| meet: KNIVES AT NOON |
| Written by Michael McClelland |
| Wednesday, 22 September 2010 15:55 |
 If you’ve ever been to Dunedin before, the first few things you might notice are the cold, the student culture and the music. Actually I retract that – you won’t notice the music, because most of the bands are hiding from the public eye. Thankfully, we managed to track down KNIVES AT NOON to ask a few questions about their debut EP - 'GLITTER GUTS'. Working with a local hotshot sound engineer, the EP showcases some of the many songs they’ve been churning out for the past few years. It’s been a long road for Knives At Noon with line-up changes at every turn. But the band have finally produced something to make all the turbulence worthwhile – and people are noticing too. Just earlier this year they were selected to play at Homegrown Festival in Wellington. Not too long after that, Vampire Weekend came to NZ and Knives At Noon were selected to be the support act. Even though they’re only just putting out their EP now, they’re still not slowing down. A full-length album is expected to be released next year and these guys have already started working on demos. If their hard work to date is anything to go by, they’re going to be slaving their guts out (o-ho!) over this one. COUP DE MAIN: What do you think of Dunedin music at the moment? Who’s your favourite band from there at the moment? KNIVES AT NOON - OLI WILSON: Personally my favourite Dunedin band at the moment, musically speaking, is Operation Rolling Thunder. They’re pretty intense, they’re quite virtuosic. Definitely see them live. And OK! Crazy Fiction Lady, I like what they’re doing at the moment. Also see them live, they’re worth seeing. CDM: How would you compare Auckland crowds to Dunedin crowds? OLI: In our experience, to be honest, the best and most energetic crowds are in Wellington. As for Auckland, we played at Cassette 9 and that was great. It was really, really positive. There’s not a huge difference, I don’t think, in terms of the crowds and the responses we’ve found between Auckland and Dunedin. Depending on the gig that we’re at, they’re pretty good. The turn out, population-wise, they tend to be a lot smaller as probably a lot more people go to gigs per capita down here. And yeah, we played the dunedinmusic.com party and there was four hundred, four hundred and forty people through the door just to see local bands. Some gigs, you know on a Wednesday night, there can be easily 300 people out to see a band. When we play up in Auckland it’s been pretty good, it’s not noticeably harder, or people more pretentious. In Dunedin if anything, people become more pretentious the more commercially-orientated your music sounds. But then again, that happens anywhere. CDM: Would you call yourself an indie band? Or a pop band? OLI: Well, we’re an indie band because we do everything ourselves – we DIY. The EP, 'Glitter Guts', I recorded myself, and we got a local engineer to mix it - Dale [Cotton]. The album’s gonna be exactly the same, I’m working closely with Dale, who’s producing the album. It’s all gonna be local. We’re releasing through an indie label, [Liberation Music]. They’re a boutique indie label, so they don’t have very many artists on their book. We do what we want. We have put absolutely no thought into whether or not this is going to fit into this format, or whether or not it’s going to be accessible to commercial radio, or anything. On the whole, no, I wouldn’t say we’re a commercially oriented band on the way that we work. If a song gets picked up in a commercial format, it has nothing to do with the fact that we might have planned it that way. Actually, I get really annoyed when I talk to other bands or other band managers or various other record labels, especially – well, I won’t say any names – when they say: “If you want to be successful, you have to plan for success and you have to plan for success by fulfilling the obligations to commercial radio”... and all that kind of stuff. And that’s something we’ve done never done, and it’s something that we’ll never do. So yeah, I mean comparing ourselves to other Dunedin bands, I suppose we would sound more commercially orientated. CDM: How’s recording for your album going? OLI: We’ve just started. And given the fact that the EP took a year, we’re not promising it any time soon. It’s going really well working with Dale [Cotton]. It’s a really big step up in terms of production values obviously, recording on the new SSL million dollar desk down here. We’re taking a lot longer on it. The dynamics in it are gonna be massive. It’s gonna be way heavier, way faster, way louder, but also way quieter, more intimate as well. Because with an EP, you can’t have that kind of depth and that kind of scope. An album is like a definitive statement about yourself, whereas an EP is like a snapshot of where you are. And so the album is just gonna be ranging from the heavy guitars to the clean pianos and really exploring our arrangement and songwriting as musicians, trying to get out of “this is just one-trick pony". There’ll be strings in there, we’re gonna throw everything in the kitchen sink at it basically. CDM: Do you have any plans to reuse old material? OLI: I would be very surprised if anything old ever gets included. We’ve just got way too much new material to choose from. We’re choosing from pools of 20+ songs. So putting anything old out would be artistically kind of pointless.  CDM: You’ve been around for a while, haven’t you? OLI: We’ve actually gone through heaps of line-up changes. So really we’ve only been around for a year under the current line-up. And so 'Glitter Guts' feels like it’s a first EP, because it’s the first EP with the line-up that we have now - with the songwriting team that we have now. We almost changed our name, but we decided against it, because you know, we’ve got better things to do than think of a new band name. CDM: Tell me a little bit about how you got picked up by Liberation Music... OLI: We got picked up by Liberation after Homegrown [2010]. We got a slot on the indie stage, and Liberation’s A&R for Mushroom Music - which is the publishing company - was in the audience, and heard us, and came to check us out. And then passed on 'Glitter Guts' to Liberation, who came and saw us at one of our better Auckland shows. They obviously liked what they saw live, and liked what they heard, and we pieced together a deal over about three months of talks, four months... it dragged on a bit. But it was important that we got all the details and that everyone was happy. We wanted to go with them because they’re a small label, they’re independent. They signed us because they liked the music, not because we have 20,000 fans on Facebook - know what I mean? With record deals or licensing deals these days, you tend to be privileged if you’ve already proven to the record company that you can be financially viable. Which means that at the end of the day, your music’s not actually important to them. Because the only thing they want to tap into is your pre-existing fanbase or your ability to make the commodity. Which is something that we didn’t have and weren’t interested in pursuing. And so Liberation said: “Hey, you don’t have any fans on Facebook, but we don’t care because we like what you’re doing musically.” And that was an important factor for us to go with them. CDM: How was opening for Vampire Weekend? Did you meet the band? OLI: Nah, we met their tour manager <laughs>. Not that cool! It was weird, because that was the first major support slot we’d ever done, and it was just 1700 or so kids, basically, who’d never heard of us – just sort of glaring at us. So we had no choice but to just rock out and go as hard as we could. It was packed out – it was weird walking up to a stage with so many strangers out there. But it was worth it. They were standing, so that was good, so there was dancing, and getting into it, and all that. But essentially, people are always there to see the main act. And I know from my own experience when I go to see a band, I don’t care about the support – I just want to see the band. But in saying that, the response we got was really good and it could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse. CDM: How much new music are you listening to at the moment? What’s your favourite? OLI: To be honest, everyone in the band goes through various different phases of listening to different stuff at different times. At the moment, I’m going through phases of listening back to older stuff. Things like R.E.M. and Radiohead. Just basically their full catalogues. I bought a David Bowie 'Outside' album, the 1995 collaboration with [Brian] Eno. Just bits and pieces here and there. In terms of actual new stuff, the last new music I bought was probably The Presets. Everyone’s got such a diverse taste in music in the band, I can’t really say what the others are into. CDM: Do you listen to the radio? OLI: Nah. I listen to the bNets down here when I’m driving. When I’m up North I listen to bFM and Kiwi FM. Alternative radio, mostly. Not hugely into a lot of the popular mainstream stuff at the moment, and I don’t think anyone in the band is. Occasionally there’s something out there that’s really good, but on the whole, most of us engage in the alternative. KNIVES AT NOON - debut EP ‘GLITTER GUTS’ out now!
Video the music video for ‘Violins And Violence’ below... |
