I am thrilled to announce Faux Faux Amis have signed with record label Early Music (formerly Holy Eucharist Line).
I met with Sam and Oscar from the label a few months ago and we bonded over ideas about performance, prolificacy, and to paraphrase The Streets, “pushing things forward”. Early Music’s output is eclectic, including Canberra’s best vocal artist Aphir, big-in-Japan glitch-hoppers Gunwaif, jazz-flecked abstract beatmaker Stenxh, and acoustic folksters Northumberland – we are their first punk band, and both sides are excited about the possibilities.
Our first release will be for their winter/fall schedule – an EP of all-new material entitled X. The elevator pitch is this: ten songs, all a minute long.
Photo by Tiffany Gleeson (Catherine, Mel and Nick Peddle not pictured)
Writing short songs is not unusual for me – the Shine Tarts pieces were all brief, and my songs rarely include dead weight like, say, middle eights or third verses. I’ve always had a fondness for albums that include fragments and pieces – Money Mark, Cody ChestnuTT, and Badly Drawn Boy spring to mind.
But I didn’t want fragments on X – I agree with Chuck Klosterman when he wrote that he can look at an album’s track-listing, find the shortest song, and be confident that will be his favourite. I treated each song on X as if it was that one awesome short song on a regular album. It’s a microcosm of our standard set – there’s the occasional odd time signature, some French lyrics, hummable solos, a couple of in-jokes, and lots of backing vocals. All of these songs could be “full-length”* – it feels decadent to blow them in ten minutes.
Early Music are big on multimedia outputs and cross-pollination between their artists – I’m keen to get involved with that aspect of being on a label, and looking forward to sharing the results. We start recording this weekend!
We are also planning a staggered release of videos for each of the ten songs – excitedly I’ve begun to enlist writers, animators and artists to come on board – basically either people I love working with, or people I wanted to work with – the list so far includes Tom Woodward, Nick Delatovic, Emma Gibson and Joel Barcham.
* Well, except one song, but more on that another time…
Lick Nuke 