Decoder Ring - Interview

Sydney band Deccoder Ring are perhaps best known outside of snooty inner city circles as being responsible for the award winning soundtrack to the Australian movie Somersault (2004). Well before then - and long after - the band have been engaging listeners on a level beyond merely "Thanks for coming tonight! CDs are by the door on the way out." The band consider a projectionist their official fifth member of the band, and it's this dedication to creating a multi-sensory experience that has seem them bloom beyond 'post-rock' circles and into that of clubs, dance tents, raves, rock shows, and happenings...as well as curios like the music for that weird Toohey's Extra Dry ad where the cowboy dude grows himself, and being asked to support Coldplay around the nation.

The band have just released their fourth album They Blind the Stars, And The Wild Team, recorded in the US with famed producer Scott Colbourn and about to be played in your town. Over the course of an email interview, we get founding member Matt Fitzgerald riled up about the limitless permutations of instrumental music, the band's jaunt to the US to record their new album, and their dalliances in the world of beer advertising and Coldplay.

First up, why in this day and age of iPod shuffling and "digital singles" do you make stirring instrumental music? And how has your process evolved since you began?

I think the question is more why do you make an album which is intended to be listened as a whole, rather than a collection of random assorted songs? There’s always been singles bands and artists and there has always been album bands. I don’t think  that Beyonce’s ‘Halo’ would have been knocked off the charts by Decoder Ring even before the iPod! At the same time technology does affect music and culture. As Eno pointed out, it was the rise of radio which created the single, with the need to compartmentalize into small bites. The digital age just gives the listener more control than the radio, which is a good thing because I don’t know if radio has been the most positive force in promoting diversity or innovation in music, but that’s a debate for another time.

I love albums – things that you get lost in, that make you forget where you are, for me my memories are more about my favourite albums than songs, and I still think a lot of people feel that way.  Given the type of music we make I feel we can push the album thing further than a lot of bands can, and for us it was important that this time we pushed it as far as we could, that we made an album that was an album in the true sense of the word. For me when an album is good it’s like an amazing movie, but without the external dictates, it ebbs and flows, and has a narrative, but it’s internal to you, it’s your own. It is what we wanted to explore with They Blind the Stars, and the Wild Team.

As a follow on from the above: "Popular" instrumental music has shifted from the guitar workouts of the '90s/early '00s, to being much more electronic based in 2009. While there are electronic influences in your work, has there been a compulsion at all to drop an 808 (drum machine) into the mix and edge into more "dance" territory? Or do you see yourself straddling both worlds?

Definitely straddling both worlds. Ultimately we don’t see and don’t like the distinction between rock and electronica (or any genre distinction for that matter).  I think if anything it’s breaking down more than when we first started, but it’s still seen as some demarcation.

I don’t know if it’s reactionary or revolutionary but we always like to move in the opposite direction of what is popular – popular tends to be one step off staid or passé, whereas we always strive to create something that we are not hearing, to create a counterpoint, or a musical alternative. I know a lot of bands strive to be popular, which I suppose makes a lot of sense, but I’ve always found that if this is your intention when you write it tends to come hand in hand with some form of creative compromise.  What we are more interested in is trying to agitate music forward, to do our bit to kill what is popular now and hopefully inspire others to create new sounds and approaches to what is music.
 
To some extent that’s why our most electronic record was Fractions (2005) – at the time it was the counterpoint to the re-emergence of the guitar band, but ultimately it was just another angle of us exploring the mixing of organic and electronic components. Blind the Stars... to some extent is a reaction to being a slave to the sequence, it creates a simulation of emotion rather than a spontaneous moment and we wanted to create an album that was driven by performance, that the feelings in the playing came through.
 
That being said I still feel just as comfortable being called an electronic band as a rock band (and prefer both to post rock or instrumental). For me heaps of the bands I’m hearing employing both organic and electronic styles are taking the worst of both words – the formulaic verse/chorus structure of rock with the cold precision of electronic sequencing. Our approach is the opposite – the epic, trance enducing structures of electonica with the raw emotional energy of live instrumentation.

That being said, I think an 808 has been present on pretty much every album we’ve ever done…

Does the spectre of modern instrumental bands like Mogwai, Godspeed et al dog the process at all? Is there only so many epic minor to major chord mood shifts one can employ?

Does the spectre of Daft Punk dog the process for every electro/electronica/house/dupstep etc., band? I doubt it, although it shits me how many people are blatantly ripping them off (but minus their punk approach which made Homework such a seminal album).

The pigeon holing is something put on us by others, we don’t consider ourselves as sitting in any camp. Put it this way would you think the spectre of Fleetwood Mac dogs our process? Or Burial? Or J Dilla? Or MBV? Or Mastadon or the VU or Miles Davis?  Well the answer to all is maybe yes and no – I’m amazed when any band makes an amazing record or song, it inspires me, but not to try to recreate what they did but to create something distinct, original and unique – because that is ultimately makes all these bands (including Mogwai and Godspeed) great.

I also don’t see a distinction between modern instrumental bands and non-vocal music of the past – between classical, jazz, ambient – and that’s just western culture - plus music throughout the world there are so many sounds and styles. When you look at it from that perspective it the people singing the 3:30 pop songs you should be asking about the limitations of their music.
 
Is "the band" the songwriter? Or is it more of an amorphous puzzle that you all work at in smaller pieces? Perhaps individually?
 
Very much the band, although we all bring our own thing to it, but we solve the puzzle together. For us it has to be spontaneous rather than premeditated. It’s something we don’t really control – it just happens in a way that is very automatic. We start playing and we all improvise around each other, eventually a point comes when all the pieces come together – we could have been playing for 3 minutes or 30 minutes – and suddenly you’re lost in the sounds and the mood. At this point you’re listening to the music rather than your part, the song takes control and it’s like every note is pre-determined. For us that’s the moment that marks a new Decoder Ring song.
 
Does that equate to standing in a room bashing it out? Or is it more of an "in the box" kind've thing?

It can be both, although part of taking so much time with the album was to be locked in and have and unspoken understanding, so this became our natural state when we played. That’s how the second album came about. We wanted to capture those raw spontaneous moments, and (producer) Scott (Colbourn) was great at always have the tape rolling. So everything on the second album is completely spontaneous – it didn’t exist before those recordings, we just picked up our instruments and that’s what came out, no overdubs, nothing, just a pure moment. We were in such a dissociative state that we had no idea what we had created until it was played back to us.
 

Decoder Ring - 'Twilight'

What was the impetus for They Blind the Stars, And the Wild Team? The end point that would differ from previous efforts...

We wanted an album that was as broad and encompassing as possible both in terms of sonics and emotion. Our film composing experiences taught us how music can form a narrative, and we wanted to take that beyond the constraints of film, where there are spatial and geographical specifics, characters and words. In film all those things reinforce that as the viewer you are the observer. We wanted to create a non verbal experience – as Kubrick put it “one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content”.

We wanted to make something that when you listened to the album it would interact with your own life and experiences. In essence the last part of the creative process is determined by the listener, and they define the narrative and in that way it becomes theirs, so each album is different and personalized. As part of this we wanted the album to work differently at different volumes – if you play it quietly it’s quite gentle and symphonic, but if you play it loud it really sonic and energized.
 
Finally, we wanted to make an album that reflected how we sound live and to have that energy and intensity. So part of the process was playing and playing so when we recorded it was virtually a live recording, but with the fidelity and atmospherics of a studio album. That meant we wanted to be able to just focus on our playing and leave the producing for someone else this time.  For us Scott was the only producer who we felt could get that balance right.

How did Scott Colburn work with your world? It seems to me as if you'd all be fairly headstrong with what your aiming to achieve as well as adept in the studio given your experience. What did you hope Colburn would have or do that you couldn't?
 
Headstrong is about the most polite way I’ve heard our demeanors described, but I think over time we’ve learnt to be very protective of what we do and trust our instincts. That was the bind we were in – we’ve fiercely independent and have strived to become almost completely autonomous, including by producing our last two records, having our own label, and so on, so the idea of working with someone we didn’t know was intimidating, simply because if it didn’t work we would have blown our money and then we would have been screwed.
 
Luckily Scott was very much a kindred spirit, and has ethos about music and the music industry that is very much like our own. We hit it off immediately when we were talking over the phone before heading off to Seattle, and it was clear that his ideas of how he wanted to record really melded with what we were wanting to achieve. Most importantly it was a very live set up – he has a Church - and we recorded in there, all in the same room with minimum separation so it was as live as can be. There was minimal intervention also with Scott being very much about capturing who we are, rather than turning us into some cookie cutter produced guff. Scott calls himself an Audio Wizard which is strangely apt; he does weave a magic over the recording process but in a way which is hard to describe.  On top of that he was also the nicest guy you could hope to meet, really funny, a great conversationalist – all in all the type of person you want to be with on both a creative and person level when you are in the confines of a long recording session.
 
Did the relationship with Lenka (Kripac, singer on the Somersault soundtrack and Fractions) affirm or discourage using a vocalist in future?

I think the fact that we were committed to having no vocals on this album probably answers that question. Whilst a powerful device, the voice can be quite a limiting instrument, particularly depending on the singer’s ability to traverse moods and styles. With this album the scope was just always to big for vocals - at best they would have been lost in the music, at worst they would have watered down the sentiment.

That being said I would never rule out future collaborations with vocalists, but I would not like to be constrained by having a vocalist as a band member again.

Is Simon K (projectionist) still a "member of the band"? I remember seeing you years ago in tiny, tiny rooms that would have this great scaffolding contraption at the back with projectors and whatnot. Could the band work without it?

Simon and his trusty legion of 16mm projectors are still most certainly part of the band, as is his scaffold. We like to have this luddite component – I mean you could sequence our tracks and the visuals and play the whole thing off a laptop. The thing is it would be a completely different experience. Without all the heavy artillery the spirit gets lost a bit, so we like to play live and for the visuals to be off the multiple projectors. I mean I still am always completely caught up and lost in the show when I am playing – I think its the way we combine music and visual live that sets us apart from other bands and what makes it a Decoder Ring show.

I have no shame in saying that 'Yama Yama' (from the Toohey's Extra Dry ad) is one of my favourite pieces of music that you - or anyone really -have done. As in, I researched how to rip it from their website and then did so in order to be able to listen to it at my whim. I've told (guitarist) Pete Kelly this in person and I'm pretty sure he didn't believe me.

That was really fun. We are very cautious about what we associate with, but we don’t have a problem with alcohol (although we may have an alcohol problem) so when we saw the ad we had to do it. I mean when else do you get to promote cloning? Cloning has become so taboo, which really takes the fun out of what cloning could be all about. The TED ads were just weird and broken and throwing something like that up on TV entertained us. Then the song we were asked to remix was crazy too, and then we just fuck it up further with weird sounds and then smashed it with some distorted guitars. We were laughing the whole time we did the remix, and then somehow it made it through the suits and on to the TV which was cool.



We keep getting requests to release it – TED wanted us to as well but we said no. When we disappeared to write Blind the Stars we really wanted to disappear – I hate how bands constantly drip feed promo crap now between albums. The last thing we wanted to do was just go ‘Hey here we are, we just did an ad. Here’s our song’. It just seemed a bit tragic to be releasing a song from a Beer Ad. Now that the albums out we can look at it again, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

What did you learn from the Coldplay experience? Is playing arenas all it's cracked up to be? (Decoder Ring were asked by Coldplay to support them on their Australian national tour earlier in 2009.)

Pretty much – it’s hard to knock playing on the best PA’s in the world with the best crew etc. At the same time, there’s a generic quality to arenas that would have to get to you after awhile, as it is kinda faceless. The idea of being on tour - like Coldplay are - non stop for over twelve months, jumping from venue to venue, country to country...I would find fairly soul destroying (although extremely financially rewarding). Having seen what they go through, once the interviews and the like is thrown in, is pretty 24/7 and relentless – there’s really no time for any sense of self. Somehow they still were really grounded and still acted just like a band – it works for them. It was something that was nice to experience, but I was happy to just be a visitor. We’re all happy with who we are and what Decoder Ring is and the tour with Coldplay really just brought that home to us.

They Blind The Stars and The Wild Team is out now on Inertia Recordings

DECODER RING - ALBUM LAUNCH TOUR 2009

Sydney - Fri 28 August @ The Metro Theatre (w/ Bridezilla)
Melbourne - Sat 5 September @ Hi-Fi Bar & Ballroom (w/ Bridezilla)
Katoomba - Sat 12 September @ Baroque Bar
Sydney - Sat 5 December @ Homebake

www.myspace.com/decoderringsounds