The Band Next Door

In the tradition of putting up the series of interviews I have had with artists in the past few years on the blog – I thought I’d pass on to you this transcription of a chat I had with Daniel from the Melbourne band Subaudible Hum. Their body of work consists of many stories told through quite loud songs full of jaunt and noise. This was very evident on Tall Stories.

The element of melody is still there throughout their discography, and the band’s releases have many nuances of melodic intertwining here there and everywhere. The below chat was from way back in late 2006, and at the time the band had just released their album In Time For Spring, On Came The Snow
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Philippe – What were your ambitions when you started Subaudible Hum and do you think that they’ve changed over time or do you find that a lot of those ambitions stay the same in the years that Subaudible Hum has been in existence?

Daniel – I think they’ve changed mildly, and not so much sonically, more entire-ly, I guess? More musically, philosophically, if you will. I think it started out – I started out writing songs probably to rock out a bit more, I was quite image conscious to a degree. A small degree of course. It just developed into, especially with this new album, into a much more exploration-al kind of thing. We’re really interested now in epic songs and just writing songs that don’t speak to a four piece band, you know? Songs aren’t so much more stage orientated anymore.

Do you find that expansion has challenged you further to write more compact pieces for, I suppose, future releases, or do you find you keep on striving yourself and challenging yourself with that kind of concept?

Yeah. It’s (a sort of) ladder I think. I don’t think the songs that have been written don’t present any pressure at all, or any challenge. Fundamentally you just want to write songs you want to hear. As long as I can keep doing that, that’s pretty cool. It’s just your musical tastes keep changing, so your song writing changes along with it.

Tell us about where and when you started writing In Time for Spring, On Came the Snow. How long did the recording take?

The recording we sort of tracked in May (2006) quite quickly. Then I went overseas for about two months. Then just sort of scattered tracking and mixing right up until probably a couple of weeks ago (Sep 2006).

Did the trip overseas influence how you saw the album, with that break in between once you came back to it?

Maybe. It may have sort have disconnected me from the original sentiments in the album somewhat. Because really, overseas I did nothing musically except play in a couple of pubs in Ireland; you know – me time, rather than anything to do with Subaudible Hum. Maybe. I enjoy the odd break here and there because, I don’t know, I like song writing a lot more than actually playing music, I guess. Playing guitar all the time gets kind of boring, so to be away from the same drum beats and the same bass plots and coming back with fresh ears is really good.

Tell me more about what other stuff you do outside of music to keep your mind refreshed. Like you’ve mentioned, to stay away from that boring aspect of making music, I suppose you could say.

Not too much else, really. I do a bit of journalism. When I say journalism, I mean write for street press in Melbourne, and that’s about it. I like trying to start other projects. It never really works, but it’s nice to come up with the concept. That doesn’t really take up much of my time though, it’s really just a thought in a pub. But yeah, that’s all I do.

The thing with our band, I think, is that these kind of things make us not want to do a lot more than we know what we do want to do. A lot of the songs have originated because we let go of a couple of things that we didn’t want to do. To be more specific I guess just allowing a song to have verse, chorus, verse, chorus, that kind of thing. I really just sat down for a month and just wrote an album and just really didn’t say no to any ideas. They worked really well, it came out sounding nothing like what they originally sounded like, just ten times better.

In that concentrated space of time I can imagine it’s a fairly intense workout. Can you give us an idea of how you develop those ideas in that kind of environment?

I think it was mainly sticking to drums and bass, I think. The core of the kind of music I wanted to make, you know, you want to play what you want to hear, and I really like that kind of music. So I’d start there and go “alright, what do I want to put on it? What do I know how to play? Ah, guitar, alright”. So you know, develop stuff.

I’ve read somewhere that your aim in making music is creating little worlds and ideas and messages in your music. Was there any particular message that you wanted to come across in your new album? Tell us more about these worlds that I read about.

I think I meant more like kind of, you create a song and it’s kind of like creating a really short movie. It kind of extends beyond the bounds of time and a strict vision in the way that a film would show you one point of view you could really take a song for whatever you personally see in it. I think with this album a couple of things, we did more straight forward, well there was an actual attempt to create a story and a world with certain songs. One in particular is called ‘Journey all Around the World’ and it’s starts in one place and turns into something else and turns into something else, it’s just the story of kind of being on a ship like this mad sailor, just waking up and everyone having jumped ship and you’re left on this giant thing that has its’ own mission around the world. Then there’s a storm and sharks and things. So yeah, that’s one example I guess. We used music as always to put across messages of really horrible things going on in the world.

At the same time making music is a good way to actually take a stand and use it as a soapbox. Keeping in mind what you just told me, do you challenge any particular ideologies and concepts people live by today through your music? Do you intend to do that?

Yeah, you try and say stuff like that you’re immediately a political band, you know? I don’t even know what that is. Otherwise it just seems really half hearted. And we’re not a political band, it’s just society and the world everyone takes it for what they see and it’s not really that way at all, we’re being, we’ve got blinkers on. We’re constantly lied to, constantly. You just want to get all that stuff out, it’s just outrage.

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