel like fulfilling the next bit of our lives, that we felt needed to be fulfilled.

    You’re playing MS Fest in Tasmania in a couple of weeks, which will mark your return to live shows. What made you say yes to that gig?

    We’ve done it a couple of times and always have a really good time there. We really like working with the guy who puts it on. We have a really good relationship with those guys and we thought that’s probably a really good, nice way to start things again. We’re doing the MS Fest, and then the Future Music Festival. It’s an isolated run around the country and a reinvigoration for us. Even being in rehearsals this week – getting ready for it, trying out the new songs and seeing how they fit, tweaking them and all that sort of stuff; it’s really taking the creative juices to another level.

    I think there’s only so much… I was talking to Jules [bandmate Julian Hamilton] about this yesterday. I remember when we wrote Beams, and I remember when we wrote Apocalypso, and both those situations we were [playing in other] bands (both Kim and Julian have worked as touring musicians for other bands, most notably Hamilton with Silverchair – Ed) and recording with other bands, and we really felt this urgency to go and work at our [own] music. So we’d be working all day at rehearsal studios with a different band and then at nighttime we’d go to the studio and write songs. We’d done that at fever pitch, and then the same with Apocalypso; we came back after three years of touring and we were so highly attuned to what we were doing and what we needed to do in the next record, that we went in and did it in a short time.

    I guess the drawbacks of taking a break from it all is that those things start to fade a bit in your mind; they’re not at the forefront and you start to forget. In a way it’s really great for your creativity to take on new ideas, new concepts, and try things you normally wouldn’t do, and that’s what we’ve done a lot of. But getting back into rehearsal this week and having this run of shows to look forward to, this reality check is really starting to complete the picture. As a result, we’re going to have a really interesting record. But nothing that’s too far away from what we normally do. It’s an exciting time.

    For the full interview, visit The Vine. And I highly recommend that you do, if you’ve already read this far: while the above questions/responses are quite standard, the interview took a real left turn once we began discussing how Kim thinks Australians view The Presets, and how they’ve influenced Australian culture in unexpected ways.

    For more of The Presets, visit their website. The music video for their song ‘If I Know You‘ is embedded below.

  • Rolling Stone Q+A: Rob Swire of Pendulum, December 2010

    A Q+A published in the January 2011 issue of Rolling Stone, which featured in the ‘Sounds of Summer’ music festival guide. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    Pendulum – Heavy Dance

    Leading the Perth-born, U.K.-based drum-and-bass act Pendulum isn’t all Rob Swire has been doing recently: he also co-wrote and co-produced Rihanna’s “Rude Boy”, which meant double platinum in Australia. Pendulum have just wrapped up an Aussie tour ahead of their appearance at the Future Music Festival tour in March, and we caught up with Swire on the eve of their show in his hometown, Perth.

    Onstage you rely on around a dozen computers – that’s a lot of trust in technology.

    Well,  the point of having 12 computers is so that if one of them goes down, the rest are relatively alright. We do get the central computer resetting sometimes, because that thing’s being raped, to be honest.

    When you were younger, do you remember watching particular artists or bands and thinking, “that’s what I want to do”?

    I was fairly heavy into electronic music, so I never really saw that many bands. I think the first band I saw was Spiderbait and the second was The Prodigy. We were in a band before, a sort of metal band and that was just sort of inspired by death metal bands, but I think watching Strapping Young Lad and Muse pretty much inspired us to get a band together.

    Your background is in metal, yet you’re now in the biggest electronic rock act in the world. You’ve also co-written with Rihanna. Do you get bored easily?

    I do, yes. I’m totally ADD in terms of writing music. I just get bored of whatever I last did, and if I do something too long I get bored and do something else. The Rihanna thing is something different and it’s far, far removed from the Pendulum stuff. It’s good.

    Do you see yourself pursuing more co-writing in the future?

    I can, yeah, but it’s such a different thing to the way we’ve done things in the past. With Pendulum, we have 100 percent creative control. With the stuff like Rihanna, you pretty much do what they say. If they don’t like a bit of a verse, they fuckin’ take it out. If they don’t like a vocal, that’s not the vocal they use.

    With Pendulum, you’ve been performing your ABC News remix as the encore of the current tour. That song’s become something else entirely for you, hasn’t it?

    Yeah, in fact, it’s a very scary thing. I think the slight weirdness of the Sydney show might have been a lot of people were solely there to see that tune. They’d heard it on the radio and thought we might be a sort of electro, DJ group or some shit like that, and they came along and there’s a band playing metal-infused drum and bass. There was a lot of chanting of “ABC!” throughout the set. It was a bit weird.

    For more Pendulum, visit their website. The music video for their track ‘The Island‘ is embedded below.

  • triple j mag story: ‘Friendly Fires in the studio’, December 2010

    A story for the November 2010 issue of triple j mag. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the article text underneath.

    Garage Days

    A lack of recording venues gave Friendly Fires licence to get creative

    “I don’t think I’ve had a day off in the last two years,” says Ed Macfarlane of the British dance-punk trio Friendly Fires. That’s no complaint, though: since the release of their self-titled debut album in 2008, the vocalist and his bandmates (Jack Savidge, drums; Edd Gibson, guitar) have been in demand, making a 2009 appearance at Splendour In The Grass. Though they’ve been writing and recording on and off since January, the band only recently set aside time to work in earnest on their follow-up LP: in the same garage as the first album, no less.

    “It feels really informal,” says the singer. “We’re not a band who’ll just set up the drums and guitar, and write and record in a day. We like to spend a lot of time really getting into the production, and trying to create weird and interesting sounds. I’m probably the band’s biggest perfectionist; I produced the first record and I’ve produced most of this one, too.” Ed admits that sometimes he needs Jack and Edd to slap him around the head and say “‘stop messing about with the hi-hat sound – the song is the important thing, let’s focus on that!'”

    The decision to self-produce was born of necessity: the natives of St Albans, Hertfordshire, weren’t keen to record in their hometown’s sole recording studio. It was a blessing in disguise: you’re entirely responsible for the output when you do everything yourself. Almost everything, that is; their debut’s opening track, ‘Jump in the Pool‘, was produced and co-written by famed producer Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Florence and the Machine), and Paul’s working on three new songs. ” Maybe that will affect the sound of the record, but I’m still pretty sure it’s gonna sound like us, not a producer,” Ed says.

    When it came to writing for the album, due out in February, Ed spent a productive month in a cottage in Nomandy, France. “I can’t speak French, and I don’t have any friends in Normandy, so it was just me on my own, trying to be creative. I got cabin fever about three weeks into it. There was definitely a point where I was questioning what I was doing.”

    Ed’s dance moves feature in live shows, and he confesses to indulging sometimes while recording. “It’s also particularly embarrassing if I’m working on a track alone, then my Mum or Dad opens up the garage and see me dancing to my own music!”

    For more Friendly Fires, visit their MySpace. The music video for their song ‘Kiss Of Life‘ is embedded below.

  • The Vine interview: Daddy G of Massive Attack, March 2010

    An interview with Massive Attack for The Vine ahead of their Australian tour in March 2010.

    Grant Marshall and Robert Del Naja of Massive AttackAs chief trip-hop genre-definers, Massive Attack exist in 2010 as production duo Robert del Naja [stage name: 3D] and Grant Marshall [Daddy G], who work alongside co-producers, session musicians, and guest vocalists to skilfully mesh elements of electronica, hip-hop, drum-and-bass and house. Following the February release of their highly anticipated – and frequently postponed – fifth album, Heligoland, Massive Attack are touring Australia for the first time since 2003.

    On the eve of their performance at Perth’s Kings Park, Andrew McMillen connected with Daddy G [pictured above left] to discuss controversial artwork, digital downloading, and Massive Attack’s two appearances in Triple J’s Hottest 100 Of All Time.

    Full interview at The Vine, published March 18, 2010.

    I didn’t realise it until after the fact, but this was my ‘biggest’ interview thus far, when considered in terms of Massive Attack’s widely celebrated career and lasting impact on contemporary music. Thereby pushing Neil Strauss to #2.

    The interview was conducted from the back seat of a friend’s car on a sunny Friday afternoon.. only because I couldn’t attain a quiet place to record our conversation elsewhere at the office. The interview had been rescheduled five times in 10 days, and was originally supposed to be with Robert del Naja / 3D. Oh well.

    On a personal note, it was rewarding to tip Grant off about Massive Attack’s presence in triple j’s Hottest 100 Of All Time, and how their songs ‘Unfinished Sympathy‘ and ‘Teardrop‘ were the only tracks in the countdown to feature female vocals. The scoop was significant enough to warrant a news story the day before publication. Juicy. Props to my friend Josh Donellan for raising it when I crowdsourced potential interview questions via Facebook in early March.