| The journey of CUT COPY's 'ZONOSCOPE'... |
| Written by Shahlin Graves |
| Friday, 06 May 2011 18:20 |
 Imagine three-quarters of Australian synth-pop band CUT COPY furiously fighting each other for ownership of a shower room - and since this is while the band are on-tour in Sweden, my imagination dictates that there should be some kind of Swedish interior-decorating scheme going on in the surrounding environment. The fourth member of the band, bassist BEN BROWNING is on his phone, explaining to me the source of 'Fight Club' noises that punctuate our conversation every once in a while. Cut Copy have plenty to get rowdy about with the release of their third album 'ZONOSCOPE', that features the well-received singles 'Need You Now' (of no relation to Lady Antebellum), 'Take Me Over', and 'Where I'm Going'. Browning's favourite song on the album is the perfectly textured 'This Is All We've Got' - a song that showcases the strengths of the 'Zonoscope' album, in layering floaty vocal harmonies on top of intricately programmed synthesizers and spirited guitar-lines. I like bands that keep their promises... and as it turns out, Cut Copy are men of their word. In farewell, Browning promised that the band had plans to tour 'Zonoscope' on our shores - "We are coming to New Zealand, but I guess that will be announced in the next week or so. Maybe sooner. Or later. But, I think we are definitely coming to tour the record..." - and voila tour dates not long after! Considering that their first Auckland show has already sold out and their Wellington date is very close to full capacity, you would be a fool to delay in purchasing tickets to the newly-announced second night at The Studio in Auckland. Honestly! Judging from the mad kerfuffle I overheard, if the band's live shows are anything like their shower-parties, then New Zealand ought to prepare for a bit of a rave...  COUP DE MAIN: How are you finding your current tour, in comparison to previous Cut Copy tours? CUT COPY - BEN BROWNING: Well, this one's just started, but so far so good. We've done maybe six shows in the first week and we are just getting our stride I guess to some degree, and traversing far and wide. CDM: Cut Copy played Laneway Festival in Australia earlier this year, do you have a favourite memory from that tour? BEN: Definitely! A lot of the bands on that festival were some of our favourite bands that are going around at the moment; Beach House, Ariel Pink, Deerhunter. So we got to see those bands a lot - we got to see them play three or four times each - and got to meet them all. I had Ariel Pink around for dinner at my girlfriend's house in Sydney, and we ended up talking about the cosmos and the universe until about three in the morning. So that whole festival was really amazing and our shows went really well as well, but it was almost like a bonus that we got to play there. We probably would have all gone along to that festival, had we not been playing anyway. CDM: You officially joined the band last year, but you had been playing with Cut Copy live previously to that. How did that all come about? BEN: I knew the guys before I joined - I was really close friends with Dan's housemate when I was at University for a few years. I ended up knowing Dan through him and I played in this band called Damn Arms - I joined that band for six months - and Damn Arms toured with Cut Copy, and I met all the other guys on that tour. They had another player playing with them live and he couldn't continue touring in the band from that point on, so they asked me to take over from him and to continue on from there. CDM: Congratulations on the release of 'Zonoscope'! Are you pleased with how well it's been received? BEN: Yes! We are hearing good things - we are really happy with the response, we are hearing good things with the way it's charting in college radio in America, and definite good things like that. There are some positive reviews in America and elsewhere as well. We are really happy with the record ourselves and it's good to get positive feedback as well, but sometimes you can get a little bit caught up in reading and hearing about how things are going in the press and stuff - it can be a little distracting. Generally, with the way the shows have been going with the new songs we've been doing, and the fans at our shows - it seems to be translating really well in a live environment and we seem to be getting a positive vibe back from that, and people are recognising that it is a progression from the last record and we are on some kind of a journey. I think that is the most pleasing aspect of the feedback so far. CDM: I was in Australia in February and every store that I walked into was playing the album. Is there a sense of pride knowing that your home-country is so supportive of the release? BEN: Yeah, it's interesting... Australia is sort of a little bit weird like that, it's hard to know when you're being accepted or not. Especially in our hometown of Melbourne, it seems like you have to earn your stripes, and maybe a bit because of the record we've started to get some success overseas that the response in Australia now is maybe more positive. I don't feel like we've crossed into the mainstream of Australia but we still have a lot of loyal fans and we have a lot of people that are genuine musical fans that are on board for the journey, and so hopefully we can keep those people interested now and into the future.  CDM: What was the creative process behind 'Zonoscope' like? BEN: There were a bunch of interesting factors that went into making this record. We toured for nearly eighteen months doing the 'In Ghost Colours' record in Australia and around the world, we got to know those songs inside out, and then some... and you just versus that with buying records in New York, or in Portugal or whatever, and talking about what we might like to do for the next record throughout that tour without being able to guide anything or do any demos - we didn't really have any time. Then we took a break when we got home, and then we started coming up with new songs. Dan did a bunch of demos in his home-studio and we found this warehouse space in Melbourne and started experimenting with the demos and doing percussion jams and different things, and started producing the record by ourselves at the start, and thinking we might make a bunch of demos and then take them to another producer overseas. We worked and started being really happy with what we were doing by ourselves. [Then] we bought in someone we knew who knew how to engineer the recordings and we realised we could pretty much produce the record at that point by ourselves, and that took us into the last year where we kind of brought everything together in the warehouse space over about three or four months - just slaving away with cups of tea to keep us warm, and that's how 'Zonoscope' was finally realised. CDM: What was your favourite moment during the recording of the album? BEN: I did a foot-stomp solo, where I stomped the floorboards of the warehouse and we recorded it. I don't think it made it on to the record, but recording that was my favourite moment of the record. CDM: What do you think are the main points of difference between 'Zonoscope' and the first two Cut Copy albums (2004's 'Bright Like Neon Love' and 2008's 'In Ghost Colours')? BEN: I think there have been common aspects to all three albums in terms of the sense of melody and chords - uplifting songs, and also Dan's music/production with organic guitar - so there are similarities, but I think with this record we tried to take some of these ideas that we had at the beginning of the process a little bit further. So we tried to extend the the hypnotic aspect of what we were doing - extending the percussion jams and single-note bass lines over one or two minutes and see what possibilities were in those things. I guess, maybe the kind of dreamy sound-scape sort of elements from the first two records were kind of the main elements to this record to begin with... and then the songs kind of formed around some of that.  CDM: What was it like filming the 'Need You Now' music video? BEN: It was really fun! We got to do that in Los Angeles with Keith Schofield, who is a director we really like, and his music videos are really funny. The treatment he wrote for us seemed really interesting and it was actually really hilarious being on set, because we had fourty or so of these extras dressed up in sports uniforms, and half of them were kind-of sports people and half of them were just like D-grade actors or maybe diehard Cut Copy fans that just wanted to be in the film-clip - it was this weird mix of different kinds of people. We were in this massive parking lot filming this video, it was a really funny day, I don't think I've [ever] laughed that much in one day. CDM: What is your favourite sport? BEN: Probably Cricket. CDM: According to the official Cut Copy Facebook, you guys are somewhat fond of Scrabble? BEN: I dunno about that... I don't know who wrote that... We play Chess more than we play Scrabble! I don't think I've ever played Scrabble. CDM: Tell me one thing about each of your bandmates, including yourself, that no-one else knows... BEN: Dan [Whitford] is a giraffe detective. Mitchell [Scott] likes male erotic novels. Tim Hoey is a vegan monk. And I can do a hundred push-ups in two minutes. |
