Sydney's favourite electro-hip-hop-sex-god Spod has returned from a lengthy hiatus with a brand-new 7inch 'concept EP' entitled Aminals (sic.). Conrad Richters caught up with Spod, aka Brent, over a few beers to talk animals, vinyl and just being awesome.

You've just released Aminals, a 7inch single with three animal-themed songs. Two of which are about cats. How did it come together?

It all started when I wrote 'Cats'. I was playing with a Super Nintendo thing, making a little melody out of it. It has little animal heads, like little cat and dog heads on a midi-timeline sort of thing in Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo. So I made this melody out of it, and it was really easy and really fun and I was like 'Fuck! That's really fucking good!' and I just thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I also really like it coz I'd never written a sort of, I don't know what you call it, a sort of dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba…

A swing beat?

Yeah, coz everything I do is a sort of boom-chick-boom-boom-chick sort of thing. So I wanted to do a song that was all swing. It sounds like a fat cat walking.

I never thought of that. I kind of thought of it as the ultra-happy brother or sister song to 'Devastator' off your first album. Like a song that doesn't really have lyrics.

Oh man, I was thinking, 'Yeah, I've never done a song with only one word before, I'm totally forging new ground'. But you're right, I totally already did it on my first album… Anyway, after I did 'Cats!', I wanted to do a thematic EP, coz I haven't done anything in a while and I wanted to come back with something that was all about one thing.

So it's a concept EP?

Pretty much, yeah. Coz I love concept albums and the first album kind of feels like a concept album even though it isn't...

I guess it's about being excellent, the concept of being the best.
 
I reckon that's fair enough.

It's a good concept.

I guess if Dark Side of the Moon is a concept album, I mean... what's that about?

Yeah. Well basically, yeah, it's on level with Dark Side of the Moon. Whatever, it's no biggie…

But yeah, the original idea was to do an animals EP coz I like cats and dogs heaps.

So you like dogs as well?

Yeah man, I'm all about animals of any kind. That's why I'm kind of disappointed I didn't get to represent the spectrum a bit more, coz I had song called 'Dogs'.

Oh really?

Yeah, but I never ended up finishing it. It was kind of the same thing as 'Cats!' but more of a hip-hop idea.

You could've covered 'Who Let The Dogs Out'.

Yeah, that could have been sweet. But then I would have to kill myself...

But yeah, so I was going to do 'Dogs' but then I also have this thing where everything I do has to have a song done with my friend Mike. So I remembered that he did this song 'Ladybug' which I was going to put on the new album, and Mike is like this big vinyl freak, so I thought bugger doing an EP, we'll just do vinyl. Then I thought I have to cover the first naughty song I ever heard which is 'We Want Some Pussy' (by 2Live Crew) which is a lot of fun to do. I just wanted to do the same sort of thing as the original but with a bit more melody to it.

Yeah, that song went off at the launch.

Thanks. It was heaps of fun. Yeah, and then I wanted a cover image with animals exploding out of a mountain face, so a friend of mine Ben did it. And it looks perfect.

Yeah it's really cool.

Yeah, and that also kind of tied in with the fact that we wanted to do vinyl, coz it's a little bit bigger and it looks awesome.

Awesome.

Awesatude!

Interview by Conrad Richters

Aminals 7inch is out now on Rice Is Nice.
An LP will be out later this year and may be called Superfriends.
www.spod.com.au
www.myspace.com/spod

TOUR
30 May Pony Bar (2am), Melbourne
31 May Old Bar, Melbourne - LAUNCH w/ Blacklevel Embassy as band!
07 June Rosies, Brisbane

Thom Yorke wears their T-shirt, Stereogum selects them for a Bjork tribute album, Deerhunter picks them as their favourite new band, and they score a deal with Sub Pop Records. But it’s only when they start getting mail like this that No Age know they’re really onto something:

YOU ARE SATAN’S LIL PUPPETS. KEEP DOING STUPID, FAKE LIL KID PUNK MUSIC. JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE FANS DOESN’T MAKE YOU BETTER THAN ANYONE. NO WONDER YOU OPENED FOR PUSSY-ASS LIARS… HOPE HELL FEEL’S GREAT WHEN SATAN’S BUTT FUCKING YOU… EVERYONE WHO PERFORMS @ THE SMELL IS A FAKE, TRENDY, VEIN ‘LOOK @ ME’ SCENESTER.  (sic. On all of it.)

The San Fransiscan art-punk duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall promptly re-posted the love letter on their MySpace page under the title “the sweetest little shits ever”. I ask Randy if that’s a response they’re used to getting and he laughs, “That one really just came out of the blue.”

In March last year No Age released five different EPs through five different labels on the same day; a marketing feat in anyone’s books. An onslaught of gigs and a slew of breathless reviews were followed by their debut LP Weirdo Rippers – a compilation of their favourite pre-released tracks. But while they’re clearly generating all the right kind of attention, Buzz Band somehow doesn’t quite cut it for No Age. Because listening to their forthcoming sophomore Nouns, you start getting a bit excited that for the first time in a while, we might be on the verge of something Different. The album thickly throbs and twitches between skuzzy, fuzzy garage, experimental punk and surprisingly, psychedelic pop – and if you don’t like it that’s fine, because like all harbingers of a changing sound, the importance lies less in the result and more in the idea. Delivered with a DIY consciousness and recorded onto a boom box, it’s a new sound of born-again punk that represents a new wave of San Franciscan music, fostered largely by a little-known community space called The Smell.

“The Smell community is very important to us. Dean and I have both volunteered there for years, and it’s where we got to experiment with new sounds and new songs, and just generally be supported by our friends and other musicians - bands like Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda and the Mae Shi.” That’s Randy again on the phone to me after band-practice, dropping the names of bands that I’ve never heard of but which he maintains are integral to the identity of the San Fran underground music scene. The Smell opened in 1997 as the city’s only all-ages alternative music spot and art gallery. Being non-commercial and community-run, in its short history it’s been forced to move, close down and renovate – much to the chagrin of the bands, political groups and local volunteers who continue to arrange benefits, gigs and fundraisers to help (for desperate want of better phrasing) keep The Smell alive.

It’s a communal, walk-in venue where people go to meet, create, collaborate and experiment - but Randy assures me that it’s not just a bunch of art students taking themselves too seriously. It’s also a lot of fun. “You’ve got all your friends together just having a good time, and if something comes out at the end of it, whether it’s a song or a work of art or anything, it’s just a remembrances of your time spent with other people. It’s not a bad idea.”

To most of us in Sydney, the idea of an all-ages, alcohol free, vegan community centre would be a bad idea, and wouldn’t automatically scream Cool. It wouldn’t really scream Fun either. Actually, it wouldn’t scream anything – it’d just sit there quietly gathering dust while everyone else sauntered off to gallery openings on Oxford Street. But to a bunch of San Franciscans, the Smell is one of the most important things that’s happened to their music scene in decades. “In an open community space where there’s no real pressure to sell out the show, or to sell loads of beers, people seem more open to hearing different kinds of music; and maybe they haven’t ever heard of the band, but they’ll go to a place like the Smell just to experience whatever’s going on.”

Thinking outside the 300-capacity-$7-per-beer box is a concept close to the heart of the band, who played a gig at the LA Central Public Library at the end of last month. “It was kind of a sombre event, but I still feel like it was successful because we were able to infiltrate a new sort of environment, and bring our energy to that. It’s kind of a win-win for us, we also like just finding new spaces and bringing our friends down there – like at the L.A River Bed.” Yep, they played a river bed too. “It’s an environment that most people don’t really know exists if they don’t live near it, so the opportunity to play there was fun for us; to see if we could pull it off, and just to watch other people discover the space.”

The huge impact that spaces can have on the creation, performance, experience and recording of music is fascinating. Take Bon Iver’s acclaimed debut as an example, written and recorded by the singer-songwriter who sequestered himself for four months in a snowed-in cabin. Or French vlog La Blogotheque, who drop bands in the middle of a river or a peak-hour train to record a song in one spectacular shot. And don’t think I’m neglecting the DIY spaces and collective communities within our own city, where local experiments with sound and space are as crucial to the development of our music scene as they are invisible to those of us less involved. 
 
Still, Randall admits that mixing it up with spaces doesn’t always result in the desired spontaneity and interaction, with the band and audience creating a unique experience together. There’s the occasional too-serious crowd which, lets face it, we’re all familiar with in Sydney - he refers to it as the “arms-folded, chin-stroking sort of crowd”. “Sometimes we’ll just say, ‘Hey, you guys are boring. We came all this way.’ But it’s their choice to act how they want to act. We have just the same choice as performers, we can provoke them or taunt them, and make them feel uncomfortable as well, so we just play it by ear every night.” 

Pitchfork awards them a 9.2, the bloggers blog, and the Buzz-machine is fed – it’s no surprise that more and more people are going to No Age gigs to stand in grave, cognitive silence taking mental notes. It must be a bit of a shock for a tiny DIY band to suddenly receive so much attention after only two years – does he worry that the apparent ‘scene-ness’ of No Age might take away from the actual experience of the music? “I hope not. I feel that we’re sort of genuine people, fairly open and honest about things that affect us, and hopefully we express that through the music. We definitely try to go out of our way in interviews – and just in general, as people – to spend time explaining what we feel, and how we feel it. Hopefully we’re able to continue to do that and if it’s to more people then the more the better.” 

And what does he look for when he pays the cover charge himself? “I get really excited about bands or performers or artists or anybody who are just genuine and honest, and from the heart. Not in away that’s affected, or them trying to look out for certain genre conditions. But when it just sounds the way it sounds because that’s how it has to feel. When there’s something about what they’re doing that’s just so specific to them that it couldn’t not be that way. I enjoy things like that.”

These philosophies are part of what make the band – and the movement itself - so interesting. With punk rock’s history embedded in and inseparable from the politics of resistance, I ask if they ever feel pressure to advocate particular political messages? “I think it’s just something that’s been raised inside of us through us just being huge fans of punk music… It’s sort of inherent. The way Dean and I both live our lives, and how we lead ourselves about our daily business, is that the personal is political.” Both are vegans for starters, a decision that at least for Randy came down to a protest against the general machinery raising animals to be slaughtered and then consumed in a fortifying, celebratory way with no respect for life or it’s connection to the Earth.

So its life-as-politics and life-as-art for the duo, who express themselves not only through their menus and music, but through performance art and video pieces that they exhibit at The Smell and around the States. “It’s just a matter of taking responsibility for our voices. I really want to champion that message - that anyone with half an idea and some kind of energy and enthusiasm behind them can go out there and make their own art, and find a community that will support them… I was lucky enough to find a place like the Smell, but even if I didn’t find that, I’m sure I’d be continuing along on my wayward way.”

“You know, I look at my mum and she takes watercolour classes and reads interesting books – she does things in her own way that are really empowering and satisfying. And I think everybody has that potential inside them, it’s just a matter of unlocking it and finding something that is satisfying, finding whatever they’re looking for.”

“SATAN’S LIL PUPPETS?” Really?

Words by Steph Harmon
No Age's Nouns is out now through Stomp Records

Ratatat may need no introduction, but the following Q&A we had with them certainly does.  Suffice to say, we spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to think of the best, most interesting, most nonchalantly witty questions we could think of to ask the Brooklyn-based creators of one of our favourite 2006 releases. And suffice to say, they spent no time at all being smartasses back. Usually, we’d be a little bit disappointed. But it’s Ratatat. We all crowded around the computer screens when the answers came back. We laughed at them, we laughed at ourselves, and we put on Classics again - and for seven minutes the whole office was doing that weird body-throb sway thing that you have to do when you put on Classics again. Enjoy.

Hi, how are you? Where are you answering this from?
From my kitchen

How has the electronic landscape changed since Classics? Do you think the sound on your next album will be much different?
The electronic landscape… I like that idea. For some reason it makes me think of the landscape in that Michael Jackson video ‘can you feel it’. Maybe desert style with mountains made of solid gold.

No, I don’t think the new album will sound different from that.

Our graphic designer went to your Sydney show in 2006 and got so high that he thought the tigers on his T-shirt were making all the sound effects from Wildcat, so he started pressing them to make them louder. Is this a pretty standard crowd reaction?
Yeah that's pretty typical. There’s always the graphic designer guy in the back of the club pressing tigers. I stopped noticing after a while.

Do you keep your band so small because you can’t trust it in anyone else’s hands? Any plans for expanding?
We may expand it a bit for some upcoming tours. We’re still in the planning stages right now. I like touring in small groups though. Its just nice and manageable that way.

Do you think there's a unique sound coming out of Australia at the moment? Feel free to namedrop some Aussie bands so we can all feel good about ourselves for a second..
I heard a few Midnight Juggernaut tracks recently. They sounded good. They had some nice chord changes. Is Coldplay from Australia? I love them.

You've had two remix albums and a bunch of side projects (the Bjork one is amazing), you clearly enjoy remixing. Is it hard to find the time to write new stuff?
Thanks. It’s always a struggle to balance everything we want to do. For the most part touring has taken over the past few years. I love to write new stuff and record more than anything else though. I hope the balance begins to shift in that direction more in the future.

If you could pick any emcee to work with, who would it be, where would you play, and what would you make them wear?
Can I choose a group? Geto boys.  We’d play in at Versailles and I’d make them wet powdered wigs.

You guys seem to bridge the gap between all kinds of scenes. What’s the weirdest crowd you’ve pulled?
We played in the cafeteria of a nursing home in New Jersey right when we were starting out. It was an all acoustic set. There were maybe 12 or 15 seniors there. I think most of them couldn’t even really hear what we were doing but they seemed to be happy we were there. We got polite applause after each song. There was an upright piano in there. Mike played the first few bars of ‘fur elise’. That seemed to be the crowd favourite.

Got any obscure bands from Brooklyn to tell us about so we can pretend we found them ourselves?
The Satin Ropes
Fire Water Walker
the Barbara Walters
H.A.M. 
[We're pretty sure that none of these are actual bands. –ed]

And speaking of, what’s with the Brooklyn music scene? How can we make it happen here? I want it to happen here. Do we just need to fly that Todd P guy down?
Yeah, Todd P basically built the Brooklyn music scene by hand. He started all the bands, wrote most of the songs, booked the shows, made the videos, drank the beers, walked the dog, watered the lawn, drove the van, fired the bassist. he’s the man in charge, but he’s also all the little people. Fly him down, give him a week or 2, you’ll get your Brooklyn music scene. Did you know he built Portland’s music scene before he built ours?

On Wikipedia it says “the animal sample in the song ‘Wildcat’ was taken from a real wildcat in the woods in upstate NY”. We don’t believe that. Please respond.
Have you ever even been to upstate New York? Wildcats are everywhere. To be honest it’s hard to get any recording done up there without getting a bunch of wildcat sounds bleeding onto the tracks.

You’re coming to Sydney this month. What do you have in store for us?
I want to go check out the Imax on Darling Harbour. Last time we were in Sydney we watched a movie there about crazy deep sea animals. A 50 story screen, 3-d glasses… it looked more real than real.  That's what is in store… perhaps some music afterwards?

I read one interview where you said you came up with the name ‘Ratatat’ after a tame and kosher brainstorm. Another said you came up with it after an acid trip. Wanna give us a third story?
Actually Todd P built that name for us.

Ratatat are playing at Essential Festival... today. Hurry.

Buzz to get in and meet the first guy, who introduces you to the second, who escorts you to a lift and introduces you to the third, who takes you down stairs to meet a fourth and suddenly I'm seated on the lower side of the largest desk in the world with Mitchell Scott beaming at me from behind a computer screen. Like I'm at an extremely important job interview and here's my potential boss. "Hi Boss." Boss laughs casually, unglamorously, and I instantly like him. He just got in from Melbourne, and happens to be one third of Cut Copy. We're here on the brink of their second album release, the one we've been waiting for that was rumoured to be released at the beginning of 2007, so naturally my first question is

What happened?
Yeah, it's been a bit frustrating.. Our record came out a year and a half later in the UK, so we were that far behind when we started touring. Then we were just dealing with the labels, organising the producer…

Was there any pressure with it? It's been said that a first album is meant to impress the listeners and a sophomore is meant to cement the artist…
I'm sure there is [that pressure] in a way, and I guess having to wait so long for the record to come out plays up some of that. But in terms of getting the record written and recording then we found it was actually relatively easy.

Dan sings a lot more on this.
Yeah that's right, there's a lot more vocals and a lot less repetition. We wanted to do something more song-based. But yeah, I guess we just made the record without over thinking it too much in terms of who it's for … You have that time when you're just waiting for the record to come out when those thoughts start to come into your mind like 'oh... how is this going to be received?' But I don't think we psyched ourselves up too much.

You got to work with Tim Goldsworthy (DFA). What was that like?
He was great to work with; he's a really cool guy. A very charming, very British guy, you know? Very softly spoken and polite. His role was not so much as a producer who'd rip apart songs and want to change around the lyrics or the tunes or anything like that. It was more a gentle guiding through how things were recorded, suggesting bits and pieces... Kind of like a mentor. And he'd always have stuff arriving from Ebay [laughs]

Well I'll be honest, that's... unexpected
Yeah, it was - it's such a contrast between him and James Murphy (DFA, LCD Sound System). Whereas Tim's a small, English, softly spoken guy, James is a big brash American. They're a total contrast but they obviously do amazing stuff together. Two of the coolest guys you might ever want to meet.

You're releasing In Ghost Colours off the back of a pretty amazing tour - Franz Ferdinand, Daft Punk, Junior Senior, Bloc Party, Daft Punk… Got any tour goss? Daft Punk?
Touring with Franz was pretty amazing, you know- the size of the shows was just incredible. It was all through the states, and so many people would come down to actually see the supports too. And they were just the nicest guys.

Scott starts to tell a story about a guy from Pretty Girls Make Graves blowing up his hand with a firework, and I'm biting my tongue trying not to rudely interrupt to ask for specific Daft Punk stories. But hey, I only have 15 minutes here, so I stop biting and rudely interrupt to ask for specific Daft Punk stories.

Do they ever take their helmets off? Or just for sleeps?
That's the thing, even in the clubs they keep their mirrored sunglasses. That air of mystique never really drops… Dan has actually met those guys before over in Paris and had done an interview with Guy-man recently for some reason. I dunno how or why but Vice wanted someone in a band to interview Daft Punk. But yeah, we met them and they're really cool, and...

and...
Well, they were pretty reserved as far as we could tell… They generally kept their cool French visage up… but there was this break dancing display…

AND???
Yeah okay, so one of the last nights after the Sydney show we were on this boat taking us from the venue to the afterparty, and all the Frenchies got out on the very front of the boat like that Titanic scene, and had a break-dancing battle… [laughs] All of a sudden all their cool went out the window and that was it…

I think I missed that Titanic scene. Did you join in?
No, I got outta there pretty quickly.

And do you think your relationship with Australia has changed with all this touring?
I guess the obvious answer is you have a more informed opinion of what's good about it. It just strengthened our view that we wouldn't live anywhere else, really.

So you guys have a label - Cutters - and you've signed Midnight Juggernauts, KIM from Presets, Nightlife and there's talk of Damn Arms… Why'd you choose to start it?
We were touring a lot in the UK, and getting a bit of a profile I guess. We started noticing that some of the bands that we really liked from home didn't have much of a profile overseas - or at least not as much as we'd maybe like them too. We had these amazing friends at home doing really cool stuff, and yeah, that's basically what it started as - putting out 12 inches for our friends.

The Presets have said that people had been positioning them, the Juggernauts and Cut Copy at the forefront of an internationally recognised Australian music culture; a particularly Australian 'sound'; a revolution, if you will. Will you?
Uhh, I wouldn't feel too bad about it. We're really surprised how popular this scene has become in Australia. It certainly wasn't like that when we started out - there wasn't a scene for it at all really! So I guess it's really nice seeing people who are just friends of yours [making] things. And when it takes on a bit of a life of its own, and a scene develops around something that you're doing, it's a really positive thing.

Interview by Bianca Khalil
Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours - - Out 22 MARCH

You know an interview maybe isn’t gonna go as well as you’d hoped when your first question is, “Sorry, is someone shooting at you?” Naeem Juwan AKA MC Spank Rock was speaking to me on his mobile from the US, and with a thick accent, static line and constant interruptions by a swarm of “Wassup!”s and friendly handclasps, most of the interview involved me pretending that I understood what he was saying and that I wasn’t, in fact, the whitest man in the world. And yes, there was gunfire. “Sorry, is someone shooting at you?” “I’m at the gun range. Shooting rifles.”

Of course. It didn’t surprise me. A certain amount of frivolity and maverick-ness would be expected from the man behind the party-starting dance-inducing juggernaut that is Spank Rock. Their new EP, Bangers & Cash, pays homage to 2 Live Crew – an older group who, not unlike Spank, used a bunch of revolutionary beats underneath some mum-would-slap-you-if-she-heard-this-shit lyrics. But with the tracklist that reads like a pre-pubescent's pencil case (“Shake That”, “B-O-O-T-A-Y”, “Loose”, “Pussy”, “Bitch!”), the first question I wanted to ask is whether he ever gets tired of rapping about, well, pussy. But you can’t ask Spank Rock that and expect him to like you.

…But really, doesn't he ever get tired of rapping about pussy?
[Painstakingly long pause] Yeah. I get tired of it… but this EP is actually the first time ever that I had to continuously write songs about one subject. I actually remember getting to the 3rd song and really just being worn out. Like “this shit is not interesting.”… I like having fun with my music and going to the club and dancing with girls, and I think talking about sex is funny and fun - but it’s really important to me to be meaningful. I want to make music that will last the test of time.

A task that only becomes achievable when, like Spank, you have the foresight to see where the scene might be headed –most of the production on Bangers And Cash sounds like it’s from the future. I asked him what it’s been like to work with both xxxchange and, more recently on Bangers, the 19-year old producer-extraordinaire Benny Blanco.
Benny was with Disco D when I was hooking up songs with D about a year ago. I used to see him when I’d walk around Williamsburg, and I’d be like, “Yo, wassup Benny?” and he’d be like. [Naeem puts on his best white-person voice] “Yo. What is up, Spank?”, and just keep boppin’ along 'n shit. He’s a very good person… He had this idea he wanted to do,  sort of Spank Rock Vs 2 Live Crew... More sexy cocaine jams, y'know?

Sexy cocaine jams? What? I pretend I know, and he continues.

Teaming up with Alex [xxxchange] was important too, because his ideas for hip hop were really about pushing it with beats. He couldn’t give those beats to anyone else, I don’t think. Like [laughs] - no one else is fucking having them if I can’t. Then with the new EP I’m trying to learn how to make good club bangers and anthems - y’know?

I pretend I know again, and in spite of the losses incurred through translation, it's refreshing to hear an MC speak honestly about ambition and competition in a hip hop environment otherwise enveloped in ego. Later on, when we talked of his desire to change how people thought about music, culture and life, Naeem spoke with even more of that surprising humility. “I have these thoughts in my head, but sometimes I don’t know whether I have the all the skills to get them out.”

I ask, are you happy being the unofficial dance instructor of young sweaty white people?
[Naeem laughs] Teaching indie rock kids how to dance is a task I’m not up for. Letting them feel good about dancing is really what I want to do. They don’t really drop it likes it hot… yet. They’re still 2-stepping… Still 2-stepping.

I ask, did you ever expect to have that sort of crowd as your main fanbase?
[This is probably where he really started hating me.] Um. No I don’t think that’s true… A lot of people, including myself, are just listening to a lot of different music. It’s not the 90’s anymore. I can admit that I like rap music and admit that I like hip hop. It’s not that segregated, I think it’s awesome - it really reminds me of the early 80s and the beginning of hip hop, y’know when there was post punk and all these cool things happening in downtown NY, and all these cultures were getting mashed together and were closer with one another. Some of the best music is made around those times – I feel like the cycle's just going around again.

I ask, so whatever happened to the Air Cock Thrust? I’d been pulling them out all over the place over here until I realised you guys stopped doing them live?
Yeah Ronnie Darko pulled a testicle doing the ACT so if he created it, he had to retire it. If I pulled my testicle doing the ACT, I'd stop doing it too.

You can actually pull a testicle muscle?
Totally you can pull a testicle muscle, dude! You’ve gotta work those things out… You’ve really gotta get some action, man.

Yeah. Fair enough.

Interview by Lachlan Macara
Spank Rock's Bangers And Cash - - Out Now