Monthly Archives: May 2007

dB Magazine, Interview, Writing

Audiofly

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Audiofly are Luca Saporito and Anthony Middleton, two hotshot DJ/Producers making big waves in the dance scene with their forward thinking music and lively DJ sets. Their music is described as ‘deadly Techno meets Electronic House’ and as ‘a powerful and original style of music’. Relatively new to the scene as Audiofly, the duo’s enthusiasm for the music and scene in general is infectious.

Anthony Middleton met Luca Saporito in early 2000 when he was trying an experiment in surround sound. “I was trying to introduce it into a club environment and it didn’t really work out,” Middleton confesses. He had little budget, but Saporito agreed to work as a DJ in the club anyway. “We found that we had really good fun together and a really good energy so it was a logical thing to do a remix (Live Love) which worked really well.”

Live Love, released in 2004, was picked up by big name DJs such as Steve Lawler, DJ Ralf, Victor Calderone & Danny Tenaglia, bringing them world wide acclaim and attention. Their own tunes Release Yourself, Rockin It and Do You Hear? were picked up by labels such as Low Pressings, Deleted Records, Fantastic House and Jackit Records. Middleton describes his sound as “very driving, having elements of techno and house, and it’s incredibly percussive which break down into melodies. It’s high energy without being hard.”

But they don’t just stick to house, offering a wide variety of sounds from all over the place. “We always get our inspiration from what we hear on the weekends,” Middleton smiles. “We’re constantly moving our sound because we’re constantly out there and listening. For example, we’ve taken elements from the minimal fad – the beats are very simple and yet incredibly powerful, and we’ve taken that kind of philosophy for our beats but added the melodic Audio Fly sound. And hearing the fresher, younger DJs on the scene also influences us. They’re excited about the music and are pushing where the old pros tend to sit back a little bit.”

In addition to rocking clubs with their productions, they have quite a reputation as DJs. Unlike many of their contemporaries, who tend to play ‘mini-sets” of 3 or 4 tunes in a row, their DJ style is as a duo – one will play a record, then the next will play another. “We tried early on to do three and three, but we found we dynamically bounce off of each other. We’re not competitive – Luca will play a track and I’ll know just the track to play after that,” he says. “We tried one off us DJing off CDJs and the other ‘live’ on Ableton, but we felt like we lost some of our energy. The guy looking at the computer is constantly looking at it and we lost our dynamic.”

However, it’s a different situation in the studio. “The last thing you need is two people twiddling the controls, resetting things and changing things,” laughs Middleton. “I’m the more engineering of the two of us, although we’re both perfectly capable I’m much faster because I’ve been doing it a longer time!”

This is the first time the duo has been to Australia to perform. “Everyone in my family has been there except me,” laments Middleton, “and I hear really, really good things about it. Luca’s been there on holiday, last year. Luca went to Australia and I went to Slovenia!” he laughs. “He was in the sunshine and I was in minus 10 degrees,” so Middleton is looking forward to coming, even if it is in our winter.

Audiofly play We Love Sounds at HQ on Fri 1 June alongside James Zabiela, Nic Fanciulli, D.Ramirez, Alan Braxe, Kris Menace, Audiofly, Riton, KOS, , Bang Gang DJ’s, Mobin Master and more

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Shapeshifter

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In Adelaide you can’t throw a stone without hitting someone who’s either a drum and bass MC or DJ. So it was a strange one of the most innovative dnb groups in the world, Shapeshifter, didn’t tour on the Adelaide leg of the Big Day Out, particularly when they rocked here so well a few years ago. “We did some shows in New Zealand but we would have much rather have done them in Adelaide and Perth,” says Sam Trevethick, they keyboardist, guitarist and percussionist of the New Zealand five piece. “It just didn’t happen and I don’t really know why, but it’s a shame because we were really looking forward to it.”

New Zealand’s drum and bass scene is a little younger than Adelaide’s, but like us, their reputation, and in particular Christchurch’s reputation as a party place has spread amongst the international dnb community. It was from this Shapeshifter were born. “When we started 8 years ago no one was really doing it like us,” Trevethick explains. “There was Roni Size and Rapresent, but not much else. The reason we wanted to do it was to get our energy out. We wanted to play some really heavy music with really interesting sounds and high energy, and that was drum and bass for us at that time. There were lots of dnb DJs coming through Christchurch at the time – Bailey, Brian G, Grooverider, Ed Rush & Optical and it was a really healthy scene back then with big gigs and we were quite influenced by that to start off with.”

The dnb scene is New Zealand is still going strong, but because of Shapeshifter’s heavy touring schedule Trevethick admits he’s no longer really considered part of the scene. “I’m not in New Zealand as much and although I DJ drum and bass, I wouldn’t really say we’re part of the scene,” he says.

“But it is a really healthy scene,” he continues. “It’s been diluted by other scenes, but that’s a good thing, and you hear about all these different artists being signed to international record labels and it’s a really good thing because 5 or 10 years ago it just wasn’t happening. The first New Zealand signing was Concord Dawn or Bulletproof (a few years ago) and was massive. There’s now a lot more people doing the music and getting signed which is really good because it pushes people to progress their sound. The whole music scene in New Zealand is pretty friendly towards each other. There’s collaborations left right and centre and it’s all one big family. It’s not hard to get involved with other people.”

Like the Hilltop Hoods, Shapeshifter recently collaborated with the Auckland Philharmonic orchestra. “It all really started at the beginning of 2005 when a radio station in New Zealand asked us to play at a festival they have in the park, and someone suggested we do a few with the Auckland Philharmonic orchestra. Arranger Victoria Kelly was imported in to do the arrangement of our tracks,” he explains. “We had one hours practice before the gig and we played and it was just an amazing experience. It was raining and everything was going to shit,” he laughs “but there were 3000 people, us and an orchestra and it was amazing.”

They wanted to repeat that with better production, and not outside where it’s raining and toured with more shows featuring not only the Auckland Philharmonic but also the Wellington Vector Symphonia and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra “We lead the orchestra by using our music as the basis, but we didn’t want it to be the band on stage, we wanted it to be 30 musicians on stage making one sound.”

“It was very tricky because we’re a live band and we’re very loud,” Trevethick explains of some of the difficulties. “We all tend to get loud on stage and vibe off of that. The very first show we did in Auckland town hall we tried to turn the band down a bit but the crowd was so incredibly loud you couldn’t hear any of it. But we learned from that.”

Like the Hard Road Restrung, their orchestral album will be made into an album and made available before the end of the year. Their latest album ‘Soulstice’ has won them critical acclaim in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and Trevethick is looking forward to playing it in Adelaide. “We’ll be playing lots of stuff off the new album which we didn’t even play on the big day out tour, plus a few new versions of interpretations we’ve made. I doubt that we’ll be playing any songs that we played last time. I think we’ve always been guilty of throwing away more songs than we actually make,” he laughs.

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Sneaky Sound System

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Sneaky Sound System, the Bondi trio of MC Double D (Daimon Downey), Miss Connie (Connie Mitchell) and Black Angus (Angus McDonald) are riding a wave of success at the moment. Just a few short years after forming, the band has had Top 40 chart success, toured with Jamiroquai, Robbie Williams and Scissor Sisters, been nominated for two Aria’s (Best Dance Release and Breakthrough Artist), and come second in an international song writing competition judged by the likes of Robert Smith of The Cure, Peter Hook of New Order, Tom Waits, and Frank Black of the Pixies just to name a few.

Staring out after McDonald lost his job at a publishing house and a fortuitous meeting with Downey at a Cowboys & Indian costume party at Fox Studios, the duo began a very successful club night in Bondi called Sneaky Sundays which runs to this day. With all their success, McDonald does lament not being at the club as much as he would like. “In the last six months we’ve probably only there half the time,” he says. “We have Ajax (voted Australia’s no 1 DJ in 2007 inthemix DJ poll) as a resident there and another guy Johnny Powell and we have a few regular guests we have when we’re not there, but it is becoming harder to run the night”.

This is because they’ve been touring with the Scissor Sisters, and more recently on their own sell out tour to promote their new single. I was surprised to hear their tours aren’t as debauched as you would think. “On a long tour you don’t party too much because there’s too much work to do. Touring is very well organised. You’re on sensible hours and there’s always food and accommodation – everything’s sorted. It’s a very civilised way of doing it and it sure beats trucking around the country doing 3 DJ gigs a night,” McDonald laughs.

Part of Sneaky Sound System’s rise to fame seems to be their sense of fun and a “do it yourself” attitude. They formed their own label after figuring out the majors weren’t too supportive and they could do more on their own. “When we approached the labels the deals they were offering were so shit we worked out our sums and though “shit, we should just do this ourselves – we can afford it!”.

Likewise with their clever film clip to Pictures, which is a string of digital photographs edited together to make a story. Conceived after looking at the digital shots of a photo shoot and noticing the stop animation feel of it, the band had a few meetings with production companies, “but every time we finished the meeting we walked out thinking it was so basic we could do it ourselves,” McDonald says. “So we got a friend of ours to take the photographs and another to do the editing and that’s all we needed.”

Yet the band has a greater depth to it than most dance bands, as evidenced by being nominated for two Arias mere months after releasing their tunes. This greatly surprised the band. “We were just not in that commercial landscape at the time (of the Arias) and our songs had only come out a month before the cut off. It didn’t even cross our minds, but to be nominated twice was a real surprise. Obviously next year we’re going to be so disappointed if we don’t get nominated,” he chuckles.

Similarly with the song Pictures winning second place in the Dance/Electronica category of the recent International Songwriting Competition. “We didn’t take it too seriously because it’s not really what we’re in it for. Someone had sent our management an email asking them to send some songs, and Pictures made it to the final and another song made it to the semi final as well. It was a bit of a surprise we came second.”

So what makes Sneaky Sound System the band of the moment? They don’t have the support of a major label pushing for radio play, and their do it yourself attitude doesn’t quite gel with what we know of the Arias, and dance music isn’t really in vogue outside of the dance music scene. “The most important part is the song writing process,” McDonald says. “If the song doesn’t stack up it doesn’t matter what production techniques you apply it won’t work. We really make sure the song will work on like an acoustic guitar or piano and then we decide what production values we should apply to it.”

“I think,” he adds “DJing around clubs and at festivals both here and abroad we started to get the feel of how to work crowds. We had been working on the record for two or three years and were really working at refining it to a stage that we were happy with it. The addition of Connie gave it that finishing touch and it’s that perfect balance of the classic pop song and electronic dance music.”

Sneaky Sound System play the Dom Polsky Centre on Fri 19 May.