With no pressure from record labels, Ohana tell ADAM D MILLS they can do whatever the fuck they want – even break up.

The future of Ohana hangs in the balance. In January, drummer Kino Versoza is leaving Thirroul – the northern Illawarra suburb from which Ohana hail – for the bright lights of Melbourne, while his bandmates scatter themselves across the globe. It won’t be until mid-2009 that all four members of the group are again on the same continent, at which point they will have to make a difficult decision: relocate the band to Melbourne and pick up (more or less) where they left off, or lay Ohana to rest.

“I’m not holding my breath,” states Versoza flatly, before clarifying. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve hit a dead end with the band. It definitely feels like we’ve got more to do, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Vocalist/guitarist Will Farrier is similarly non-committal when it comes to the length and potential permanence of this hiatus. “It’s not a definite thing that we’re going to come back from,” he says. “No-one’s capable of saying what they want to do in six months.”

It seems a strange time for Ohana to be considering calling it quits. Their second album, Dead Beat, was released just three months ago. A huge step up from its predecessor Weak Wrists, it’s the album where Ohana have really come into their own. The group seem at the peak of their powers, and are riding high on the enormously favourable reception the album has received thus far.

“If there was a point where it’s going to end, then this would be an amazing point,” says Farrier. “We’ve had such a good year. For us, [Dead Beat] is a great record. That’s nothing we’ve experienced before. If the band had ended before we’d done Dead Beat, then that would have felt like something was definitely missing, and that would have been heartbreaking. But now that this is here and there’s this document that we really like and we’re really proud of, and if it was going to end right now, this is the best time.”

Versoza agrees.

“On a whole bunch of different levels, we just feel satisfied with this record. We put down on tape music on which we finally got our point across. Before, it felt like musically that we weren’t quite there. I always felt like it wasn’t the kind of music that I really wanted to be playing, but with Dead Beat it finally came together and we were making music that we wanted.”

Recorded to two-inch tape at Melbourne’s Head Gap studio by Neil Thomason (former guitarist with Ricaine and knob twiddler for the likes of Grey Daturas, True Radical Miracle and My Disco), Dead Beat sees Ohana trading dissonance for discipline, favouring repetition and restraint over the chaos that reigned on Weak Wrists. Even the artwork is pared back, all muted greys and vacant space.

That Dead Beat sounds the way that it does is a result of what Versoza calls “a process of elimination”, subtracting those elements of Weak Wrists he and his bandmates felt didn’t properly represent them.

“If the band had ended before we’d done Dead Beat, then that would have felt like something was definitely missing, and that would have been heartbreaking.”

“I suppose we kind of knew our faults,” he says. “It’s been a slow and steady process, just trial and error. By the time we got to Dead Beat we knew what we didn’t want.

“With Weak Wrists it definitely felt like we were jumping over the top of each other. It was a bit of a muddled mess. We were searching for some kind of intensity with our sound, and it didn’t feel like we were getting it across. You see At the Drive-In and you think you can get intensity through chaos, but it just didn’t work for us. So we decided to take a simpler approach.”

Subtraction has been a major theme in Ohana’s world this past year. Weak Wrists was released by Soviet Records, a Sydney-based label that’s home to records by Hospital the Musical, Moonmilk and Dead China Doll, among others. But with Dead Beat, the group have stepped out on their own, creating their own label, Imperative Residence, to release the album. What’s more, rather than seek a distribution deal, Ohana – and Farrier in particular – have set up a complex consignment system that sees them getting the album into the shelves of independent stores in every capital city completely under their own steam.

“I don’t feel that, at this level of making music, distribution companies are the best way to do things,” explains Farrier. “It’s not like we’re against that or desperate to do it ourselves, it’s just that in the past it hasn’t worked the best for us. Mainly because we don’t have the backing and the money for a lot of promotion. What’s happened in the past is that we’ve been on a distributor’s list but it’s just that they’ve bought a small amount of CDs and then the CDs have pretty much sat in warehouses.

“For bands like us that are self-managed, self-booked, self-promoted… until you have that sort of grip on things where people have to take notice of you whether they like it or not, then it doesn’t really make sense, because you’re just yelling out to people and they’re just not listening at all.”

Farrier is quick to point out that this move is “much more practical than political”. Ohana shouldn’t be mistaken for anti-industry crusaders, spouting empty DIY rhetoric for its own sake. “I’m not offended by the system,” he says. “Of course, like any other moneymaking thing there’s going to be some elements to it which go against the grain of making independent music, but I think our attitude to being independent has always been one of being as organised and practical as we can.”

The band has found, of course, that being completely in control of your own affairs has its drawbacks. It’s no small amount of hard work, even when it comes to just packaging and mailing CDs across the country. And while both Farrier and Versoza are quick to point out that they don’t feel let down by Soviet’s handling of Weak Wrists, they’re glad to now be bearing the full responsibility for their own success or failure.

“Taking control of ourselves means that at the very end of the day if we don’t sell any records it’s only because of what we’ve done,” says Farrier. “We don’t have to blame it on the fact that we’re this small-time band and our manager didn’t do enough for us or our label let us down or anything like that.”

Ohana’s future now rests firmly in their own hands. Five years after forming in a tiny seaside suburb of Wollongong, they’ve found themselves in the enviable position of complete independence. If it’s true that no band is an island, then Ohana are at least an archipelago.

Or, as Versoza puts it, more bluntly: “We’ve got no-one to answer to. We can do whatever the fuck we want.”

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