Art Vs Commerce

Pavle Vizintin of Ghoul tells ADAM D MILLS why his band wants to give their music away for free. Photography by PHOEBE CONTI.

A Mouthful of Gold was by far one of the most unique and intriguing releases to have come out this year. At its heart, the debut EP from Sydney quartet Ghoul is a pop record, if such a thing is to be defined by its abundance of melody and hooks that steadfastly refuse to dislodge themselves from your brain. But Ghoul’s is a skewed version of pop, one that doesn’t fall into traditional verse/chorus/verse structures and that allows room for wholly unexpected elements such as the bubbling synths that flow beneath these nine tracks and the idiosyncratic crooning of vocalist Ivan Vizintin.

“We’re influenced by a lot of weird bands,” says Ivan’s brother Pavle Vizintin, Ghoul’s bass player. “We listen to a lot of pop, but a lot of the EP was influenced by really obscure places. Like, the bassline in Phil Collins’s ‘Sussudio’ was a big influence for Ivan in a lot of the stuff he wrote. Some of the drums are heavily influenced by hip-hop like the Chronic 2000. It’s really weird, the way we source our stuff. A lot of the stuff we listen to is not what everybody listens to. I’m not saying that to blow our own trumpet. It’s just that Ivan makes a conscious effort to listen to as much music as he can and that gets pawned onto me because I’m his brother, and then that trickles down to the band. We’re all about sharing this new music that we’ve heard. So I guess our influences are varied enough to be pop, but sort of not.”

Surprisingly, Ghoul haven’t spent years and years honing their sound. Indeed, the group’s history doesn’t stretch back that far at all. While all four members have known each other for some time, they only came together as Ghoul in February this year. A Mouthful of Gold was then recorded piecemeal between July and October. With no recording budget to speak of, the group took the best route available to them: recording at home with the invaluable assistance of technologies like ProTools. But despite the circumstances of its birth, A Mouthful of Gold doesn’t bear the lo-fi hallmarks usually associated with the DIY aesthetic.

“Ivan’s a pretty good producer,” says Pavle. “He did a subject or two about music production in his uni degree. The equipment we have isn’t that high up there, but it serves us really well. You can do a lot of things with ProTools.”

The sonic clarity of A Mouthful of Gold and its abundance of gurgling synth noises, stands in contrast to the more guitar-focused sound of Ghoul’s live shows. Citing New Attitude by Dirty Projectors as an influence, Pavle says this element of the EP came about from a combination of conscious decision-making and learning — the hard way — the limitations of their recording techniques.

“We didn’t want to come out with something that was like our live sound,” he explains. “We made a conscious decision that it had to different from a) what other bands are releasing, and b) from what we sound like live. Not saying that we sound horribly messy live, but it’s a completely different feel. It’s much more guitar-y. There’s a different kind of energy. The EP is far more subdued.”

One of the most notable facets of the EP, however, is Ivan’s voice. A theatrical croon that seems to nod (perhaps unconsciously) to Antony Hegarty and Morrissey, it’s not the kind of voice you’d expect to hear coming from the mouth of a 21-year-old from Sydney. Least of all one fronting a four-piece indie group. Though Ivan and Pavle have both had formal music training, Ivan’s didn’t extend to vocal lessons. No, what you hear on A Mouthful of Gold is completely self-taught.

“He used to be a much worse singer, but he just trained himself to sing,” says Pavle of his brother. “He just kept on singing songs that were in his head or songs that he really liked. He kept on singing and singing and getting better and better at it. Playing in the band, he has only gotten that better over time.

“He’s very meticulous when it comes to recording. When he does his vocal takes it’s very intense, because he keeps going and going and he’s such a big perfectionist when it comes to laying down those takes.”

When it came to getting A Mouthful of Gold heard, Ghoul took the interesting approach of making it available as a free download from their MySpace, as well as giving physical copies away at their gigs. They’re not the first band to give their music away — Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails made headlines with their recent free download stunts, while on the local front Crab Smasher just unleashed their latest record into the digital realm without a price tag attached. But even though it’s been eight or so years since the whole Metallica-versus- Napster debacle put the ethics and legalities of downloading under a microscope, little real headway has been made on the issue.

The internet is still viewed with skepticism by the industry, repeatedly blamed for downturns in CD sales. But downloading, illegal or otherwise, is an inescapable reality these days; just as home taping (surprise, surprise) did not kill music, nor will the humble MP3. Ghoul are one of a shockingly small number groups who seem to grasp this fact, and who have embraced the internet accordingly, using it for their own means.

“Nobody really knows all that much about us yet, so we just wanted to get our music out,” explains Pavle of the band’s decision to “give” their record away. “We’re not in this for money, so we don’t feel like we really need to be selling these things. We just enjoy playing music and sharing it with other people.

“We don’t owe anyone anything,” he continues. “We’re not signed, so we don’t owe anyone record sales. It is inevitable that if people like your music they’re going to download it, whether you like it or not. I don’t know where that will go in the future. But Radiohead’s move with In Rainbows is something that I hope big bands will follow. It’s not like they don’t have enough money to support themselves. People will always listen to Radiohead and I thought that was a great thing to say: ‘If you want to pay for this, then you can pay for it, but if you don’t want to, that’s up for you.’”

This kind of sentiment, of making music for its own sake and making it available to as many people as possible without asking much (or, indeed, anything) in return, is the very embodiment of the DIY ethos. While DIY ideals are sometimes muddied by hollow sloganeering and misplaced us-versus-them mentalities, Ghoul are able to stand outside of the mechanics of the industry without necessarily pledging opposition to it.

“We’re very much influenced by that whole DIY thing,” says Pavle. “There are bands in Australia that are phenomenal. Some of our favourite bands are Australian, like Ohana and My Disco, and we’ve got these bands that are our mates in Sydney like Seekae and The Dead Sea, who are doing everything by themselves and it’s some of the best music that you’ll ever hear. We’re heavily influenced by those bands because we really, really enjoy listening to them and the way they selfishly say, ‘This is who we are, this is our music, and if you like it, that’s great.’”

GHOUL UPCOMING SHOWS

Wednesday, December 3
Annandale Hotel, Sydney, NSW

Thursday, December 18
Supper Club, Sydney, NSW

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