Spazzzzdancefaggggrock!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 11:00 am
Pick and roll: Hamilton shoots,. Moyes scores.(Photo by Kane Skennar) I’m pretty sure the Presets made me gay. At least temporarily during each of their shows I saw here — energizing, mesmerizing, twisterizing orgazmoramas of technosynth pop. If Australia’s Julian Hamilton (keyboards and vocals) and Kim Moyes (drums) had gone into pharmaceuticals instead of music, they might have created a pill that makes you high, makes you dance and makes you smart.
No time release. And, you know, what more could you want? Coming out of a classical education via rock and film music, their latest album, Beams, moves from pure, driving, stuff-amyl-nitrite-up-your-nose-and- shake-your-head-around-till-dizzy grind to light, bouncy pop to electro-noise weirdities to the lovely, clip-cloppy cinematic title track.
Hamilton and Moyes spoke to the Weekly via e-mail, answering the same questions separately, which were then edited together.
L.A.
WEEKLY:Your live shows make me think of two things. One, seeing Richard Pryor at the Comedy Store years ago and the way his routine got you laughing, then kept you laughing harder and harder until you were, like, dying . .
.
JULIAN HAMILTON: What? You mean you stood there laughing at us the whole time?
. . .
and two, sex. Your song order seems very purposeful.
KIM MOYES: Man that is awesome!
The set we’ve been building is completely designed to have a powerful beginning and a mind-bending finish. I guess we always thought that if we are going to be in front of an audience for a limited amount of time, like 45 minutes or an hour, we are going to try and pack as much of a punch as we can.
And while we’re at it, what role (if any) does sex have in your music?
What role should your music have in sex?
MOYES: Sex sex sexiness IS the music, and a lot of what Jules is singing about is related to the topic of getting some or wanting to get some. We have always said that in these uncertain times, what better way to spend it than to dance, get high and fuck?
HAMILTON: I hope it makes people want to fuck and dance — they’re two of the last things we’re allowed to do in a world that’s being increasingly run on hate and fear.
MOYES: A lot of people feel the need to tell us about their sex lives and how our music plays a part in that. I would rather they kept it to themselves, but I am proud there is a piece of us sharing some intimacy with them in the bedroom.
Do you like Slade? Don’t feel you have to answer this.
MOYES:
HAMILTON:
If you were forced to classify the Presets in the most annoyingly narrow-minded, quasi-journalistic manner, what specific genre would you choose?
Otherwise, where does the music come from — what and who are your influences (in music or outside of it)? What do you want the music to do for us?
HAMILTON: Three years ago journalists called us electro-clash, now they’re calling us new rave.
I don’t know what they will call us tomorrow.
MOYES: Spazzzzdancefaggggrock! But if we were crossing the U.
S./Canadian border, I would say just “Dance Music, mate!” Essentially we are a party band; it’s pop music with techno production.
We draw inspiration from so many sources; films like Blade Runner and Mad Max are very important to us; all music affects us.
HAMILTON: We both grew up on sci-fi films from the ’80s, so film scores by guys like John Carpenter and Vangelis kinda stick in our heads.
MOYES: Hopefully our music will be with you in the car on that amazing summer vacation, or you will get laid listening to our songs or find something consoling or meaningful in the lyrics when you have just broken up, whatever — but you MUST dance like a fuck-wit to us!
You guys met in college, studying classical? What role does classical music play in your lives and current musical pursuits?
HAMILTON: That’s correct, we met whilst studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
I studied piano — Mozart and stuff, as well as modern guys like Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen.
MOYES: I was studying classical percussion, which to a large extent is learning how to count 500 bars before it’s your turn to play the triangle, offset by extremely complicated contemporary composition. Jules and I became friends over film and music and started going to clubs together and taking drugs.
We had an incredibly beautiful instrumental band called “Prop” with three other members.
HAMILTON: By night we were discovering Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers, but our days were spent battling with really difficult classical works. It’s an intense and demanding discipline, which is why it sticks in my head now, even though I no longer play classical music.
I think there are a lot of similarities between classical music and dance music — especially in terms of mood and energy: the way a dance track can break down, then build up excruciatingly slowly to a massive release, then step up even higher. A three-hour DJ mix can be a real emotional roller-coaster, much like a lot of classical music (especially romantic-era stuff like Rachmaninov Piano Concertos and Wagner Operas). I think both dance music and classical music touch on a range of human emotions in a way that perhaps three-minute rock songs cannot.
MOYES: A lot of the modern art or classical music I undertook as a classical percussionist really opened my eyes to possibilities. It gave me a sense that you could make anything happen. So much of contemporary art-music ensembles are run by hardcore fanatics who endlessly chase government funding for projects and inevitably lose money from every concert they put on, but keep it going for the sheer passion and necessity of it.
I admire that so much. As for the sound worlds being created by the composers and musicians in the contemporary classical fields, a lot of it is very hard to digest and probably too intellectual for me to grasp, but some of it is so fresh and beautiful and such a great source of inspiration for me as a musician. The orchestra, opera and the classics are just as important to me as, say, John Lennon, the Beach Boys or Kraftwerk.
News RSS