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Written By Duane Wells
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Category: | Entertainment |
It’s late afternoon on a stereotypically sunny day in downtown Los Angeles and Kim Moyes and Julian Hamilton are making the best of Southern California’s amenable year round climate.
In between chatting up reporters and posing for photoshoots on the rooftop of a downtown Los Angeles hotel, favored by A-list Angelenos, the unconventional duo behind the Aussie electropop juggernaut, The Presets, have taken advantage of a lull in the day’s activities to indulge in a quick dip in the nearby pool and nosh on an order of french fries delivered by one of the hotel’s model gorgeous waitresses.
Against this backdrop draped in Hollywood clichés and dotted with the City of Angels' immaculately primped and preening glitterati, the scraggly twosome make as paradoxical a statement as the multi-layered, mishmash of pop, rock, future pagan house and choral space funk that first earned them the attention of the music world.
However, judging from the bemused expressions on their faces as they survey the surreal setting in which they find themselves, it is clear that the up-and-coming electro wizards have grown quite accustomed to standing out from the crowd. Precisely the sort of reaction you might expect from a pair of club music enthusiasts who met while battling Beethoven at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music and later developed their bond by dancing the night away in the city’s seedy nightclubs, grooving to the music of New Order, Bjork and The Smiths.
The gregarious Hamilton and the more subdued Moyes have stopped over on the West Coast for less than 24 hours to promote their sophomore release, Apocalypso. Only the night before, the two musical wunderkinds were whipping fans into a dance-induced frenzy in Manchester, England, and before this day is done, the in-demand combo will be nestled on a plane headed back to their native Australia where they are set to perform at a string of festivals across the Outback.
Such has been the worldwide mad dash of The Presets since the 2005 release of their debut album Beams, which spawned the dance floor anthem “Down, Down, Down” and sparked two years of non-stop touring for everyone from crowds of S&M leather daddies at San Francisco’s notorious Folsom Street Fair to over 100,000 music lovers at Berlin’s Brandenburg Music Festival.
However, despite a hectic touring schedule they describe as “pretty grueling,” the guys readily admit that “there are worse ways to make a living,” a response that sheds a bit of light on the duo’s unorthodox approach to making music.
“We don’t really want to do anything,” Hamilton says matter-of-factly about the organic process that inspires the band’s music.
“The Presets is just the sort of thing that happened when we decided we wanted to do music. It’s just the way it comes out. This thing just kind of shits out of us literally. It’s not a conscious objective. It’s more of a compulsion. It’s all this shit that we like and then whatever feels right,” he continues, laughing at his own metaphor.
Comparisons to bodily functions aside, both band members are nonetheless very conscious to ensure that whatever comes through them creatively pushes the boundaries of the dance music movement in unique ways.
“What we cut out are the elements that are familiar,” Hamilton says. “We wouldn’t go down the track of putting down a really cheesy house vocal because it’s been done before. We’d rather put a stupid, punk, bad-ass vocal over something that was tribal and house to give it a different tint.”
Chiming in, Moyes adds, “We’ve started working on tracks in the past and it all started to sound like something we recognized, so we’ll throw something in that immediately fucks that up. We’ll put in some big trombone blast or a big English soccer woodland style choir chant or the sound of handclaps and hopefully it eventually sounds like us.”
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In keeping with this eclectic creative philosophy, the band took a break from touring and retreated to an isolated farm near Australia’s Byron Bay to clear their heads when the time came to record Apocalypso. Still the boys did bring a few of their experiences from touring into the studio as they planned their latest.
“To be fair, we have done a lot of touring so we worked out fairly quickly what we really enjoyed performing live so that did feed the new album a little bit. We were conscious that we were perhaps going to be touring these songs for the next three years so we decided let’s do something really fun,” Hamilton says.
Beyond that rather thin premise, however, Apocalypso came together as naturally as the band’s rustic surrounding environs where they attempted to milk bulls, race roosters and generally embrace farm life while simultaneously creating their latest collection of twisted, genre-bending electropop.
The intoxicating party anthem “My People,” for instance, they say began with a simple scream and evolved into the dance floor gem that wound up on the album.
Still, though there is no formula behind the collection, among the elements The Presets remain committed to on Apocalypso are the sexual underpinnings that have informed their earlier releases.
“It kind of felt for a while there that sex and fucking and dancing were sort of the only things that people could still do with any kind of freedom,” Hamilton offers, discussing the sexuality of the duo’s music. “Although you can’t dance in clubs in New York anymore, you can still screw. So if we can encourage people to do that, then that’s great.”
That said, Moyes and Hamilton's encouragement of sexual expression does not necessarily mean they care to hear every story about the interaction between their songs and the intimate lives of their fans.
“The first story we heard about sex relating to our music was on our first tour and it was from a guy in Brisbane up in Queensland in Australia. We had this song called ‘Pretty Little Eyes’ and the chorus is like really creepy. It’s quite depraved.” Hamilton says recounting the experience.
“Anyway he told us that when him and his girlfriend were having sex he would put that song on and like whisper the lyrics of that song into her ears. Which if you know the song, it’s like, 'Poor her!'”
“Needless to say we don’t do that song live anymore.” Moyes adds. “That killed it. Now I every time I think of it, I think of them having sex.”
While they may not be performing “Pretty Little Eyes” anytime soon, The Presets will be touring North America in May and June to support the U.S. release of Apocalypso.
Given the band’s unabashed affection for the unpredictable, fans can most assuredly expect the unexpected. After all, who knows what sort of sexy secretions they’ll come up with next.
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