The line-up included John Butler Trio, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, 65daysofstatic, The Black Seeds, Tijuana Cartel, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Hiatus Kayote, Tuka, DJ Morgz, Brian Campeau, Crooked Fiddle Band, Rusty Spring Syncopators, and Salta (there’s a fair bit of well-deserved buzz around these guys at the moment and I seriously suggest you check them out on February 3 at the Vanguard in Newtown for their EP launch supported by Persian Love Cake and Eirwen Skye).
As well as providing a pretty excellent line-up, Peats Ridge also offers many arts and sustainability workshops. The festival has won multiple sustainability awards, and this is mainly due to the entire festival being powered on renewable energy, compostable everything, and volunteers. Everything might not run as smoothly as something like Harvest, but Peats Ridge is willing to give you a go. Whether it be a free ticket for helping out, a spot on the line-up after hearing only a few demos or just a fun, safe, community atmosphere for New Year’s Eve.
Sadly, the Peats Ridge team has indicated that the festival (probably) won’t be back after running at a significant loss this year.
As much as I would love to give full reviews of all the acts I managed to catch over the three days, I just don’t have the space, and I’m sure you don’t have the time or the will to wade through ramblings that resemble the title sequence to SE7EN. In lieu of this I’ve got some interviews with Trakswet (The Herd), DJ Morgz (Thundamentals and Jones Jnr), Hiatus Kaiyote and Ruban Nielson (Unknown Mortal Orchestra), just some of the bands that I thought were real standouts. So, in short, everyone mentioned above was great in one way or another, with particular mention to Rusty Spring Syncopators and Salta; both of whom you can catch gigging around Sydney.
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The Herd
Those of you who, for whatever inexplicable reason, keep coming back to my little section of the paper for the live reviews, may be well aware of my fondness for a seasoned Sydney-based hip-hop act called The Herd. I’ve reviewed them a few times before and they never put on a bad show. Playing all their much-loved hits, the band really utilised their nine members, always maintaining a high energy. Trakswet (keys and accordion) took some time out before their show to have a little chat.
What attracts you guys to a festival like Peats Ridge?
Well, Peats Ridge is one we haven’t played before and we’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Peats Ridge. We’ve wanted to play it for many years, we’ve done stuff like Falls, Pyramid Rock, and we saw the footage of Hermitude’s gig last year and they went off. So we were like, “Damn it! We’ve got to go to Peats”.
After coming off the recent Dr Seuss shows Elefant Traks put on at the Opera House recently and now playing Peat’s Ridge as well as juggling various side projects, community work and family life, what’s the reality of touring like for The Herd these days?
Yeah, it’s a fun balance. That’s one thing that changed with The Herd though, and that’s that the gigs are a lot more condensed. Back like five years ago we’d be gigging all throughout the year pretty much, all over the country, all the time; and we used to do that year after year. But now these days we try and condense it to six-week slabs and just go out really hard. We’ll have our big shows, like the Dr Seuss one at the Opera House and we’ll try and work everything around those. I mean for that I was working with Joelistics from TZU and the first time we tried our song in the same room was the day we played it. Before that? All Skype and email, all the rehearsals were just sending tracks back and forth and bouncing ideas, and luckily it all came together on the night.
Finally, what do you think about the hip-hop that’s been coming out of the Blue Mountains at the moment, such as Thundamentals, Hermitude, Tuka, Urthboy out of The Herd, etc?
Yeah, I don’t know what goes on in the Blue Mountains but there’s some seriously great stuff coming out of there. We’ve been including it in the gig circuit since the early days. We played the Pumpkin Factory on Katoomba Street as one of our very first gigs with Elefant Traks back in 1998, so we’ve always felt a bit of a connection.
DJ Morgz
In keeping with the Australian hip-hop theme I made sure to catch up with DJ Morgz after his set. As well as being the producer for Blue Mountains hip-hop outfit Thundamentals, who you may know from their breakout cover of Matt Corby’s “Brother” which they played on Triple J’s Like a Version earlier this year, Morgz is also one half of the soul/hip-hop act Jones Jnr; the other half of which collaborated with Thundamentals on their previously mentioned cover.
Did you guys ever expect that your cover of Matt Corby’s “Brother” would be as well received as it was?
Not really, Like a Version’s a big thing and we were all super excited to do it but you don’t get a lot of time from when they tell you to do it till when you have to perform. So we had a bit of trouble thinking up what we were going to cover. We wanted to do something current and already kind of popular so people would check it out if they were into the original and potentially hate us but potentially like us, but yeah, it just got received really well. We couldn’t really believe it. It was something we didn’t spend a lot of time on, and threw it together in two and a half weeks. We got Ev Jones, who I work with in Jones Jnr and it all came together really nicely in the end. People liked it but you never know if they’re going to.
You’re the fulltime producer and DJ for Thundamentals so you did all the beats for your latest album Foreverlution. Was that a heavy workload to take on during the recording process?
Yeah, I made most of the beats aside from a couple where I did a collaboration with Dysphemic, another guy from the Mountains who’s making a name for himself in the US Dubstep scene at the moment. So I kind of oversaw the whole thing. It was a lot of work for me. On the previous album I had some help from Tommy Fiasko as we collaborated for about half of Sleeping On Your Style, so I had someone taking on some of the work on that. But with this latest one I had to do most of it on my own. It was a big job.
What’s one of your favourite tracks off the new album to play at shows?
“Thundacats” probably was, but now I like “Holla”, the intro track. We usually start the set with it and it’s a good, kind of dark way to start the set, especially with the drums and the big bass notes.
What’s your favourite track by other artists that you like to spin at your DJ sets?
Probably Ja Rule, because everyone hates him but as soon as you play it everyone loves it. No one will admit to liking it until you play it and everyone’s dancing. It was my first track yesterday and I thought it would be a bit hilarious but everyone started getting into it. It’s a bit of a laugh; I always have a smile when I’m playing that one.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Unknown Mortal Orchestra has been gaining a very solid fan base since the 2011 release of its self-titled debut. Funk/hip-hop based rhythms drive beneath front man Ruban Nielson’s high-range vocals and powerful psychedelic guitar lines. With their second album, II, due for release on February 5,and at the beginning of a massive run of shows all around the world, I’m glad Ruban found the time to sit down and have a talk about everything from the new album to seeing Jza at one of his shows.
I’ve had a peek at your touring schedule on the net and I’ve noticed you guys are playing a show a day for the next couple of weeks. Is that a pretty daunting thing to be undertaking?
Yeah, we end up doing that quite a lot, actually. We did 29 days without a day off last year, which kind of destroyed me, so we don’t do that anymore, but we’ll definitely do a week or two without a break. But I’m getting better at learning how to keep my voice going.
Also, while checking out your website, I noticed that you have an advance download of your new album available for those who pre-order. Was that your idea?
It was kind of everyone’s, really. We all thought it would be cool to give the hardcore fans a bit of an exclusive package with a bunch of goodies in there, and one of the things you got was the advance download, to make up for the wait. I mean, it’s a bit hard to sit on the album for almost a year after you finish it knowing there are some people who really want to hear it. It’s really for those few people that are really amped I guess.
Back in 2010, you released your first track, “FFunny FFriends”, anonymously on Bandcamp, and it wasn’t until after Pitchfork and various bloggers got a taste for it that you claimed it as your own. Why so shy?
It wasn’t so much shyness, it’s really that I had made the recording without telling anyone I was doing it. I was in a band at the time called the Mintchicks and we hadn’t said the band had broken up yet, but I had already left and I didn’t really want to deal with any issues regarding that, and I didn’t really think I was going to release it. When I eventually put it up I didn’t really bother with anything because of all that, as well as working a lot at the time. So I came back to it a little while later to check if anyone had heard it or anything, and there was this huge traffic spike. So I checked out all the links to see where the traffic was coming from, and it was all these blogs and eventually Pitchfork, then I set up an email for the band to see what would happen and it got a bit flooded. There were heaps of labels writing in, bloggers, people asking when we’re going to play and stuff, it was really weird. Eventually, I threw together a band because we got offered a tour with the Smithwesterns and we’d only done a few rehearsals. Then at our first show, there were all these people there to see us from like A&R and other labels. Then right after we played, this booking agent rang us up, he’s the same guy that does Goyte and Foster the People and stuff like that, and he said, “I’m going to start booking you guys.” Then we were on the road for like two years. It was pretty insane.
You’ve always got quite a funk/hip-hop feel to your rhythm section. Do you care to elaborate on any of your influences?
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of Rza, Gza and all the Wu-Tang stuff, and also Sly and the Family Stone. I quite like soul and hip-hop and stuff as well as classic rock. I mean, I’ve started referring to my music as Psy-Rn’B because I feel that’s the way it’s really going. I also have a lot of respect for other Psychedelic musicians like Tame Impala and Connan Mockasin, and I kind of want to carve out my own little space in the genre and not just be in the shadow of those bands that do what they do so well. So I’ve been really digging deeper into the soul and Rn’B side of things.
Growing up, what was the one album that you just seemed to play and play?
Well, it depends what year it was, but the albums that come into my head straight away would be El Communication by the Beastie Boys, I don’t know, for some reason I just loved that album; this one called Hot Wrecks by Frank Zappa, Zappa’s first solo record; and Liquid Swords by Gza, that was a big one as well, I listened to that album a lot. I didn’t even know what it was about but I really liked the sound. Yeah, he came to one of our shows in LA and sat right in front of me; it was really weird, I met him afterwards and he was really into it. I was like, “What the hell!?”
Did that catch you a bit off guard?
Sort of. There was this guy in LA that we work with who knew him and I ended up talking about Liquid Swords a lot and he surprised me by inviting him to the show. Gza was like, “I’m here to see it, show me what you got”, and then just sat down in front of me. I think it was probably one of the best shows we’ve played, actually. I think the pressure probably helped.
Hiatus Kaiyote
Hiatus Kaiyote are an independent soul band out of Melbourne, who have been generating a fair bit of good will around the globe with their often chaotic, yet somehow smooth and relaxed sound. The driving, usually syncopated rhythms of Perrin Moss (drums) and Paul Bender (bass, laptop and guitar) really blend amazingly with Simon Marvin’s jazzy and disjointed keyboard to foreground and interpret front-woman Nai Palm’s vocal melodies and song-writing style. I found the band sheltering themselves from the heat in a tiny tent and screwing around with an industrial fan.
I know some of you guys from a couple of other bands. How long have the four of you been working together?
Simon: Pretty close to 18 months, maybe a little bit longer. These three were working together before I jumped into the band.
Nai: Yeah, we weren’t together that long before we hooked up with you.
Simon: It’s funny because Perrin and I were living in a house in Northcott and Bender was kind of living there too but he had a Kombi van and he was sleeping out the front. So they’d be rehersing while I was in the house and I could hear them having other people trying out for the band as well, and just trying to find a sound. So while I was working with a lot of other projects I’d be coming and going and thinking, “Yeah, cool, these guys are all right”. Then I was talking to Bender and he was saying he just couldn’t find a keys player for some gig and I said, “I’ll do it!” Then we had a jam and it just clicked.
Nai: It was perfect!
Simon: Yeah, our single, “Nakamarra”, that song sounds exactly the same now as it did the first time we played it.
After the success of your debut album, Tawk Tomohawk, can we expect you guys to be heading back into the studio anytime soon?
Simon: Yeah, we’ve been building a studio at the moment.
Nai: We’re blistered from painting.
Simon: Oh, come on! Look at my hands! This is from building not painting!
Bender: Yeah, we recorded the last record mostly in our last house in Northcott. During the last record we did some tracks with some other people but we quickly realised that we had to do as much of it ourselves as we possibly could in order to achieve the kind of sounds we wanted. It’s just really hard to try and communicate with someone else what you’re trying to get. Also having that kind of time to experiment and get particular kinds of sounds. When the clock’s ticking and you’re paying for it, it’s really hard to mess around and try and find something particular. In the end you’ve just got to record the song.
As a band your live show has a certain edge-of-chaos feel to it. Is that an energy you’re trying to capture on album?
Perrin: I guess, but it’s also a bit of a different thing between the live show and the record.
Simon: Yeah, with the next record it’s certainly something we’re focusing on but that’s definitely the kind of vibe we’re going for as a band; having a studio sound and a live sound. Especially having your own space to record means you can get the kind of sounds you want to get. It also shows that in this day and age it’s very easy to create a home studio. You can just do it.
Perrin: Yeah, and every room has its own sound. Some rooms might sound really bad but you can often work it to have its own feel and characteristics. Otherwise you just get a whole bunch of records with the same aesthetic.
