Tro was written during an intense session in Edinburgh as part of a Colab sojourn in the Scottish winter. Technology enfolds us yet is cold; it is both fascinating yet oddly repellant; it allows us to do so much but fails us at crucial moments. The world has become a vast series of interlocking technical systems both controlling and controlled by the people who designed them.
Ruined in a Day is a cover of a classic New Order song from their 1993 album 'Republic'. Our version actually sounds nothing like the original. It's more or less just the lyrics and the concept that were the inspirations to what has become an almost completely new song. I love the atmospherics of the original, with the opaque lyrics that hint and several meanings. We recorded this originally before I left Australia and at that time the song was a lot more raw and kind of electro rock. I dusted it off again a year later and suddenly started hearing all electronics within the mix. That got me started and pretty soon the track turned into something much more lush, with a lot more instruments and much more variation. We're going to be shooting video for Ruined in a Day shortly at a couple of sites along the Thames in London.
If Thy Soul is a song that proves that there's not reason not to dance when you're musing on god. Especially if you're filming the video in a dark, derelict hospital full of unseen drops into elevator shafts, asbestos warnings, jagged glass and creepy memories. Our friend Laura wrote the lyrics to this song and recorded them over the top of this unvarying bass drone and recurrent single kick drum. I think it must have been my desperation to restore my piece of mind after first hearing this incredibly brooding initial cut that made me work feverishly to utterly change the music. At the end of 3 intense days of effort, a remarkably different song emerged. Weirdly enough, we were able to keep the original vocal - didn't even have to change the way it was processed at all. So now you have this song that is both danceable and dark.
Instruments of Night is a song inspired by the novel of the same name by Thomas H Cook. I've read quite a few of his books now, hoping to get a similar experience to the first time I read 'Instruments', but nothing quite compares. I wonder if he also sees this as his greatest work, or just another of his many books? 'Instruments' is an evocative, complex narrative with stories within stories, bringing to life gas light America even as the narrator struggles with his present-day life. In our song we've tried to capture some of the haunting, melodic nature of Cook's story. As for the video to go with the song, we're working on it - we have the concept but just not the resources to film it right now. A familiar feeling to all indie film makers!
Theories of the Day was inspired by a short film I saw as a really young kid. It was really old even when I saw it, a grainy image on the screen and in my mind, a kind of a morality tale, based on a short story by sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury called "All Summer in a Day". The story is set on a rainy planet colonised by humans where the sun hasn't emerged from behind the rain clouds for years and years. One young girl was born on Earth and still remembers the sun. She believes predictions that one day the sun will come out on this new planet as well, but the other kids at her school, jealous of her Earth experience, ridicule her. This story stuck with me as I was growing up and came to mind one day while I was in France. The song for "Theories" started to develop in my head but I could only remember fragments of the film and had no idea what it was called, who made it, or, at that time, that it was based on a Ray Bradbury book. After literally several months of googling it on and off, I finally struck gold where the film was being discussed on an obscure film forum. And what was quite funny was that, the more I dug, the more I realised that there were dozens of people like myself - people had periodically posted in to this forum on exactly the same search, with the messages always starting out with something like "I saw this weird sci-fi film as a kid and it's always stuck with me....". Well, the story didn't end there because, in reply to my own version of this post, a kind soul in the US then wrote back to say that, although the movie had long long since gone out of circulation and couldn't be bought for love nor money, he had an old copy recorded off the TV on Betamax! Not only that, he was willing to transfer it to the computer, burn it to DVD, and post it to me in Australia! Well how is that for a kind human reaching out across the internet! So I now have my very own special copy of "All Summer in a Day" - from 35mm film, to a TV screen, to a Betamax tape, to a hard drive, to a DVD in the US, to a band in Australia, arranged over the internet. A truly high tech end to a low tech start that would have made a visionary like Ray Bradbury smile with delight.
Play track
A musician is stalked through a surreal alternate of Adelaide's landscape. Paranoia? Real threat? One and the same? We should point out that, lyrically, the song has nothing to do with any of that - or does it? The video for Opposite won us an award at U-Film a while back for best FX, which was nice. Although moody and down-tempo, Opposite is a fun song to play live, with lots of tweaking of volumes and FX and heavily filtered vocals that come into their own when you hear them over a PA.
Some of our songs start with a lyric, others with an idea for a melody. Rarely do they start with a sample, but 'Judgement' is an exception to that rule. Listening to some old New Order tunes one day I had one of those moments where your mind suddenly envisages an entirely new song around a few bars of the tune. The first lyric, 'My judgement is poor' sprang to mind straight away and I started constructing the new song. An e-piano riff was next, which seemed to compliment the sample perfectly and gave the song a really jamming, slightly bluesy feel. Where to go next? The construction of lyrics was a bit like a word-association test from this point on: 'My judgement is poor.....but even though I saw......you look into her eyes....I couldn't spot your lies'. Miracuously, there seemed to be some content in that, and the themes of the song grew from there.
This song started life as a guitar loop written by a friend, Gilles, in London. It was supposed to turn into something like a rocky ballad I think. But then Simon came up with a digital image named Char 2 which you can see on this site. Looking at this picture, 'Landscapes' sprang into my mind almost in its entirety - the only time I've ever had this experience. Suddenly the balladish guitar loop turned into a quirky, moody kernel running through a glitchy electronic soundscape overlayed with a vocal part that I slapped down right then and there. The recording left a little to be desired, but grew on us so much we've stuck with the original take - vibe over quality one might say. Oh and for those who have seen us play this live, you'll know that playing this guitar part and singing at the same time definitely challenges my guitar-skills....
This is one of several Colab tracks inspired by the art of David Thorpe, an artist who caught our attention a few years ago. As we said in a blog elswhere on the site, Thorpe captures, within each work, a whole belief system; depicting isolated, idealised communities striving for....for what? Well it's hard to tell. But that's what we tried to do as well when we wrote 'Do What You Have To Do". What are the characters in the song striving for?
Another song written at an isolated location, this time a place called Ranelagh House up near Robertson between Sydney and Canberra. The place has been renovated now but a few years ago it was a pastiche of vintages, with 1920s bathrooms just down the hall from pink velvet 60s lounge rooms, all surrounded by ramshackle gardens with spectacular views. Sitting in part of those gardens, staring at part of that view, got me thinking about the nature of religion and the result was Gods of Greed.