Groovin The Moo finally arrives in Bunbury this weekend and with it comes festival favourite, Art Vs Science. Jim Finn, keyboard extraordinaire took some time out to speak with OUTinPerth over the phone before the big weekend.
I just finished listening to your new album The Experiment; it’s pretty wild stuff. How happy are you with the album?
Yeah very happy; it took us a while to put it all together and organise the tracks and see what would go where. There are a few songs where we have little transitional music between the songs to make it flow well but, yeah overall we’re really, really happy about it. It’s a pretty long album, I think; about 14 songs on the physical album … I don’t even know my own album.
It seemed to me this album was more chaotic than your earlier stuff. Was this intentional?
I think it’s just our chaotic minds. It depends what sort of mood we’re in as to what songs we write. Sometimes, like with a song like With Thoughts, we’re in a more gentle mood, thinking about beautiful things in the world. With songs like Take A Look At Your Face and Sledgehammer, it’s just intense dance party music that we wanted to make people freak out and dance. So it does swing back and forth but people say it kind of works even though they are different styles, it still has the same vibe to it.
What are you happiest about the record?
That it’s finally done I think. It was a fair while putting it together…
How long?
It took about over a year, well I mean, some of those songs we’ve been playing since we started the band which we didn’t record for the first EP. In one way or another, it’s kind of been going for three years, I guess, the songs have been around for that long.
One of the songs I’m most proud of is Meteor; it’s basically a straight-up jam that we had. We pressed record; we were sitting in the studio and started jamming. Everything that you hear on that recording was how it was first played by all of us. We finished the song [and said], ‘Wow, we basically just wrote a song that was recorded in the studio’.
How much of The Experiment is just jamming as oppose to pre-formed ideas?
The way we pretty much write all the songs is we’ll just sit in a room and plug the amps and keyboards in; set the drums up and someone will start playing something. Then we’ll all just play along and if we like it, ‘that’s cool, let’s think of another part for this’ or if we don’t ‘let’s try something else, let’s play something else’… I think the best songs come from just jamming.
It’s been reported that AVS is a rock band that makes dance music. Where do you sit with that statement?
I like that. Actually some of the bands on the Groovin The Moo tour which we’re doing at the moment; the guys from Darwin Deez were saying that. I like that because we’ve all come from live rock music backgrounds and different bands and things and I think it is a rock music set up, it’s just that we play dance music with synths and keyboards and stuff. I can’t think off the top of my head, many other bands that are doing that, playing dance music 100 per cent live without samples or backing tracks and running keyboards through big guitar amps. I guess there is a bit of originality in that without even meaning to.
Benn Dorrington
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