Rand & Holland At The Speed Of Light

Four years after their acclaimed debut, Rand & Holland return with a new album.

Brett Thompson and Stu Olsen have gone and made a pop record, so they think, and they sound almost surprised about the fact. They’re using words like “pretty”, “light” and “up” to describe Caravans, their new album as Rand & Holland, which follows on from 2003’s stark and slow-moving Tomorrow Will Be Like Today. Seems they got tired of being the most serious people in the room.

“We played so many shows around the first album, and we had to try very hard to get the atmosphere very low,” explains Stu, with a smile. “But it was always on a Friday night and people were out seeing their friends, drinking and living it up. And we were like, ‘Oh, we’re trying to get really miserable here and you’re all too happy’. It was a real wake up. If that was the environment we were going to be working in then we wanted to be in harmony with it. We wanted to party, too.”

Brett looks sideways at Stu, considering for a moment. “In harmony,” he reiterates, signalling his agreement. “That is true. As a musician you can’t be up there going, ‘Oh why aren’t they listening to me? I’m pouring my heart out here’.”

This party-starting change of direction is relative, of course; relative to the general air of hushed understatement that still constitutes the overall Rand & Holland atmosphere. Caravans is far more Five Leaves Left than ABBA Gold, and like their forebear Nick Drake’s early work, it makes for listening as clear and soft as water. The folk(ish) comparison is not simply one of mood, either, for Caravans is written around the sound of an acoustic guitar.

“The big difference this time is that I switched [from bass] to writing on a nylon-string guitar,” Brett explains, though he doesn’t think that this has changed his basic songwriting method: “It’s still about the hypnotic,” he says.

“Once you learn finger-picking and hammering it’s so addictive,” adds Stu. “It’s a really satisfying breakthrough, and we just went with that.”

The instrument takes a central role right from the outset of Caravans. Opening track ‘The Light’ rocks back and forth on a four-note riff like a cradle, buoyed by lullaby-ish trumpet and half-buried snare drum. It’s a song that sets a tone of diffuse radiance for the entire album, though, like an old-fashioned slab of vinyl, the work breaks into two distinct halves.

There’s a finger-clicking pace to the album’s first section. ‘It’s Alright’ leans towards the sound of early, acoustic blues that Stu indicates he’s a big fan of: tambourines shuffle and hands clap; a dusty porch can almost be traced out in the background. The title track features the kind of nimble, chiming guitar and delicate percussion that brings The Go-Betweens immediately to mind, though Brett will later claim that this wasn’t a conscious influence on his writing.

Caravans’ second half is noticeably slower. ‘Oh My Love’ is closest in structure to the minimalism of Tomorrow Will Be Like Today: “Oh my love, where have you gone, where have you gone?” sings Brett repeatedly, though the mood is reflective rather than despairing. ‘The Stranger’ borrows its ghostly organ tone straight from The Paradise Motel’s songbook, while ‘The War’ dissolves into a trance that recalls the slow-burning psychedelia of Six Organs Of Admittance.

“The first five tracks are up and then it shifts, kind of like a Side B,” Brett explains, admitting that he can be both “obsessive and indecisive” about the fine art of sequencing. “I really enjoy that [sequence] – I feel like it works. It sounds like a better record, actually, and I thought that the first one was a lot to live up to, because I thought we created something quite special.”

He wouldn’t be alone in thinking that. Tomorrow Will Be Like Today, Rand & Holland’s debut recording, garnered the band favourable comparisons with Smog, Yo La Tengo, Grand Salvo – a coterie of low-key, high-craft songwriters. In Brett’s words, the sound was “empty and open”, based around slowly repeated melodic and lyrical phrases. “All of the songs have a drone element,” comments Brett on the dark, deep bass tones that anchored each piece – “there’s always an open string there.”

Tomorrow Will Be Like Today appeared to come out of nowhere, poised and fully formed. Though Brett and Stu were both experienced musicians within Sydney’s experimental and noise music circles, Rand & Holland had played no live shows until that album’s release. The band has been deftly sidestepping the weight of audience expectation ever since: from acoustic reverie to wall-of-feedback and most points in between, Rand & Holland pursue continual reinvention.

“We were in a very good position with the first album,” reflects Brett. “We’d never played live, and that was both to our advantage and our disadvantage. When we first started playing live I don’t think that we were particularly good, because it takes time to get it together. Our first shows were quite uncomfortable.”

Having played with musicians ranging from experimentalist Oren Ambarchi to the sought-after Bree van Ryk – “She’s drummer to the stars now,” Brett laughs, “playing with Holly Throsby and Darren Hanlon” – the core duo are currently gigging, when they can, with City City City peers Ned Collette and Joe Talia, both of whom contributed to the recording of Caravans.

“Brett and I play together all the time,” Stu comments, “and because it’s hard to get the other guys, it’s a luxury when we can.”

“But every time we do that, it changes things,” adds Brett. “There’s always that chance that it might or might not work.”

“The best outcome is when we do something the first time and it comes out really fresh,” continues Stu. “That’s why we’re always playing with different line-ups, different venues – even if it’s a good song it gets stale after a while.” The band’s preference is for non-traditional venues: galleries, warehouses, DIY Sydney spaces such as Pelt and Yvonne Ruve. “If we can do a gallery then it’s ideal, because people are prepared to be quiet,” says Stu. “It’s such a rare thing to have silence. I love playing music and listening to music when people are quiet. There’s so much talk in everyday life.”

The pair’s preference for silence stems not from a sense of preciousness about their music – “it’s up to you to engage an audience,” Brett underlines – as from a genuine enjoyment in the act of listening. Playing together is a way of working out how an atmosphere might be shifted in small, subtle increments.

“Different keys have different effects,” explains Stu, by way of example. “We’re just coming to understand that. E is the earthy, positive tone, and G is also positive. A Flat is the evil chord. To go from one key to another in a set is really useful, because you can really lift the mood.”

“I think that I’m more interested in creating moods,” says Brett. “I think that’s our strong point… To me, it’s not singer-songwriter music, or folk music. We’re not telling people stories. It’s as much instrumental, as anything else.”

Though he anticipates that their new pop songs “are going to be instantly more gratifying” to a live audience, Brett indicates that Rand & Holland’s minimalist days are not entirely behind them. “I’d like to go back to some of those empty spaces,” he says. “That’s what I like about the bass: just hanging on a chord. Who’s that composer?” he asks, half to Stu and half to himself. “Morton Feldman. It’s all about what happens between the notes, not what happens on the note.”

“If you listen hard enough to a note, there’s all these other notes,” adds Stu. “It’s great when you lose track of what the [main] notes are doing, and the undertones take over.”

Off-stage, the listening continues. The pair are relaxed and considerate in each other’s company, both paying attention to the other’s answers but never interrupting. If this dynamic is at all representative of their musical relationship, one could hazard a guess that the latter is both securely established and productive.

“I feel like I’m writing for the third album with the two of us in mind,” Brett affirms, “though things can always change.”

“Caravans was written more with a massive band,” says Stu. “Well rehearsed, really capable. [It was about] those pop visions. There was huge instrumentation – we put a lot of stuff on and took it away before it was mixed. The title track sounded much more like The Go-Betweens before we ditched the jangly guitar.”

‘Caravans’ still sounds jangly enough for this interviewer to have fronted up with ‘Go-Betweens influence??’ underlined three times in her notebook. There’s an effortless melodicism to the track in question, combined with a hint of sparse angularity, highly reminiscent of that band’s Before Hollywood era.

“I have to say, I haven’t listened much to The Go-Betweens,” responds Brett. “I know ‘Cattle and Cane’. Why the comparison? Is it the mood?” he asks, turning the questioning around.

“I’ve never got Go-Betweens mania,” ponders Stu. “Some people I know are like ‘This is it’. I kind of expected that one day I’d understand, but I’m still waiting.”

“I just wasn’t into that stuff as a teenager,” Brett continues. “I always thought that they were a little bit twee. The first Australian bands for me were Lubricated Goat, The Birthday Party, Thug… all the Australian noise bands during the late 80s I was hugely into, so The Go-Betweens,” – he breaks off, imitating a face of teenage disdain.

“Then again, if I had been 17 years old and heard the stuff that we’re doing now there’s no way I would have liked it,” he smiles. “No way. But people can change.”

‘People can change’ might well be the official Rand & Holland motto, capturing as it does a sense of the band’s floating membership and fluctuating, open-ended sound. That said, Brett in particular seems nervous about the weight of listener expectation. Four years on from their first album, they now have something significant to live up to.

“There’s that pop element to the new album, so I wonder what people will expect; what they’ll want to see [live]; if it’s going to be played on the radio… You always want to be recognised in your own backyard.”

The fact is that Rand & Holland will probably continue to flummox some audiences and charm others, depending on all sorts of variables – the venue, the mood, the ever-changing timbre of fingers against nylon-string guitars.

“We never go to a gig relaxed, thinking that it’ll be fine,” says Stu. But they continue to play, nonetheless, “Which is amazing, considering all the bad reviews we’ve had,” he decides. “I think the classic one is: ‘Oh, they were really quiet in parts, they were really loud in parts. Now for the next band’.”

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