Luke Dubber and Angus Stuart make up Australian electronic duo Hermitude, who are heading to New Zealand to tour Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland this July. Rachel Bache spoke to Luke Dubber about their upcoming tour and the release of their new album Dark Night Sweet Light.
NZ HERALD: Hermitude is touring New Zealand this July. Are you looking forward to it?
Luke Dubber: We're really excited to come over in New Zealand and play, it's such an awesome chilled out place. We love it.
What should punters expect from your live show?
We have a new record out for starters, so we'll be playing a whole bunch of new music. We've also updated the show a bit with some new visuals and a couple of new instruments as well. We're going to be bringing our usual amount of crazy Hermitude energy and turbo-boosted with a little bit extra.
Do you guys mainly stay behind the DJ desk or do you get out onto the stage too?
Yeah we do, a lot of it is primarily done behind the table, but we also have instruments that we bring out the front and show people that we're not just playing video games while we're up performing. We've got some little wireless instruments that we bring out get in front of the camera so people can see what we're doing, make it a bit more of an interactive show wherever we can.
We have a wireless synthesiser and a drum machine. So Gusto (Angus Stuart) plays the drum machine, he's kind of the drummer of the group, and taps out lots of crazy rhythms and I flex my 80s key-tar chops and we kind of have a little bit of a jam and mix it up.
Your new album Dark Night Sweet Light has dropped - how would you describe the sound of this album?
We intentionally went for a sound that incorporates more space as opposed to more sounds taking up the frequency spectrum. I think we both got really excited by a lot of the music that was coming out, the use of the "less is more" strategy. We tried to incorporate that ethos into this record and make it still really bang, but have quiet gentle moments, a lot of space in the music so you can really hear everything clearly and it still translates to a big sound.
So you'd say it's quite a big shift from previous albums?
I guess it's just a subtle step in a new direction for us. We always try and do that with every record, just challenge ourselves with something that maybe just puts us out of our comfort zone or something that we can enjoy working on. Every time we put out a record I see it as like another kind of chapter in our, not just our careers but in our friendship and stuff. Yeah, you just end up on these wild journeys every few years, it's pretty amazing.
What would you say is one of the most important things to you when it comes to making music?
I guess for Hermitude we try and make songs that are really strong melodically and also structurally. Because a lot of our music is instrumental, although on this record there are quite a few vocal tracks, the vocals on the vocal tracks are used more like an instrument, there are not many songs on the records that are typical verse/chorus-y vibe, they're more just little snippets of vocals that come out like an instrument would. We try and make great songs that people can kind of whistle along to or sing along to or whatever, that have strong melodies and a strong backbone of rhythm and that also maybe sound a little bit different from things that are happening, I think we like to soak up a lot of the influence of what's happening around the world or just in Australia, or wherever, music-wise in our genre and in other genres and take the parts and inject them into our own music but give it a bit of a twist so it has its own Hermitude flavour. All of those things are important (laughs). Sorry, that was a bit of a round-about answer.
So you do have been working together for quite a long time, how did you first start making music together?
We started, we used to play in a band together years ago and that kind of ran its course and kind of died. Then a couple years later we both started hanging out as friends as we got a little bit older and realised that we both had a love of similar kinds of music. We basically just hung out in the Blue Mountains one night, smoked a joint on the edge of a lookout and were like "maybe we should get the keys to your dad's studio" cause Gusto's dad got a recording studio, so we grabbed his keys and went into the studio at midnight one night and came out at seven the next morning and had this really cool song written like, "wow that came together really well" and we kinda did it again a couple weeks later and we just realised after two or three or four those sessions that this was something we should pursue because it was sounding really good. So yeah, that was kind of the beginning of it I guess and then we put a few of those tunes, like five of them, together and we knew one of the guys at Elefant Traks down here in Sydney and we gave him a tape and the rest is history, they were like "yeah, yeah we'll put this out" and that kind of started us off on our career I guess.
Yeah! And we've done two EPs in between all of that, so I think it's our seventh release and yeah, it's been quite a journey. Every time we put out a record I see it as like another kind of chapter in our, not just our careers but in our friendship and stuff. Yeah, you just end up on these wild journeys every few years, it's pretty amazing.
Is it ever tricky at times, working as a duo? Do you ever clash over what you want in a track?
We're pretty open these days. I think us doing it together for so long we're really trusting of each other's opinions and what we kind of know is cool, so after doing it for so long now, we're completely open with each other about each part of what we're writing. If there's something that one of us isn't feeling we're really straight up about it and we try not to have any egos in the studio, so you're just kind of searching for the best possible part of the song regardless of where it comes from, it's just about making the song as good as it can possibly be between the two of us. I think those lessons take a while to learn, us doing it for so long, there's always times where you can be insecure about what you're writing or what you're putting out but as the years go on, you learn your role and what is the best was to reach the end goal of a really great song.
Is it weird for you sometimes that people might not know your music directly, but know it through a remix? For example Flume's remix of Hyper Paradise.
That just grew into an enormous monster that nobody could tame really, that song. I don't think it really matters as how people discover us, because it has been a gazillion people who did find us through that remix, so it's all positive really for us. If they like what they hear they're gonna go back and check us out. I mean, I've discovered several artists through remixes, whether they were the ones being remixed or the ones doing the remixing. So with that song, that's just been a goldmine for both of us, no one could have foreseen the trajectory of that song and how high it could possibly go, I remember first hearing it when he (Flume) first sent it to us, just thinking to myself "wow this is huge" but you never know how big a song is going to be till it kind of lives its life and to watch that one just explode into this enormous thing is just remarkable. Yeah we're really excited, we still and were about what that song's done for us.
You guys have done a couple of remixes yourself, how do you decide who you want to remix? Do those songs end up in your set?
We kind remixing from artists that we admire, so if we're really digging their style, if they're kind of a similar style or in a similar vain to us then we're really happy to remix them. We haven't done heaps of remixes in the past, but we've done a few and we are kind of picky with who we like to remix, but the ODESZA guys were really nice guys and we also dug the song, kind of the direction of their music as well, so we just decided to do that remix for them, that's kind of done really well for us over there as well, which is great, so now when we go over to the States people actually know us a little bit through that song. Every now and then we can kind of do random remixes for bands that are a little bit out of our genre, but yeah, we just kind of pick good music I guess, stuff we like that we're inspired by and when we put it on we can kind of hear something in there that we actually want to collaborate on.
Who: Hermitude When & where: July 9, Otago University, Dunedin; July 20, Bodega, Wellington; July 11, The Studio, Auckland What: New album Dark Night Sweet Light out now.
