While made up of current and former members of Ricaine, Blacklevel Embassy, The Nation Blue and Rhythm Bell, Margins don’t sound like the sum of their parts. In fact, they’re almost the direct opposite of what you’d expect. ADAM D MILLS talks to bassist Brett O’Riley about the band’s formation, their hasty first LP and their “no crescendo” credo.

First off, I wanted to congratulate you on the record.
Thanks! It blows my mind that someone thinks that, but it’s awesome. It’s weird. It started off very much as a side project for fun, just to chill and do something different. That record is essentially a demo. We recorded that before we’d even done a show. I had it and gave it to Low Transit [Industries] because I know the dude [Darren Smallan] who runs it, and he was all over it. We hadn’t even mixed it before I gave it to him. Then we played a show, he was there and he was into it. Crazy. Which is why it’s weird that people are into it. Because it’s like, fuck, it’s a demo. We did it before we’d even been out in public, we didn’t have any preconceived ideas about anything, and just did it in a day and a half.

How long had you been working on the material before you went in to record the demo?
A fair while, but that was more to do with busy stuff outside [the band]. It probably took us 18 months or something. But during that 18 months, [Dave] Geisler had a kid, and was off for three months or something like that. Dan [McKay] was overseas touring with The Nation Blue for a month and a bit as well. We would have done the Blacklevel record somewhere in there as well, and then touring. So there were very brief periods of activity and long breaks in those 18 months.

It’s surprising you found the time to work on this at all, given the number of bands you’re all in.
It just sort of happened. Adam [Cooper] and I met Dave from him playing in Rhythm Bell. Adam and I write together a fair bit, we’ve got a stockpile of songs. And we’ve got a lot of that sort of crap lying around because they’re the kind of riffs you come up with when you’re just lying around on the couch watching TV or whatever. So we had all these bits and pieces that we never would have been able to use for Blacklevel, and we just said, “Dave, do you want to come and play in a pretty band?” and, “Dave, do you want to come and do something else?” And it just happened. We had one jam and didn’t even know if we were going to do it again, because it didn’t come overly natural for us. But then we thought, “Nah, fuck that. We have to make this work otherwise we’re lame.” So we tried again and kept going.

I’d say most people coming to this record with some knowledge of your other bands are going to be quite shocked by what they hear.
We did that on purpose. We might disappoint a whole bunch of people who are expecting some brutal rock riffery, but they’re not going to get it. We get all that shit out [with our other bands]. We have that avenue. This is just relaxing. It’s kind of like, “Let’s be in a band where we don’t have to sweat and yell or stretch before we go on. Let’s just chill.” And it’s great. Playing shows is easy. It’s so different from what we’re used to having to do.

How many shows have you played so far?
Seven. I know that because I had to write a bio the other day and I counted how many shows we’ve done. We’ve played seven shows and we’ve recorded half of our second album. Which is awesome. I’m so much more excited about that than the one I have to talk about.

Tell us about it.
We did it with our friend Jonboy Rock, who we did the Blacklevel record with. We only had like a song, a song and a half. He was in Melbourne for the Big Day Out and he’s a mate so we caught up. I was like, “Dude, we need to make a record or something. Let’s go and look at some studios.” We spent the day hanging out and checking out studios … We sort of established between now and the end of the year that he had one weekend off in March, and then the rest of the time he was overseas touring with various bands. So we just booked it in, and then spent a month, a month and a half, writing some tunes. We did it in two days and got more than half-an-hour’s worth of stuff out of it. It sounds fucking great. It’s all live, in the same room at the same time, with heaps of spill. It was pretty intense, getting the right take, it took a little while, but it was fucking worth it.

Is that different to how you recorded this first album?
Yeah, totally different. That was done at a place called Fatsound Studio in West Melbourne. [Engineer] Barry [Stockley’s] got great old shit, but it’s a tiny little space. We did it all live, except we couldn’t have the bass mic’ed because there was too much spill. Acoustically, it wasn’t as good as the room we did the next thing in. Because it was a demo, we really didn’t pay that much attention. We went to him because it’s cheap. It was like, “We don’t know if this is going to be a band, we don’t know if we’re ever going to do a show, we don’t know what’s going to happen, so let’s just record what we’ve got in case we get busy and nothing ever happens.”

Recording limitations aside, though, the record sounds fantastic. Everything’s so warm and natural sounding.
We tried as best we could to do that. I’m not so into the bass sound, because we couldn’t mic it up, so that’s just a DI. But he’s got sweet old mics, so the guitars sound fucking great. And Dan used this tiny little jazz drum kit with some sweet mics on it. So even though the room was tiny and we were all crammed into this tiny concrete bunker under the ground, we did our best to keep it that way. And then when we mixed it, we mixed it down to tape in a nice room with a big desk. Once we realised that someone was putting this out, we thought, “Fuck, we better up the ante a little bit!” And then we sent it to Bob [Weston] overseas to master and he put it through his sweet analogue converters and shit.

Dan’s drumming really stands out.
Dan’s fucking great. But don’t print that in case he reads it.

“We might disappoint a whole bunch of people who are expecting some brutal rock riffery, but they’re not going to get it.”

You’ve already said he’s the best drummer in Australia on Mess+Noise.
Oh, did I? There you go. Then I can say it again, I guess. Dan’s fucking awesome. The first time we jammed with this was before he even joined Blacklevel. He’d only done [The] Nation [Blue] for the past eight years or whatever. So Dan struggled the most to break out of what he’d been programmed to do. When we were driving home he was like, “Oh man, I really struggled. Fuck, we have to do it again.” He was pushing for it the most, because he was really frustrated that he couldn’t get his head around it. He came back to the next one absolutely prepared. I’ve watched him as a friend and as a band nerd improve fucking leaps and bounds since then.

I’m used to hearing him go hammer and tongs, so it’s surprising to hear that there’s so much restraint and subtlety to his playing in Margins.
He’s loving it, because this is a new band. It’s not The Nation Blue, and Blacklevel was already going when he joined. But this is a new thing, so this is the first new band he’s joined since he was a teenager. And it’s completely different. He likes a lot of jazz and shit, so he’s been getting into his jazz nerd drumming. And it’s good as a rhythm section to do something completely different. We still know each other well enough to communicate, but doing it really quietly.

It must have been challenging for everyone, trying to break out of the mould of your other bands. Was there a particular approach you all took to achieve that?
It was probably just time. The first jam was like, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” The second was, “This might work”, and by the third it was like, “Fuck, this is really going to work.” It took a few months for us to get our head around it, to find our feet. A lot of it was probably telling someone else to shut up [because they’re] overplaying. From memory we were probably stripping things back more and more the longer we went on. Because your natural instinct is to play, but you don’t really have to. Just shut up and let everyone find their space.

Did it take a lot of discipline to drill that into your heads?
Yeah. I reckon it did for a couple of the dudes. Adam tends to be a pretty busy player, because he’s good and he can. And Dave’s natural instinct is to play, and when you’re enjoying it you try to make your parts harder and harder and harder. And it’s like, “Nah, just fucking listen to everyone. Pick your moments.” I’ll play the one note for 10 minutes if I have to, if it gives you room to do your thing. It’s just being aware of what everyone else is doing.

The other side of that is not pulling back so far that there’s really nothing going on.
It’s a fine line. It took a bit to get there. And even now we’re still learning how to do it. There are songs now that only three dudes are playing. Someone will shut up the whole time and not play because it’s just not adding anything. I think I’m probably the most guilty of that, because I’m a bit of an admirer of everyone else’s playing. I’m really into the talents of the three other guys. So a lot of the time I’m thinking, “Fuck, I don’t want to get in the way of this, this is awesome.”

Unlike many instrumental bands, Margins never get loud. Did you deliberately try to avoid those post-rock cliches?
That was one of our mission statements: avoid the epic build-up. It was like, “We’re not going to get loud.” We try our fucking damnedest. We have to pull ourselves back because we’re going too hard. A lot of times, with some of the trickier arrangements, when we hit some of the tricky changes, we tended to get louder, because it was just instinct to nail changes. Dan and I went to see an unnamed Melbourne band who do that kind of post-rocky shit, and we were both walked out fucking angry at how lame they were. They were probably a really big influence, because they were so fucking average. They weren’t even awful, they were just average.

I’m a cynical dude by nature, and a big part of me thought that indie dudes were into that loud part because they’d never been exposed to it that much. I remember when Mogwai first came out, I went to see them with a bunch of my friends, who were all indie dudes. And everyone was going on about how full-on Mogwai are, how heavy they are, and I’m like, “Dude, they’re not really. Go see some metal sometime.” It’s not really that intense. I like the quiet shit. That’s more intense, just in a different way.

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MARGINS LAUNCH 'MARGINS'

Sunday, May 24
Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, VIC
w/The Holy Rose

Friday, July 10
Sandringham Hotel, Sydney, NSW