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IT’S SLOW AND WEIRD AND IT’S REALLY BEAUTIFUL, AND THERE’S AWALTZ ON IT.”
“The funny thing was that we’d stopped working with James Ford, and I got caught that night by the BBC, and I said to the BBC if there was a producer out there, to give us a bell. Then Ross called two days after and we thought he must ’ve seen this article – and he hadn’t, he’d just out of the blue called us up to see what we were up to.” Aside from working with At The Drive-In on their seminal release Relationship Of Command, Robinson made his name in the 90s alternative metal scene working with the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot. Not exact ly the kind of producer you’d expect the main exponents of new rave to be dealing with. “I just love that At The Drive-In record, particularly,” counters Reynolds, “and meeting him… he wasn’t talking about music, he was diving st raight into our personal lives… he just fit where we were mentally at that point in time. “He was in the rehearsal room with us the whole time – it was this tiny little room – and he’d be playing with us continuously, giving that support and encouragement to play the best you possibly can, and once we got to that point he’d hit record. With the entire album already written before they’d stepped foot into the st udio – “something we learned over the two-year period was never go to the st udio without having written a song” – and after all they’d been through to this point, it was a fairly easy choice of what to release as the come-back single: Echoes. “We had faith in that one from the beginning; it’s been knocking around for a couple of years,” Reynolds says. “I think this record takes a bit of time to soak up. We’re finding more things out about it and loving it. I think because we’d lived with Echoes the longest it felt the most natural [to select as the lead single], and we were most familiar with it at the time. “It was a bridging gap – I very much think it’s a bridge between the two records. The song is an epic burst of youthful psychedelic splendour, and its music video – which finds the band playing amidst an African desert – perfect ly accompanies the song’s otherworldly quality, and seems to span a much longer period of time than the mere day covered in it. “One of things we’re doing at the moment is getting our photo taken in natural phenomena; finding parts of the world that look beautiful and unexplainable. The desert we shot [the Echoes video] in seemed to be the pinnacle of that and a suitable spot for the video. “We were there for the amount of time you see the video run in a sense; we were there from when the sun came up to when the sun goes down. We were genuinely in awe; we’d arrive in the morning when it was dark, and [director Saam Farahmande] put us on those fi rst st ruct ures where you see us singing when it was dark so we had no idea where we were or what to expect, and as the sun came up we were just wowed by where we were. We spent the entire day driving around this vast, never-ending desert scene, and we were just so blown away by the beauty of it.” With Echoes one of the most well rehearsed songs on the album, and a few of its other tracks having made numerous live appearences well before the album’s release, it’s no surprise to learn that the band will be playing the majority of it when they hit Aust ralia. “It’s a funny one because normally you test out the songs to find out whether they work live, and this time we’re [just] playing the full record,” Reynolds says. “Apart from Cypherspeed, which we’re going to save for the minute, we’re playing the entire record.” Cypherspeed, unfortunately, happens to be one of the album’s highlights, perhaps its st rongest song even, an epic opus of shredding and chorale that acts as the album’s coda, and carries it to the heavens. “That song references psychedelic experiences we’ve been having and that song’s basically about acceptance and st illness; it’s basically saying that 22 3DWORLD
in the absolute mayhem of going out and looking for everything you ever wanted in your life you can find it by staying absolutely st ill. That’s the message of the song. But at the same time it’s this bombardment of music. “When we recorded that one with Ross, because we added the chanting sect ion in the end while we were in the st udio – the song was written apart from that sect ion, because we thought that was going to be inst rumental – we put that together, and then took a step back and were like, ‘Th is is weird as hell’, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ – because we weirded ourselves out – but we were on the right path; if it’s weird, it’s right. “It was always the last track – where the hell do you go from that?” WHO: Klaxons WHAT: Surfing The Void (Modular/Universal) WHERE &WHEN: Enmore Theatre (Sydney) Thursday 2 September, Palace Theatre (Melbourne) Friday 3 September, Falls Fest ival (Victoria/Tasmania) Tuesday 28 December to Saturday 1 January, Field Day (Sydney) Saturday 1 January, Sunset Sounds (Brisbane) Wednesday 5 and Thursday 6 January
UNDERCOVER ECHOES
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OULWAX. EROL ALKAN. CRYSTAL CASTLES. VAN SHE. SEBASTIAN. JUSTICE. These are just some of the heavyweights that remixed Klaxons tracks from their debut album Myths Of The Near Future. But don’t expect the same treatment with Surfing The Void. “We’re not doing any remixes this time,” Jamie Reynolds says. “We just don’t want to do it. We just feel so secure in what we’ve got going on, that we feel this time our approach is to make it as honest as possible - and that way’s to keep it how it is. “[The album’s] got its own power and its own magic and I just don’t think, we don’t want to dive into the remix world at the moment. We’re so happy with what happened last time but we want to carry on as ourselves and have st rength and confidence in what we’ve got without having to branch out. “One thing I got really excited about was that there’s this cover version [of Echoes] that’s turned up on the internet, and I find that more exciting than remixes; that somebody’s taken the time to cover it. There’s this band called the Heretics, they were so early on it and covered the song, and we found it so much more complimentary and great than someone doing a remix at this point. “It’d been on the radio for two days and then it came out and we were like, ‘Bloody hell these guys are on it.’” While the music video Heretics have created is laughably bad, their take on Echoes channels New Order in every way possible – which can only be a good thing.