Dark Fun

Cal Young of The Scientists of Modern Music talks to LAWSON FLETCHER about balancing out the electro formula. Photos by SEAN FENESSEY

Fretting for days over where to meet Cal Young, vocalising half of Hobart duo The Scientists of Modern Music – made whole by guitar and laser firing Simon McIntosh – I finally settled on an upstairs bar on Melbourne’s Elizabeth Street. Little worry – he had been here many times before. His girlfriend lives in Melbourne and he also pays regular visits to the big smoke for band commitments. Already a picture emerges of an act extending their profile up the east coast beyond their dinky island origins, but that’s to be dealt with after the formalities are out of the way. Handshakes, drinks bought, details established, before we slip into a good hour of chatting, thriftily stretching one cola and one orange juice all the way.

I’ve caught The Scientists at a somewhat awkward, transitional time; busy re-releasing and touring their formative Electronic Sunset EP while also starting work on their debut longplayer, shifting gears and winning hearts. Young readily admits that this album-length reworking of the EP – complete with a few live cuts and remixes from Swede mashers Mr Miyagi and his own Electric Ramjet project – is a provocation to publicity. One that has paid off.

“Being album length, it’s just gotten more exposure already,” he explains. “Even Triple J, again they’ve picked it up properly this time and put it on full rotation, which is sick.”

The big, expansive waves of tracks like ‘Technology Illiterate’ and ‘Easy’ have proven their concoction a second time around, it seems, an implicit renunciation of those that would have this band consigned to the giant pan of synth-pop flashes. There's something enduringly simplistic and yet texturally unique in their sound that begs repeated listens. Pop at heart, unmarked by pretension and balls-out simple, this recording streams along analogue synth lines and fizzling, machine-like drum patterns, all powering under Young’s vocoderisations and McIntosh’s almost industrial-rock guitar blazes. For this second ride, cult label Rubber Records has their back, with possibilities for even greater expansion.

“There might be a little interest in Japan, but that's just something that we've been talking about ... we've put out our feelers and we’re thinking about going overseas to record our album.”

But first, back to before the modern age. How did it all start, when did these two become The Scientists of Modern Music?

“As soon as we were born, man,” laughs Young, with a kind of smart-arse good nature that shines through many more times in our talk.

More predictably, though, the band actually emerged from the chaos of late high school and its avoidance.

“We were in audio-design class and all we did was pretty much bludge the class and go to a practise room and play with this really crappy drum kit and this guitar that was always out of tune,” Young says. “We thought it sounded great at the time! And then from there we just progressed and got into synths.”

They are the perfect pair, he reckons. Young, the die-hard electro fan, and McIntosh, a studied classicist (“Simon was in a stage band and other awesome things like that in school,” he jokes).

“It’s a 50-50 job, I’m more making beats and bass and he’s just into melodies, because he’s musically trained, where I’m not! I come from a listener’s point of view.”

Accordingly, it was Young that turned his mate onto whatever electronic music was available to them down south, “mainly Air and Chemical Brothers and stuff like that”. Young says he knew from the moment he heard The Chemical Brothers’ Surrender, he knew he wanted to make an electro record, and the sweeping, ambitious heavy-hitters on the EP hint something of the English siblings’ early influence.

The first gig, one to remember, a year 12 Rock Challenge, where they found themselves in the ‘acoustic’ category (‘Off The Rock’), somehow still making it to the finals.

“We just got our first gig from there and got like 50 bucks and we were just like, ‘Sick’. It was strange, because it was our first opener gig and we were so nervous ¬– I nearly spewed, Simon nearly shat his pants, it was great fun!”

The need to fill a setlist past ‘Number One’ (the deadpan title of their first track) spawned the material on Electronic Sunset. Six songs were conceived in two weeks, among the hectic times of final exams. The Scientists hit the ground running from there, touring and recording in their first year.

“I mean it was quite quick, it was like, ‘Wow, this is blowing up in our faces pretty easily’. I think for me it was always sort of a goal that I've always wanted to do, that I've always set my mind to it and sort of wished it. As soon as we got out of school it was just an excuse to go crazy and just do it. We had no responsibilities in a way so we could just do whatever we wanted.”

Knowing this, it seems a bit harsh to criticise the EP for lacking complexity – made on the run and amid the blow up of youth, it was always only ever an opening gambit, a means of moving forward. Sure it is a tad schematic, but it helped the band map out a cosmological territory whose detail they now find themselves eager to fill in. It’s with their debut album that the pair move from blueprints to buildings.

“We’re trying to make the album completely different to the EP, in the way that we record and perform,” Young explains.

Whereas the EP songs were jammed out for live situations and then, come recording, “slapped together from how we played them live”, this time writing songs comes first, “and then we work out how to play them”. Young is keen to play (and use) more instruments, rather than “having those gaps between our songs where we don’t play anything”.

“We can’t help it we have to do that,” he says. “I mean like, Midnight Juggernauts, their first EP, like how different is it from their new stuff! I’ve only just been recently getting into it, and yeah it’s cool but you just look at it and go, ‘Wow, that's so basic and all the new stuff is just so complex and awesome!’ and that was the stage we were at then.”

So what might be the substance of this new shot at intricacy?

“I think our album’s going to be quite dark in a way, branch out into something new. We’re just really heavily into like dirty sort of dark dance stuff, and I think, I dunno it’s just trying to be, yeah, dark.”

I think our album’s going to be quite dark in a way, branch out into something new. We’re just really heavily into like dirty sort of dark dance stuff.

Exasperated, it is here that Young reaches the termination point of his articulation of their emerging aesthetic. I think it’s actually a moment that discloses a watershed in their development as a band; his difficultly describing the more sinister, experimental sounds they are conceiving speaks to a gloriously expanded musical palette. The Scientists of Modern Music are trailing down pathways they’ve hitherto left untouched. This comes out when I probe him further on the process of making the album, he talks about recording melodies with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra string quartet, recording vocals with members of Gerling and Dukes of Windsor, more complete lyrics, a shift from distorted to rhythmic guitar and diving deeper into the possibilities of programming.

“Like really delve into heavily electronic stuff,” he says, “but making electronic music with other instruments.”

He describes a process of chopping and looping the raw data of live instruments into electronic music that blurs so many lines it’s positively avant-garde. So will that much-loved and equally as loathed vocoder sit prominent?

“You know, a lot of people ask us, ‘Oh why do you use vocoder, it sounds like Daft Punk. But we use it because it’s a new way of expressing vocals. So there’ll be plenty of that on there, but in a different way. It won’t be a standout piece like all of our tracks on the EP.”

This reminds me of Laurie Anderson’s use of the instrument (if that’s even the term for it) on ‘O Superman’, as a melodic element and not simply an effect, patterned within the song. Young agrees.

“We’ll have it like the backup vocalist in the background, so we harmonise with the normal vocals and the vocoder so it gives it this warm feeling.”

The open-armed force of their early material, the band’s constant motivation to take people on a ride – born of a place untainted by the brush of relentlessly hip mainland electro that relies on detached separation of performer and audience – will remain an important principle behind their music, says Young.

“Yeah, to take people with us to where we’re going, just flying through space, man.”

Quips aside (well, not really, The Scientists are anything if serious), Young is keen to stress this when I ask him what separates them from some of their larger counterparts operating on the larger chunk of land.

“Our music is kinda clean from stuff that’s mainland. It is separated by that ocean, the music as well,” he muses.

It’s this unaffected condition that produces such an endearing performance ethos, for one has not really known this band until they have seen them play live.

Costumed in a monochrome combo (Young in black, McIntosh in white) and choreographed (exuberant hand signals and air guitar), a gig with this band is just, well, fun. Remember that?

“We’re just having so much fun on the stage that we’ve just got to try and take advantage of it. I mean every time we come on stage it's not just going through the steps like that [flamboyant hand wave] it's something new, all the time.”

Asked what makes the duo distinct from the more established acts that reviewers often like to tick off The Scientists’ ostensible ‘influence-list’, Young decides it is mainly this fact.

“We’re completely different, performance-wise. I think since most electronic bands have a drummer these days and we don’t, people are sort of deterred, so we try to make it more than what we’ve got. And some of my favourite bands I'll see them live and it's like, ‘What are you guys doing? You're just sort of standing there.’ Like it’s really hard sometimes when you can see the performer just not getting into it, ‘cause when I'm an audience member I'm looking and I'm seeing that element that they're trying to bring to their audience but they're not bringing it, and as a performer that really kind of turns me off, which is a shame because, y’know, it's music, it should be fun!”

So rather than stand around smoking a cigarette behind keyboards or blatantly simulating robots, The Scientists simply party onstage, beaming faces. It has the net effect of creating a feel-good feedback loop between performer and audience, you too find yourself beaming and screaming after just a few songs. Have the band ever found an audience that hasn’t been receptive? “No, not really,” Young answers. “Well it’s strange, like if we show up to a gig and no one has really heard of us, then people sort of sit back and watch, but then they slowly get into it, usually half way through the set. Then they love it. So we’ve been lucky in that regard.”

Reading about the band in the days before our conversation, I noticed that Young and McIntosh appeared in every photo with eyes blacked out, by headband or otherwise. So what’s the go?

“The whole blindfold thing was kinda just like playing around with the media, questioning identity, just purely playing around not because we wanna hide ourselves. Bands have done this before and we’re sort of taking that on and just having fun with it and pissing people off because, you know, no one really wants to see someone covering themselves, like, ‘What do they look like?’ I mean, we’re stupid on stage so we may as well be stupid with the media, just to have fun.”

I suggest that the last word in that comment seems like their guiding principle: fun.

“Dark fun,” Young jokes, referring to his other favourite word of the interview.

Dark fun – I guess it remains to be seen if The Scientists of Modern Music can come up with the correct formula to balance the righteously exciting and accessible impetus of their performance with the riskier, harsher sentiment rumbling on their horizon. Many before have seen such an experiment blow up in their face, it’s like nuclear fusion, but if anyone can achieve that, it is these two.

ELECTRONIC SUNSET RE-LAUNCH

Wednesday, July 23 Red Room, Brisbane, QLD

Friday, July 25 The Prince of Wales, Melbourne, VIC

+