t i j u a n a c a r t e l — w o o d en s h j i p s
After eight years of non-stop touring both at home and abroad, including six months in India and time playing the UK club scene, Gold Coast five-piece Tijuana Cartel have embarked on a national tour as far reaching as their musical influences. Dubbing themselves somewhat simply as an indie-electronic act, lead guitarist, vocalist and co-producer Paul George, puts the bands unique sound down to a passion for experimenting with the musically exotic. “We’ve got a real passion for electronic music at our core and we enjoy trying to mix it up with different sounds on top of that,” George explains. “We have a real thing for exotic scales and particularly Middle-eastern sounds, so that comes through a fair bit in a lot of our songs.” Initially drawing influence from Mexican rhythms, with a heavy focus on flamenco guitar, trumpet and Afro-Cuban percussion, Tijuana Cartel’s sound has evolved to reflect the likes of the Chemical Brothers, LCD Sound System and TV on the Radio, as well as what George calls a really long list of world music artists. Keeping with the bands eclecticism, Tijuana Cartel are currently on tour promoting their latest album M1 and are visiting more of Australia than ever before. “We’ve toured almost non-stop for the last few years but we do the weekends and then come home and have a normal life,” says George. “This tour is different in that we’re playing one venue and driving to the next place and setting up to do the same thing over and over for 64 days.” The M1 album release tour will see the band play large venues in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne as well as a slew of regional
Years of travelling to shows in a beaten-up panel van and touring through third world countries is finally paying off for Gold Coast locals, Tijuana Cartel. Before the band kicked off their biggest national tour to date, vocalist PAUL GEORGE spoke to AMELIA PARROTT about the tour, the new album and the band’s exotic influences.
Touring has become such an integral part of the band’s identity, it served as inspiration for the title of their latest album. “M1 is the highway that runs from Queensland to New South Wales,” explains George. “We’ve got this old dodgy white van [and] we’re close to 160,000 kilometres of touring in it. We’ve seen the M1 sign at least a few thousand times so we thought it would be a perfect name for the album.” M1 has been quietly successful for the five-piece. After almost giving up on getting radio airplay, the band was surprised by the popularity of psychedelic first single ‘White Dove’. And their latest release ‘Keep Off the Chemicals” is gaining momentum on the airwaves. For now, the release of M1 and the coinciding national tour are the primary focus for Tijuana Cartel, but the Goldie locals have plenty of projects on the cards for the new year. “Up until the end of the year we’ll do the tour and then get straight into the summer festivals. We’re doing Peats Ridge for New Year’s then we’re heading down to Pyramid Rock Festival outside of Melbourne. We’re also organising a documentary we’re hoping to film at the end of the year, somewhere in south-east Asia in a refugee camp. And a five-track concept EP, but that’s another story.”
thought [the tour] would be a good chance to see a bit of Australia and see how we’re going. I mean, there’s some places like Port Hedland — we know it’s a mining town but we’re not sure how hard electronic beats will go down in that kind of place. I’m hoping it’ll be great.”
Tijuana Cartel are performing at the Beach Hotel, Byron Bay, on Saturday November 12; Finnian’s Tavern, Port Macquarie, on Sunday November 13; Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle, on Friday November 18; Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley, December 29 – January 1.
the album we thought that he had a good sense of who we were and where we were coming from. It is that personal relationship that made us feel really comfortable and able to get the best sound possible out of the tunes.” Thematically, West pays homage to the somewhat exotic culture of the American West. “We all grew up in other parts of the country and then migrated to the west,” says Brewer. “I grew up in Vermont. I couldn’t have imagined Christmas without snow,” he laughs. “That there were places in the world where you didn’t have snow on Christmas was one of those things that always fascinated us as individuals. When it came time to make the record we thought we would pay
tribute to that idea.” As for translating the theme into music, Whalen says the process was very natural. “We kind of jumped into it without trying to force anything. But there are elements to the song that make me think of sitting by the campfire under the big sky with a mountain silhouette in the background.” With Wooden Shjips set to head out on the road in support of West, Whalen says that the band are looking forward to paying another visit to Australia. “We are working on finalising our tour plans at the moment,” he says. “Our trip down there last year was just amazing. We definitely want to go back, it was such a pleasure!”
Exotic Natives shows from Port Hedland to Port Macquarie. Playing at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne will be a milestone for the band, who are confident they can sell-out the largest Melbourne venue they have played. George is also looking forward to testing the waters with their regional tour dates. “We
Having just released their new record, West, Wooden Shjips have returned with their most coherent and refined effort to date. Nash Whalen, organist of the San Franciscan psychedelic-drone four-piece, spoke to Liam Demamiel about Christmas, working with your idols and keeping it simple. To truly appreciate Wooden Shjips and their output, one must understand the philosophy of minimalism that its members work by. “The basic idea when Wooden Shjips started was to create repetitive and minimal music and to keep it really simple,” an impassioned Whalen tells me. “Whenever we start playing a song, we know that yes, there could be drum fills in there, but we don’t want them.”
about whether the microphones were working and when to push record and stop. Those things were distracting. Being in a studio and having an engineer to set everything up and to control everything made things so much easier for us,” he says with obvious relief. “It was so much easier for us to concentrate on the music and to give our best performance. It freed us up to not have to think about a lot of things and
The Wild, Wild West With this in mind, it is plain to see that West is the definitive manifesto of a band intent on pushing themselves to the limits of these self-imposed restrictions. Following their formation in San Francisco in 2006, Wooden Shjips’ first recordings of their heady psychedelicdrone fusion were taped and mixed by the band in their practice space. This do-ityourself attitude continued for two albums, before the band decided to enter a ‘proper’ studio for the first time. West is the end result of this new approach. Whalen is reflective when it comes to the recording process. “The thing about recording ourselves was that we didn’t have a lot of equipment and we always had to worry
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magazine issue #064 — November 2011
that really made a difference for us.” In a continuation of the changed approach to recording, the band sent West for mastering with psychedelic journeyman and Spacemen 3 member, Sonic Boom. “It was really good to have Sonic Boom work on it,” says Whalen. “He has a great ear and has made lots of amazing records over the years. I don’t know what he did, but he put a nice little twist on everything and really made it come out well.” Whalen says that working with Sonic Boom, a clear influence on the band, was more a result of happenstance than opportune fandom. “He was playing solo at a festival and he asked us to back him up on some songs, so by the time it came around to ask him to master
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West is out now through Thrill Jockey/Fuse.
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