Preparations for L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis continue apace. As I wrote last time, the band is an amalgam of Faux Faux Amis and some special guests. I’m happy to announce those new inductees into FFA are Josh Buckler (Moochers Inc., Beth’n’Ben)…
Alice Cottee (No Hausfrau, Glitoris)…
and Nathan Gubler (The Blade Winner, The Sinbirds). Not only is Nathan performing with us, he’s also written a 1/4 of the songcycle.
Photos by Bron King, Jem Nativdad, and Adam Thomas respectively.
What a classy bunch of people!
The book (and songs) are now finished – Mel, Kev and I had our first rehearsal of the tracks last weekend. This Wednesday is our first table reading with everyone. Exciting times!
If people come up to me after a show, they usually say something like ‘Good job!’ or ‘That was great!’. At Babyfreeze’s last gig at Smiths, three people independently came up and said ‘YOU GUYS BLEW MY MIND’. It was testament to the spectacular run of gigs we’ve had lately, which continued at The Phoenix last night. Driving home afterwards, I got the idea to attempt a potted (and digressive) history of the band.
I Drew A Picture Of You
2008. Nick had written a clutch of electro-pop songs, and was casting about for a collaborator to record them. Meantime, I was fronting Cool Weapon, already making electronic music (and, umm, wearing red suspenders. We looked like droog firemen).
One week, I wrote a handful of songs that veered towards the Suicide/Peaches/Fad Gadget end of the electronica spectrum. While I presented demos of them to Cool Weapon, I already had visions of performing them solo (one – Interview Song – was recorded by Cool Weapon but never released). Recognising I didn’t have enough material for a full set, I shared them with Nick and we combined them with his electro-pop numbers to make the first Babyfreeze setlist (Nick came up with the name, taken from the breakdancing move).
I arrange all the songs on my drum machine, the BOSS Dr. Groove DR-202. Determined to become Queanbeyan’s answer to Beck (it was circa 2000), the DR-202 was my next purchase after a guitar and four track recorder. Which is to say, I’ve had it forever – it’s probably the instrument I am most comfortable with. While I use it extensively on demos and home recordings, I’d never performed with it live before Babyfreeze. Its limitations became our signature (you can have any sound you like… as long it’s drums and bass). Combined with a KAOSS pad, and a smattering of saxophone and guitar, we were ready to gig.
Keep Going No It Hurts
Our first gig was a Thursday at Bar 32, one of the infamous Gangbusters nights. We wore keyboard tie t-shirts, and I unveiled my pink luchador mask (now forever linked to my El Lukio persona). We got a great reaction from the small crowd. In one of the oddest moments of kismet I’ve experienced, following us was also a debut punky electronic duo where one member wore a pink mask. It was PARTYBUS, who became our new favourite act.
Playing the drum machine is freeing as a performer – mostly, I only have to mute/unmute various sounds and cue up the next loop. I spend the rest of my time dancing or adlibbing back-up vocals – I imagine it’s similar to how Bez feels.
Nick and I have rarely mixed music and politics, but the plainspoken pro-equal marriage banger Single Sex Couples is a glorious anomaly. The song is one of my favourites, and played a big role in defining the band’s persona. It’s been in our set since the start, and it’s shameful that it is still relevant today.
A few gigs in, we asked Paul Heslin to produce our first album (my first time working with the boy genius). Stretched out on the floor of Nick’s living room, we recorded all the tracks in a day. Paul took away the recordings and added heavy reverb and electronic wizardry (he was going through a Martin Hannett phase). I’ve always been pleased with these tracks – they’ve got a unified and enviably dank sound. We tentatively planned a release (I wanted to sell pink and black balloons with the tracklist and a download code written on them), but didn’t arrange it before I moved to Cairns a couple of months later.
One of the last songs I showed Nick before I left was Worked Up – Nick and I had been riffing one day when he described Babyfreeze as ‘po-mo homo electro’. I took it as a challenge to compose something for this microgenre, and came up with a busy drum’n’bass track detailing a fictitious gay crush and rendezvous. Performing it is probably the closest I’ll get to being David Bowie.
It was three years before I moved back to Canberra. Babyfreeze was on hiatus, but Nick and I still collaborated on and off. I wrote four or five afrobeat-inspired instrumentals while in Cairns’ tropical climes – Nick added lyrics and vocal melodies. They were never meant for Babyfreeze per se, but one – Salt Is No Liar – has become a mainstay and high point of our live set (especially when Julia Johnson is available to sing co-lead).
Baby I’m A Golden Guarantee
Phase two of Babyfreeze kicked off when Nick Peddle, Canberra’s favourite drummer, joined. Dubbed ‘Face Face’ by Nick, Peddle breathed new life into the songs and made them rock ten times harder. Here’s proof – the first song of our first gig back.
Just two weeks later(!), we landed on the cover of BMA, to promote the You Are Here festival.
For the photo shoot, we were told to dress like ‘hipsters’ – I hadn’t realised the term was so specific, and ended up the odd one out (I’m pretty much dressed as Corey Worthington). Regardless, it was surreal.
At the same time, I started to get itchy about making films (I have no idea where this urge came from, but I’m glad that it did). My need to start making films was so dire, I unearthed Lou’s discarded iTouch (I didn’t own a smartphone until late last year), and started using Babyfreeze as a testbed.
Once I purchased a ‘real’ camera, the first thing I did was make a video for Babyfreeze.
More clips followed after Nick suggested Babyfreeze make a Christmas ‘video EP’. I loved the subversiveness of it (it’s not exactly Metallica doing a Christmas album, but it’s still an unexpected diversion). We covered a favourite Christmas song each (Ramones’ Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight) for me, Prince’s Lonely Christmas for Nick), and recorded Nick’s brilliant Christmas Number One. I’ve blogged about the videos before – the only update is that while the others notched a couple hundred views, Lonely Christmas racked 9,000… before Warner Bros. had it taken down. A shame, and I’m sure if Prince himself actually heard it, we’d be in Paisley Park jamming right now.
When I See You Boy I Just Want To
People always comment on the chemistry Nick and I have onstage. It stems from being friends and playing together for so long, but part of it also comes from Babyfreeze being our perennial side-project. This isn’t the band where we fret over arrangements or trying to get everyone to rehearsal; this is the band where we get up and just have fun. The kind of band where if the sax breaks, we just stop performing with sax, where if the guitar’s out of tune, we play it louder (our gear is rapidly breaking down – I’m dreading the day the DR-202 gives up the ghost).
We’re also both hams, but in Babyfreeze it manifests in different ways. I stay hunched over my drum machine, dancing and singing to myself, lost in reverie. Nick stares down the audience, performing acrobatics, jumping and lunging across the stage. Meanwhile, I’ve also developed this habit of singing along to all of Nick’s parts – not into a microphone or anything, just for my own benefit. I’m not sure what an audience makes of it, but for me it’s like being in the band and performing karaoke at the same time.
We’re now recording a new EP, again with Paul, and roping in someesteemedmusicians to slather the lean arrangements in gold. This next chapter is shaping up to be the best.
I’ve begun work on a theatre/music hybrid. The project came from a conversation I had with Mel and Lou after an FFA performance. Mel proposed I write some cop show-themed songs – from there, it freewheeled until Lou epiphanically suggested the band host a murder mystery party. I’ve never played Cluedo or been to a murder mystery night (still haven’t!), but I could instantly picture a gig structured around the format. Lou spruiked it the next day to the YAH gang while we were at This Is Not Art, and I followed up later with a written pitch. It got accepted into YAH 2015 a fortnight ago, and I’m now madly pulling it together.
I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but here’s a sentence from the pitch:
L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis is like an episode of Scooby Doo written by Jean-Luc Godard – a pulpy whodunnit, splattered with existential digressions on death and the power of pop songs.
I finished the first draft last week (‘draft zero’ as I’ve dubbed it because it doesn’t include the songs). Zero was needed ASAP for me to see if the shape and structure is going to work, but also so I could present something tangible to the band. Speaking of, the band won’t strictly be Faux Faux Amis – it will be a composite of our usual line-up with ring-ins and special guests. I love playing with new musicians, so I’m buzzed by the prospect.
There’s a lot of heady ideas packed into the show – existentialism, world mythology, ritual and the role of art. Some is overt, but most is bubbling under the surface – I wrote pages and pages of material, of which much is condensed into a handful of declamations (it brought to mind Thom Yorke writing scores of lyrics for one section of Paranoid Android, which he eventually summated into “when I am king you will be first against the wall”). It’s also heavily (HEAVILY) influenced by Nick’s productions of The Last Prom and Bomb Collar, both works where he deftly explored the Big Questions with humour, pathos and catchy tunes.
My favourite phase of any project is the first – some call it research, I think of it as ‘filling your head’. It’s the gathering of ideas, however disparate, and smashing them against each other. Everything I read, listen to, or watch is examined for its inspiration and possible interpolation. This includes movies I’ve sought out for context (Clue, Murder By Death), books I’ve happened to be concurrently reading (The Bulletproof Coffin, Season Of The Witch), and even seemingly random events (a man on the bus removed an exercise book from his backpack and held its scrawled notes up to the window as if consecrating the pages with sunlight – how could I not find room for that in the show?).
I’m about 50% of the way through the songs – I’ve got riffs or chords for each, an idea of what they need to achieve at their particular juncture in the show, and their subject matter. The lyrics are coming together but I never like to rush lyrics if I can help it… hopefully I have an inspired Christmas break!
Among all these whimsical creations, I’ve neglected to make a straight-ahead, sweaty, ‘band playing in a room’ rock clip. Consider this my entry into that illustrious canon.
We filmed in our regular rehearsal room at Redsun Studios (say that five times fast), but I knew we’d need to tart it up a bit. Fans of the band will recognise the portraits as stills from our live projections. I rasterbated and printed all the ‘big heads’ the day before – well, except Kev’s, whose portrait debuted in our last video. Lou and I then had to piece them all together on the day – each consisted of around 15 A4 pages that needed to be arranged and stuck together face-down. Kev’s portrait was before we’d ironed out our technique, and we got the ordering wrong. I kinda like that his is the Picasso of the lot, especially since it was the only one to be recycled.
I’m a sucker for dramatic, colourful lighting, from Wong Kar Wai’s films through to Blackstreet’s No Diggity. We jerry-rigged the lights by taping red cellophane over the room’s fluorescents, then threw a blue gel over the camera mounted LED ring. I love the combination of the two colours, further heightened by the smoke we liberally pumped into the room (courtesy of friend-of-the-band Joel Barcham’s fog machine – thanks Joel!).
A technique I got to try on this shoot was to mime to the song playing at half-speed and then speed back up the footage in post. At half-speed, the song sounds like jokey doom-rock (least it was funny to us on the day). The sped-back-up footage has a manic energy to it, and also allowed Lou (camerawoman and bedrock of this operation) to cover a lot more distance in her tracking shots (essentially, she could circle the band twice as many times). The clip that gave me the idea is Vampire Weekend’s excellent A-Punk (I imagine half-speed Vampire Weekend just sounds like Animal Collective).
The final stylistic affectation is the animation. I’ve gushed before about my love for Ruff Mercy– I’m hoping he’ll interpret my crude imitation of his style as flattery. The clip consists of around 1800 frames – I reckon I drew over at least two-thirds of those. The animation amplifies the already unhinged vibe of the piece.
I’ve been watching a hell of a lot of movies lately, from makings-of (Full Tilt Boogie, Snowballed, and Hearts Of Darkness), to cult classics (El Topo, The Third Man, if…, Red Desert, Rififi, One False Move), and recent(ish) releases (Jodorowsky’s Dune, The Double, Frank, Starred Up, When Animals Dream, Stretch).
But mostly, I’ve been watching “music films” (be they documentaries, performances, films with cool soundtracks, or hybrids of all three). It began a couple of months ago with Gimme Shelter. Since then, using this excellent MOJO list as a guide, I’ve watched:
Anna
A Hard Day’s Night
The T.A.M.I. Show
The Wicker Man
Cracked Actor
The Blues According To Lightnin’ Hopkins
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
In Bed With Madonna
Quadrophenia
Rock’n’Roll High School
Head
I’ve been approaching these with a researcher’s zeal, but research for what? I don’t know yet.
There’s something intriguing about those films where the band play themselves, or versions of themselves. A ‘rock star’ is already an assumed persona – inserting that into some other narrative is like placing a story within a story (where reality and fiction blurs is something I keep coming back to). Those films, like Head and A Hard Day’s Night, have a meta-textual element that’s incredibly appealing (next on my list is this Dave Clark Five one directed by none other than John Boorman!).
This clip is a collaboration between Matthew Borneman and myself. Matt spent time in London working in the fashion industry (for photographer Mario Testino no less), and really wanted to do a clip lampooning the “fashion film”. I wasn’t even aware there was such a genre, but Matt gave me a quick education on Youtube. The arty angles, endless credits, talcum powder and gauze netting were all directly lifted from fashion films (and Matt’s brain). The idea is FFA is merely the soundtrack to a fake auteur’s masterpiece – in going along with the conceit we created a new Youtube account and uploaded it anonymously. I love how it gets into a groove in the first thirty seconds or so, and then is crammed with another three setups in the final half, each more preposterous than the last.
This clip is by Danny Wild of ZONKVISION. I met Danny at You Are Here 2014, where he curated a mini-festival of one minute films. Danny’s style – and interest in brevity – seemed a natural fit. This slacker-fi gem latches on to the songs’s refrain “take me away from here”, presenting a world full of teleportals in innocuous public spaces.
Mel had the idea to shoot a karaoke based clip. Originally, the band was to perform it in a karaoke booth. I thought it might be fun to have a couple of kids (my nieces!) stumble upon the song on SingStar. As you’ll see, it emerges from a mystic Gameboy, which gave me the chance to indulge in some 8-bit design. And Stan makes an appearance, trainspotters!
The Canberra International Film Festival kindly asked me to do a video review of a film in its 2014 season. They also thrillingly referred to me as a “Canberra identity”!
It was a little nerve-wracking being as exposed as this – I normally hide behind a pink mask (and a made-up voice). Still, I enjoyed it immensely – if anyone hears of any openings on At The Movies, let me know…
I said to Lou the other day that I wanted to make a clip like Lily Allen’s Sheezus or Danny Brown’s ODB.
Though it’s completely obvious now, I didn’t realise they were by the same director – Ruffmercy. Since then, I’ve been devouring all his other videos.
Ruffmercy – real name Russ Murphy – is a Bristol-based animator and director. He’s worked for companies like MTV since the 90s, but it was his video for Dahlia Black’s Fuck A Rap Song that made his name as a director. Inspired by a gif he was sent for reference, he started drawing over the frames of the video, inventing an aesthetic that synthesises graffiti, Ralph Steadman, Basquiat, and every schoolkid that’s added a moustache and a black eye to the cover of a magazine. I love how his motto – ruff, rugged and raw – applies equally to hip-hop and punk. Being a relentless doodler and former stencil artist, it’s a style that immediately appeals.
Messing up film has been an ongoing pursuit for me – I’ve written before (a year ago to the day in fact!), about a Central West gig where multiple projectors where running 8mm reels. Some of this footage was blank frames that had been painted on – it looked amazing. Nearly everything is easier to do digitally these days, but replicating that is not one of them – I ended up buying an off-the-shelf set of ink and paint splattered footage to overlay over my videos, but it’s not the same.
However, what Ruffmercy’s work first reminded me of was the unexpected ending to one of my fave movies, Irma Vep.
I was very taken with the effect, how punk and tactile it felt.
It’s surprising how adaptable Ruffmercy’s technique is – here’s another video utilising the same approach but with a different vibe.
The harsh and jagged lines, the scratched out eyes and teeth, have been replaced with ballooning squiggles and dots. This completely changes the effect, from violent paranoia to something bubbly and pop. The song contributes, but there is no doubt how much personality we imbue into the lines and marks themselves.
In the few interviews online with Ruffmercy, I pieced together enough of his workflow to try myself. Armed with a borrowed drawing tablet, I had a crack over the weekend. I tried a mixture of the poppy and grungy stuff over a few seconds of Kev dancing. It’s clumsier than Ruffmercy’s work, but I was encouraged enough by this first attempt.
As any animator will tell you, it’s time-consuming work. There’s over 500 individual frames making up this brief proof of concept. That said, it’s the kind of work that can be pleasantly done with the radio or TV in the background. I still haven’t figured out how Ruffmercy times his stuff so well to the music, and that will be the focus of my next test.
Music videos are a natural fit, but I’ve also been considering its use in other genres – as transitions between scenes in a sitcom, or in a stylised action sequence. It’s given me a taste for the possibilities in animation – I also stumbled upon this video yesterday AND OH GOD I’M ALREADY BUSY ENOUGH…
Nick: So I went to Luke’s place for dinner last night and pretty much as soon as I got in the door he surprised me with this, the final of five videos for my EPINADAY. I’d pitched the basic approach for this one (and written the ‘dialogue’ and ‘where-are-they-nows’) but Luke took it above and beyond. It’s easily my favourite of the five.
This was another song that I used to play with Big Score, and the arrangement owes a lot to Big Score’s Beth Monzo in particular and Nick Peddle. They were the ones who first turned it from an indie chord-chugger to the afrobeat-ish shuffle it is now, so having Nick drum on this take felt like a nice tribute to all those sweaty pub gigs we’d shared.
I don’t know if this is one of my better songs or not but it’s definitely one of my favourites. I wrote it in my early 20s, I used to write a lot of songs from the perspective of an old man back then. Probably a perverse desire to avoid the normal young-person concerns, or maybe just an attempt to ape all the Old Fogeys Of Song that I love so much.
I had a strong hunch that I’d be personally very satisfied by this project, but I’ve been humbled by the positive response I’ve gotten from those that have watched the vids. Thanks again to the Rogues Gallery who helped me achieve this: Sam King, Julia Johnson, Matt Lustri, Nick Peddle, Shane Parsons, Adam Thomas, Leon Twardy, Adelaide Rief and Luke ‘Beyond Rebuke’ McGrath!
Luke: Huzzah, the final EPINADAY video!
To begin with, I cut together a performance of the song as per the previous videos. With that as a base, I layered the collateral footage over the top – with the exception of a couple of brief moments, it completely subsumed the actual performance.
We wanted to impart this last video with a ‘behind the scenes’ vibe. I consciously left in the bits I would normally edit around – camera wobbles, refocussing and the like – as well as the less guarded moments from the musicians. Combined with the warm film look, it feels like a home movie, perfectly suiting the wistful tone of the song.
Overall, the five videos totalled around 20+ hours of editing. As with nearly everything I do, it became a larger task than I anticipated (my skills at gauging time and effort are severely underdeveloped – the silver lining being I jump blindly into a lot of ultimately rewarding endeavours). Having space between each editing session was a bonus – it allowed me to consider each edit independently, to experiment and choose something that suited the individual songs.
Nick: The other three EPinaday songs have all had previous lives in bands that I’ve played them with. This track, whilst it’s been kicking around for a couple years, had never been performed live or even rehearsed by a band before. For that reason it feels like the most honest expression of the arrange-and-record-in-a-day concept.
In writing terms it’s pretty straight-up Nashville country in the Cash and Carter tradition. Boxing matches are a metaphor I seem to keep coming back to, probably because of all the great terminology that exists in the sport (plenty of my trademark apocalyptic imagery sneaks in too). Musically there’s a certain gleeful dumbness to the chunka-chunk chorus that we all leaned into. There’s a 7th chord in there among the usual major chords, which makes it practically jazz by my standards.
Luke: After the multi-cam extravaganza of World Of Hurt, and the demure black and white of Lake George, I was at a loss for how to approach Seeing Stars. Quick edits? Lots of inserts? More of the same?
Nick provided me with the key – he said (and I’m paraphrasing), “It’s a country song, innit? So go punk with it. Blank Generation. Them bleedin’ squares won’t know what hit ’em”. Blank Generation is a touchstone between us – 16mm unsynched black and white reels of bands playing CBGBs in the late 70s. It’s essentially home movies, some of bands that became the biggest in world – Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Ramones, and others that became cult favourites – Television, Wayne County, Tuff Darts, to name a few. Put simply, it’s the coolest footage ever filmed.
I didn’t go Blank Generation on Seeing Stars. But the suggestion freed me to not be so precious with the footage. I wanted to do something similar to this video of PROM, to recast it as a long-lost VHS nasty. With that as a starting point, I put together the ‘interrupted transmission’ intro, to indicate a clean break from the slicker videos that came before (the dubbed Spanish sitcom dialogue was a perverse piece of whimsy).
There is a veneer of TV static over the footage (though not as extreme as Nothing But Flowers), and then from there, things get… weird. The doubled footage, the squiggly black lines, and the day-glo colours were the result of a fun morning of experimentation (which also yielded hideous Rubber Johnnies like this):
To me, it’s come out quite psychedelic, and I like the idea of both Nick and Julia seemingly singing this duet not to each other, but to mirrored versions of themselves.
My favourite moment though is when Sam King’s head disappears – it’s like there’s an invisible lake in the middle of the frame – his topknot bobs above a moment before sinking completely. Beautiful.
Lick Nuke 