Pivot’s Laurence Pike speaks to DOM ALESSIO about the band’s unpredictable year abroad. Photography by FRANCESCO BRIGIDA and GLEN WILKIE (live).

It’s 8pm in Sydney and on the other side of the globe in London, Laurence Pike, the curly-haired drummer of transcontinental three-piece Pivot, thinks it’s 7pm. So for the next hour I’ll stare at a computer screen, occasionally wander out to my lounge room to eat some dinner, and wait for the sound of an incoming Skype call.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiing!

“Hello, this is the voice of Gary Numan’s robot.”

It’s 9.15pm on a balmy Monday night and the grainy, slightly distorted sound of Pike’s voice is coming through my computer. Some ersatz English journalist snubbed their interview with him, adding 15 minutes to my already protracted waiting period. That, and Pike forgot that daylight savings time started on the east coast of Australia about a month ago. You can insert your own generic drummer joke here if you like.

“I think we’ve done more gigs this year than the band’s done in its entire existence. Probably, like, four times as many,” begins Pike, his laugh distorting through cyberspace. I’m beginning to see how he could confuse something as simple as the time in Australia. “Like, when Make Me Love You came out [in 2005] we did about 12 shows that year and I think by the end of this year we would have done about a hundred.”

That’s a lot of kilometres clocked on the tour bus odometer, and it’s even more impressive when you consider the majority of Pivot’s shows have only been performed in the last six months, following the release of their second album, the staggeringly impressive O Soundtrack My Heart. Pike’s currently holed up “in what is essentially a commune” just south of the River Thames in a building that was once a primary school, but now houses Pivot’s manager and a collection of her friends. He’s spent the better part of three months here, in between stints on friends’ couches and nights in a cramped van touring across Europe. “It’s the equivalent to doing the Monday night gigs at the Hopetoun, you know,” laughs Pike, referring to the Surry Hills pub where many Sydney bands attempt to launch a career. “We did the hard yards on the London indie scene earlier in the year and we’ve been building from scratch.”

It’s that steel-eyed dedication to the cause that has seen Laurence and his brother Richard – guitarist, keyboardist and slightly older Pike – carry the Pivot torch for nigh on a decade. When it began in 1999, Pivot was an entirely different animal. Back then the band was a quintet, consisting of the brothers Pike and friends of theirs who, like Richard and Laurence, were studying at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. Pianist Adrian Klumpes, bassist Neal Sutherland and turntablist Dave Bowman, together with the Pikes, formed the earliest incarnation of Pivot. It would take six years for the band to release anything.

“It started more or less as a jam band, exploring improvising in the experimental context – you know, using rock and electronics and samples and stuff like that, so that’s more or less how it stayed for the first few years.”

“We had to do an improv thing, because we never met before we did the gig. We literally met on stage.”

It sounds like your typically esoteric “classically trained” musician tripe, but their 2005 album Make Me Love You was anything but drivel. Here was a beautiful downbeat record, an amalgam of jazz and Portishead-esque trip-hop, devoid of vocals but brimming with musical ingenuity. “Most of the material on Make Me Love You was written in a sort of improvised/jamming context,” Pike says. “Quite literally, there’s a couple of tracks which are just us playing in the studio and we built them from there.”

After all, that’s what Pivot knew how to do best: jam and improvise. Which is fine if you enjoy the process of controlling chaos, but if you want to create traditional songs - ones that you can record and play live night after night – it’s probably not your ideal modus operandi. It certainly wasn’t for Laurence and Richard, and it’s here where things started to go awry for Pivot.

“I don’t know if a lot of people realise, but we would just turn up and see what would happen but try and do it in a way that was cohesive,” Pike recalls of those early gigs, “but after a while we wanted to be writing music as well and doing things that had more unity and structure. So Make Me Love You was the first step in that, [but] putting that record out was a real struggle for us. I think when the movement went from being a jam band to that, I think that was where there was the division in the original line-up.”

A year after the record was released, the Pikes were all that was left of Pivot. Sutherland and Klumpes has departed due to the ole’ creative differences quagmire and Bowman’s work commitments saw him venture overseas. But keeping the band together was always going to be difficult. Although Make Me Love You was lauded by pundits - including a nomination for the inaugural Triple J album of the year award, the J Award – the quintet played a mere 10 shows to support the release.

“It was always a struggle to get the band together to rehearse or to do gigs or whatever,” sighs Pike. “There just wasn’t a focus there so basically it became pretty clear after that record came out that shit had to change. Some of us really wanted to do it and others didn’t, so there was no point just dragging it out for the sake of keeping some line-up together that hadn’t really existed in any unified purpose for a couple of years.”

While Pike is reticent to illuminate the details, he explains vaguely that the sticking point was pianist Adrian Klumpes who, at the time, was in another band with Pike, the striking and abstract Triosk. Now Triosk is a different story altogether: their music, a polyglot of Tortoise, John Coltrane and glitch, was far more popular at the time than Pivot. Along with bass player Ben Waples, Triosk released three transcendental albums over their six-year career, including one with German electronic auteur and Triosk influence Jan Jelinek. Those records – 1 + 3 + 1, Moment Returns and swansong The Headlight Serenade – were all released through The Leaf Label in the UK, and found the aberrant jazz trio traversing the globe to play shows.

“[Triosk] ran in tandem with a couple of other things I was doing for a while,” says Pike. It began in 2001 “as an offshoot of what we were doing in Pivot but I wanted to explore it in a slightly different ensemble context”.

To fill the void left by Pivot’s inactivity, Pike began branching out musically. Along with Triosk he began lending his inimitable skills to Guillermo Scott Herren’s projects Prefuse 73 and Savath y Savalas, Melbourne’s mustachioed and enigmatic electronic artist Qua, German kindred spirits Flanger, Australian jazz pianist and Conservatorium of Music teacher Mike Nock and American singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, better known by the moniker Smog. Somewhere in there, Pike made coin from drumming on commercials and even released his own 10” vinyl under the handle “Laurenz Pike”, a solo drum piece distributed through Berlin label Monika Enterprize.

“I’m just naturally quite curious about trying different things and interacting with different people,” Pike explains. “I think in the last few years I’ve become more wary of that and actually tried to hone my focus more and pare things back. I think that’s become more important rather than doing as many things as possible. But there was a period there when I was just doing everything and anything and that was great, it was a great learning experience you know, invaluable in some ways.”

But back to Triosk.

“I didn’t want to do that anymore,” he says exasperated. “I could go on the rest of my life playing in a billion bands and never really feel like I’m achieving any of the things that I want to and that was the constant problem with Pivot. I was always feeling – and I know Rich felt the same way – that we were never really achieving what we wanted to with the band because it was always a bit diffused by other things that were going on around it. The moment that the space was created there for things to happen, things started happening and they happened very quickly and I think that’s no coincidence.”

That “moment” could loosely be defined from the middle of 2006 to the beginning of 2007, a time when Pivot shed three of its founding members and Triosk prematurely bid farewell to the world. Towards the end of 2006, Pike was commissioned by the avant-garde Sound Summit music festival to perform with Dave Miller, an electronic artist born in Perth but living in London. Without any preparation, the duo performed an improvised show at the Sydney Opera House.

“We had to do an improv thing,” Pike interjects, “because we never met before we did the gig. We literally met on stage. So that was like an improv thing involving drums and laptop and live sampling. It was quite experimental but obviously we had a connection there and it was quite fun so we continued to work together and that speared off into that little side project Roam the Hello Clouds.”

Roam the Hello Clouds, which also consists of bassist Phil Slater, released their improvised album Near Misses in 2007. Their music was a minimalistic evolution on Triosk’s electro-infused jazz. The collaboration also proved fruitful for Pivot. “It got to a point where Richard and I were like, well, obviously Dave is the person we should be working with. Pretty much from that moment things became pretty clear which direction we were heading in, and it morphed over a period of four-to-five months until it became the three of us.”

After years of inactivity and stilted growth, Miller proved the necessary propellant for the Pivot machine. With Miller based in London and the Pikes still living in Sydney, the trio had to build the majority of their second record O Soundtrack My Heart over the internet. “We’re a band that uses technology and we didn’t really see it as an obstacle,” says Pike, who had created Triosk records in a similar fashion. “You know, Dave’s a very tech-savvy person as well. In some ways it made the processes faster and more democratic because you’d wake up in the morning and there’d be new parts to a song and there wouldn’t necessarily be that time or interaction to discuss it, you’d accept it on face value and start working on it, you know. So it was an interesting process in that regard and it was fun, it was like Christmas – you didn’t know what you were going to get.”

“In the last three months we would have done about 45 shows [and] we’ve got eight more before we come back to Australia.”

It was around this time that the Pikes began performing the new material live. The music was more roughened and electronic-dependent than anything off Make Me Love You, and their incendiary live shows proved just as juxtaposing. It had been almost 12 months since I’d seen Pivot perform, then a sombre and subdued quintet. Now it was just the two of them playing the songs and running loops off an iPod. I saw them at Spectrum on Sydney’s Oxford Street, a cramped venue whose walls are covered by inches of dried sweat and where personal space is a valuable commodity. Laurence was playing these impossible rhythms while Richard teetered on the verge of self-combustion, as though he was attacking his Fender while simultaneously exorcising some inner demon. It was thrilling, visceral and the beginning of Pivot’s establishment as a unique and idiosyncratic band.

“That was a fun time because we felt very liberated,” Laurence Pike beams. “It was a very liberating feeling to suddenly have all this space and freedom and more emotional freedom. O Soundtrack My Heart happened quite quickly as a result. The gates were open and we went, you know … Make Me Love You just took so long, there were so many points where we considered throwing the whole project in. There were a lot of despondent times in the process.”

Pike checks himself. “I shouldn’t be so down on it. At the same time we had lots of good experiences making that record and very positive ones but just that feeling of release though once we sort of came out of that period. We felt like, ‘Oh, okay, now we can do this thing and do it the way we’ve felt like we should have,’ and that definitely came through in those first gigs when we were playing the new material with just the two of us and that whole theme underpins the whole record.”

Compared to the six years taken to complete Make Me Love You, it took Pivot a mere six months to construct their second record. It was finished in May 2007, after which the band travelled to Chicago to mix with the legendary Tortoise drummer John McEntire. Pike met McEntire during the recording sessions of Savath y Savalas’ 2007 record Golden Pollen, which both drummers worked on. It was simply a matter of calling up McEntire, sending him a disc and seeing if he was interested in mixing it, Pike says.

But it still took a further 12 months for the band to release O Soundtrack My Heart. At the beginning of this year, Pivot announced they were signing to the illustrious Warp Records. Somehow, when the collapse of record labels is viewed with a certain dose of schadenfreude, Warp has managed to maintain an unusually high level of credibility and reverence. I can’t help but mention Pivot’s association with the label and the honour of being the first Australian act signed to the esteemed UK label.

“Maybe I’m naive or something,” wavers Pike, “but things are always about the next logical step for me. It was never really that big a leap of the imagination for us because it’s like, ‘Well, they’re a great label, they release the sort of music we love and we feel like we could be a part of their roster, let’s send it to them,’ and it happened very quickly.”

That isn’t misplaced hubris on behalf of Pike. The fact is, O Soundtrack My Heart is a brilliant piece of post-industrial electronica and a stark evolution from Pivot’s debut record. The down-tempo aesthetic has been completely erased. In its place is a paragon of new millennium post-punk, the thoughts of Kraftwerk, Talking Heads and Autechre combined in a maelstrom of firebrand guitar, avalanches of assorted beeps and swoops and, above all else, Pike’s infectious and abstract drum beats.

It’s closing in on 11pm and even though it’s around 10am where Pike is, he’s starting to sound tired. He laments the fact that he’s seen his girlfriend for the sum total of one-and-a-half weeks during the past eight months. He misses Australia, and says he’ll return home even if his brother and Miller continue to live in London. “We’re going to try and finish the next record [in Australia] so hopefully that will enable us for the next year or so to be touring that record and not need to be living in the same place necessarily to be working on it you know. We’ve just got to take it as it comes I guess. Basically my intention is to be in Sydney.”

He laughs, an exasperated laugh, and says it’s been a long year. But there’s been nine years preceding it and no sign of the trio slowing down just yet. “Just thinking about it, we’re winding down to the end of this leg of the tour. You know, in the last three months we would have done about 45 shows [and] we’ve got eight more before we come back to Australia, so I’m starting to think back on the things we’ve done this year and I think we’ve achieved a great deal.

“It’s funny,” he continues, “some of the funnest gigs we’ve done have been in the quintessential London shitholes, like nasty indie bars where bands cut their teeth. And then we’ve done, you know, like absolutely surreal gigs, like huge festivals in France, playing to 10,000 people and stuff like that. It’s been a very weird … ”

A pause, and then he laughs – that omnipresent Laurence Pike laugh.

“It’s been an unpredictable year.”

PIVOT TOUR

Friday, 28 November 28
The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD
w/My Disco + Secret Birds

Saturday, November 29
The Gaelic Theatre, Sydney, NSW
w/My Disco + Qua

Friday, December 5
The Bakery, Perth, WA
w/My Disco + French Rockets

+