MY DISCO is a Melbourne based music group formed in 2003 by Liam Andrews, Ben Andrews and Rohan Rebeiro. On the verge of their latest full-length intensely minimalist album, Severe, Ben Andrews chats to John Goodridge about what went into the making of the album.
You must be pretty happy with the release of Severe.
Yeah pretty pumped, actually. It comes out Friday.
I had a listen to it last night had it on repeat it was so good. I saw you play down at Dark Mofo earlier this year and it really bought back memories of that.
Thanks man, that was a great festival.
I’m impressed with the consistency between the live show and the recorded music.
We’ve only started to play those songs live in the past four or five shows that we’ve done. It’s a little bit of a departure for us, a bit more of an ambient sound, but yeah that particular show in Hobart was great. Always has good production so it made it easy to have a good one.
Did you have a vision of what the album would be like when you started?
We kind of wrote it in about April or so of last year, April through to June, and it just so happened that we were writing these really dark, fairly bleak pieces of music. We’d probably written a bunch more material that didn’t make it. We recorded it and didn’t think it fitted or whatever. Because we wrote it over a two-month period, it all has the same dark textural quality about it, all drum and bass lines and swelly guitar bits. That’s what I enjoy, when our writing process isn’t spread out, when we’re confined to eight or ten or twelve weeks or whatever, then it all has this same element to it. Having said that, we’re still conscious of like not writing ten songs that all sound the same. Different tempos and structure ideas, try and write in different keys, blah blah blah, but because it’s all simplistic, it comes off sounding like a whole environment of music rather than just a collection of songs that we’ve written over a few years, you know.
The songs do hold together really well but each have their own personalities. I read that the process was pure digital rather than any analogue. Your live shows are very organic, so was it hard to make that decision to go digital?
No, we’d experimented with it over the last couple of years. We recorded singes and remixes and the thing we did with Sub Pop and we did it all with Cornel (Wilczek) and that’s just the format that he works in. I can still set up close to my amplifier and create feedback and the drums still sound like the organic drums. There’s not much manipulation done to them post process or anything so I think the only difference is the tools that he uses versus some other records. He works strictly in Logic whereas before we’ve done tape. I kind of think that the only noticeable difference is, which this version still has, is the compression that the tape has on saturation on drums and stuff, but I kind of feel that this record has that anyway because we still did it all live and it still is very much organic sounding.
How did you come to work with Cornel?
We’ve known him for many years; we’ve played with qua and Cornel Wilczek solo over the past seven or eight years. I think we got him to remix a single, probably about 2010, and then we were just really curious and went into the studio with him. He doesn’t actually work with that many bands anymore, he’s more of a soundtrack guy and I think working with a band that he knows the sound of and knows us personally, it’s a bit of a break from what can be a bit of a mindfuck when you’re recording film scores and what not on your own. I think he treated it as a bit of a change of pace for him. So we probably worked with him over the last five years.
He is literally one of the only people who could record this record in the way we write it. Everything is not set in stone, it’s quite improvised. A lot of times when we go to track a song, we’ve just got a couple of ideas, we don’t know how it starts, we don’t know how it ends; that’s where he comes in helping out with structural elements, production and editing, or just doing a bunch more takes and picking bits out of each one. He’s really good at understanding our vibe, because we’re not like a normal band that goes in with a three minute song that has a start a middle and an end, we just have some vague ideas and it just ends up piecing itself together.
I really felt that this album had a soundtrack kind of feel to it without actually being a soundtrack.
Yeah it’s got the space and I think at the time we were listening to a whole bunch of John Carpenter and Brad Fiedel with the original Terminator soundtrack, so we had this idea of an alien stark recording with real bleak overtones and that kind of soundtracky cinematic quality with swelling guitars and massive hall reverbs and stuff like that. That’s just what we were into, wanting it to be super alien and super bleak and having people go “I wonder if that’s a guitar or is it a synth.”
That was the feeling I had at Dark Mofo as well, that dark mysterious shadowy music that you didn’t really know where it came from.
I think it’s important to have that. Essentially we’re just guitar based with drums so I like the idea of having it alien and unique sounding so people don’t know what’s coming from where. It keeps it really exciting for us as well because it’s so improvised and I think it’s important to have the improv nature, especially for the live show.
Do you have a feeling of how the audience might react, when you’re recording?
No, not really. Sometimes we’ll add something in and say well this will freak everyone out. My Disco has been a band since 2003, but I think I’m finding now, especially in Australia, that because that’s a long time ago (there’s still people that come to our shows that have been to our very first show) but it’s more of a younger audience that have heard a few songs on Triple R or might have seen us at stuff like Dark Mofo, who might not have heard what we’ve done previously. I think in that way we’re an interesting band because you can go back and explore other albums and that’s what we’ve always wanted to do is constantly progress. I still think this record sounds like a My Disco record but it’s still a big departure from what we’ve previously done. The minimal and repetition elements are the same but the production qualities and guitar sounds are very different, which is great for use because it’s very exciting.
How do you gauge the progress of the song? Do you have listening parties or anything like that?
Obviously Cornel will play it to his peers and have a listen but for the most part we know what we like and what we don’t like and I think we’re educated enough musically to know if we’re on the right track. I might play it to a few good mates who’ve been around and heard us over the last decade. It is good to do that because you can get stuck in your own head with ideas but we’re not precious with stuff. If we record an idea and it sucks we’ll just get rid of it straight away. We don’t hold onto things.
The minimal surreal imagery you use by Falko Ohlmer is very consistent as well. How did that partnership come about?
Well again we’ve known him since 2001; essentially he’s a German fellow who lived in Australia for a year. He used to come and see our other band which is more of a pop punk post-hardcore band back in the day, and we just kept in touch and he’s come on a few Australian tours doing merch and he actually came on a European tour doing merch, so he’s just a friend of ours, who’s done more and more of our artwork including poster design, but we really did owe him an album cover. He just kind of gets it as well. A lot of his work has harsh lines but he also does a lot of colourful stuff, which wouldn’t suit us, but he’s just a malleable dude who understands us, I guess.
Do you find much difference between playing headline shows and festivals?
Yeah, a festival you’re just another band, you get on, get off, although it’s great because you play to a varied audience. It can be a little stressful when you are a particular band like we are, but having said that, the ones we’re doing on our upcoming tour, At First Sight in Sydney and Paradise in Melbourne, they’re unique and interesting run by music lovers who’ve chosen artists that complement each other. But especially with the new stuff headline shows can be a bit stressful sometimes.
Are you heading overseas at all?
After Perth, which is the last Australian one, we’re doing Malaysia and Singapore. We like to do South East Asia once every few years. After that it’s Christmas then we go to Adelaide in January for a festival, then we go to New Zealand in February, Japan in March then it’s Europe, US time but we’re not sure when.
What have you been doing since the last album Little Joy, which was released five years ago?
Everyone asks this question. It seems a long time but after we did Little Joy, we toured for two years, then after that we had a break then we recorded a couple of singles and put out a remix single CD, then we did the Sub Pop 25th year LP, we recorded a whole bunch of stuff that we didn’t do anything with, and Liam at the time was living in Barcelona and London and I was living in Indonesia, so we were pretty busy personally as well. But we put out Little Joy at the end of 2010, but we’ve put out a bunch of other stuff so yeah we’ve been busy.
———-
Severe is out today. Don’t miss the band on tour!
November 13: ANU Bar, Canberra
November 14: At First Sight Festival, Carriage Works
November 20: Crowbar, Brisbane
November 21: The Shadow Electric, Melbourne
November 28: Paradise Music Festival, Lake Mountain
December 5: Crown & Anchor, Adelaide
December 11: The Rosemount, Perth
December 12: Mojos, Fremantle
For more details head to their Facebook Page.
———-
