My Disco's Space In Between

SAM FELL sits down with Ben Andrews and gets to the bottom of the spaces that lie between My Disco, while SEAN FENNESSY takes the portraits.

Sitting in the beer garden out the back of the Rainbow Hotel on St. David Street in Fitzroy is Ben Andrews, guitarist for Melbourne D.I.Y. math rockers, My Disco. It’s quite poignant we’re sitting here in this particular beer garden together, for the Rainbow has recently transferred hands and as such, the plethora of tables and chairs that once littered this space are gone, leaving only two tables and a smattering of old, half broken plastic seats. The reason it’s so poignant is that, like My Disco’s new record, their sophomore effort, Paradise, this beer garden is sparse. It’s minimal. There’s not much here.

Unlike the beer garden however, Paradise is supposed to be like that. Sure, to the untrained ear it could be construed as a barren desert, sonically, but therein lies the appeal of My Disco, the reason they’ve become so popular in their five years on the scene – less is more. A phrase perhaps overused in a lot of situations, but one which hits the nail on the head right here. It’s the band’s use of the space between notes, what they don’t play, that has set them up in a little niche all of their own. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with a beer garden, and so we’re both perched on chairs that may give way any second, and there’s nowhere to sit that isn’t in the scorching sun. But My Disco are survivors, and so we battle on.

In the few reviews of this new record that have appeared so far, the word ‘minimal’ is the word that’s been used the most. The band’s debut, ‘06’s, Cancer was minimal to be sure, but with Paradise, My Disco have taken it to the extreme once more. “We’re trying to push ourselves to do, I wouldn’t say weirder stuff, but stuff which is maybe a bit unexpected of us,” Andrews muses – few people would have expected the band to strip off even more. “We try and look structurally at songs and go, ‘instead of how can we construct it, how can we deconstruct it’, how can we make it less of a song? We’re trying to break down the whole thing…there’s the freeness of ideas, there’s nothing to limit you. That whole idea of deconstructing it, I think, is in our advantage, but I can also see some people saying, ‘why didn’t they make it more concise and have them all play at the same time, like how a song is supposed to be’.”

It seems quite a few people are thinking that, but on the other side of the coin, there are a lot of people hailing Paradise as a fantastic record. Regardless of what the fans think however, the band are pretty happy with what they’ve produced this time around, and surely that’s the main thing. “There’s elements of Paradise that we really enjoyed, like the longer songs, the really drawn out parts that you’d normally try and edit,” Andrews concurs with a chuckle. “I’ve almost been comparing it to when Sergio Leone is making some classic western, and there’s all these really long scenes of nothing happening, really quiet…I almost think about trying to do that as long as possible without hitting the edit button.”

"What’s wrong with having 32 bars of one chord and what’s wrong with repeating a vocal line 16 times?"

This is a fine line to tread – how far can you go without pushing it over the edge from being a ‘song’ to being completely pointless? “That’s kinda what we want,” he laughs again. “The songs that I like are the ones that are a harder listen.” For the untrained ear, Paradise is indeed a hard listen, whether you’re playing the longer tracks or the more media-favoured shorter ones, but regardless of this, it’s a step up for My Disco, it’s a step out, it’s a step even further away from what you may have had them pegged as. “Yeah, I think it’s a lot denser and a lot darker,” Andrews enthuses, “but a lot freer in terms of there’s not lots of different time changes and not lots of different parts crammed in together, cos that’s what difficult about writing this deconstructive music – we just freed ourselves up to go, ‘what’s wrong with having 32 bars of one chord and what’s wrong with repeating a vocal line 16 times?’”

If you’re not a fan of My Disco, don’t answer that question. Having said all this though, Andrews and the rest of My Disco – brother, Liam Andrews on bass and Rohan Rebeiro on drums – aren’t ones to get stuck in a rut, not creatively anyway. “Yeah, we’re always trying to move on,” Andrews acknowledges. “Like, we rehearsed last night, and we’re already moving on from Paradise and looking at new stuff. And even though you could probably pick the similarities with the repetition and the sparseness, now we’re like, ‘we’ve done this idea’ – we hone in on something then move on. We’ve never really written a bunch of tunes and then gone, ‘OK that sounds like some previous work, we’re on a good thing lets keep doing that’. So now we’re looking at doing completely different stuff, which at the moment is something fresh.” He doesn’t go into this new direction in any detail, and this is fair enough – Paradise has only just been released after all, lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

So it’s been established that this is a record of repetitive sparseness, which is what makes My Disco, My Disco. And so to the making of said repetitive, sparse record; it should come as no surprise then, given the minimalism of Paradise, that it was produced by one, Steve Albini, in his own studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago. Albini, of course, hails from such bands as Shellac and Big Black, both huge influences on My Disco, and so this stands as a match made in heaven, although Andrews is quite relaxed about it– to him, it’s all just part of the process.

“For us, it was like, we’re always going overseas to tour anyway, so why not make a record over there at one of the best studios in the world for our particular sound?” he says, firstly about the decision to record in the States, before going on regarding Albini. “That was just as easy to book as any studio in the world really. You ring up and say I want these dates with this engineer in this room for this long, and they look at the schedule. It took a while to get going because he has a lot of commitments, but we found out it was the slowest year ever at the studio, so there was room for us.

“I think the term ‘producer’ is inaccurate to describe Steve,” he goes on regarding what Albini brought to Paradise as a producer. “He thinks of himself as strictly a recording engineer, an old school analogue engineer where he’ll do all the technical things, but if you want advice on songs or whatever, he’s not that guy. But at the same time, that’s what we’re used to, we’re totally insular, but I think every band in the world wants an outside opinion when they do takes, like, ‘I think that was OK, what do you reckon Steve?’ And he won’t just go, ‘I dunno, I’m recording’, he’ll help you out, but basically his approach is the quicker and rawer, the better…so we took that approach on board whole heartedly.”

The result, of course, is Paradise, and it’s a record which will either launch My Disco even further upward, or will be deemed too minimal and incohesive and so will see them treading water until their next effort comes along – only time will tell. In the meantime, it seems to be a good time to be in the band, as Andrews’ relaxed demeanour will attest, things are doin’ OK. It should be noted here as well, that Andrews is also the guitarist for local grind band, Agents Of Abhorrence, who have just completed a local tour with Texan rockers, Insect Warfare, and so given the decent (so far) success of My Disco, it seems like he may have to make a choice in the near future.

“My Disco is my true love, I think there’s a rare connection between the three of us that’s really hard to replicate,” he states quite adamantly. “I’ve been in lots of bands and done lots of touring with other bands, and I don’t think you can come close to finding what we have, again, it’s weird to explain. Even though we’re different people, we’re all on the same level and do it for really similar reasons and we connect so well as a unit, and also musically…it’s kinda like talking about relationships, it’s so hard to find a partner that you’re not gonna struggle with, so My Disco is kinda a unique thing.”

They fact they’re such a DIY band, as well as the fact Ben and Liam are brothers, would no doubt mean only good things for My Disco. “I think so, yeah, it means there’s no outside pressures,” he acknowledges. “I always used to think, ‘I wonder when we’ll get to a certain point’, but it’s really just about thinking back – in five years we’ve toured most continents, loads of places and going well over there as well, so looking at those accomplishments, that’s probably what a band should always wanna do and wanna look back on, rather than thinking, ‘when are we gonna make it?’.

In a local sense, it’d be fair to say My Disco have indeed made it – well received debut record, lots of loyal fans, multiple overseas tours, very independent, doing their thing with no interference. Time will tell though folks, whether or not Paradise will help that cause, but it’s a good record, regardless of whether you like it or not, and unlike the beer garden we leave behind as we finish up this interview and head off in our respective directions, it’s what isn’t there that counts – and that’s the My Disco way.

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