Concord Dawn

By REBECCA BARRY

The DJ was starting to panic. If he didn't get away quickly there'd be trouble. But there was no escape. The foot of the stage was packed with punters. To his right was a sheer drop. And he was in the middle of his set.

Desperate, he vaulted a wall, accidentally kicking a woman in the head on his way down.

"That's the one good thing when we do play together," says Concord Dawn's Matt Harvey. "You can go to the toilet."

Evan Short's Guinness-fuelled Boston gig is just one of many stories the pair have shared since deciding to tour separately. New Zealand's most successful drum'n'bass producers split for their second world tour, a move that meant they were cheaper to book and could cover twice the ground in half the time. While Short toured the States, Harvey played throughout Europe.

"It's not like we're jipping anyone if we play by ourselves," says Harvey. "I play a lot more mellow, trancey stuff and Evan plays more jungly stuff, although we tend to do that only when we play together. A lot of tunes that are real killers we both play and would play in every set."

Short agrees. "If you've got the two of us rather than just one, it's not going to make a radical difference. It's not like a band where you're getting just the drummer, you're getting someone showing different sides of the whole. Hopefully, if those promoters do end up making heaps of money, we will end up going to different places with the both of us."

It's a promising prospect thanks to their outstanding new album Up Rising (released on their label Uprising Records) and the fact some of the genre's biggest names frequently drop Concord Dawn tracks into their sets.

When they slipped acclaimed British producer Digital a CD of their tracks last year, he was so impressed he hooked them up with drum'n'bass guru Brillo, who now manages them in Europe and released two of their tracks on his prestigious Timeless label.

Vinyl 12-inch copies of their biggest tracks have sold 45,000 copies worldwide - 13,000 of club favourite, Morning Light.

Harvey even found himself signing autographs for an hour-and-a-half after a gig in Estonia, and turning hundreds away from a crammed 1200-strong gig in Paris.

"It was absolutely mad. In Europe there are the most rabid fans you'll ever meet. If you get an autograph from another New Zealander it's kind of naff. But over there they're just rabid, crazy, scary people. They're quite obsessive, so they find out what tune they've just heard. It just starts snowballing from there."

With dance music not as well established in the States, Harvey's smallest gigs were the equivalent of Short's biggest. But with an average fee of $1500 a gig, not to mention the album sales potentially generated, they were well worth it.

"When I played in San Diego, the promoter was really excited because there were 40 people there in this pub that would've held about 100," says Short. "I was really disappointed. I was like, 'I'm really sorry, man'. He was walking up to me with a smile on his face like, 'For what? That was rad!'."

In November, Concord Dawn will do it all again, but for now they are busy promoting the album in New Zealand, where on a good night they can pull crowds of 500.

Back at their Grey Lynn studio, Harvey checks his messages using instant messaging software, bashing out colloquial business dealings to music contacts from Philadelphia, Covington and Mt Eden. A mixing desk shares a dusty shelf with a screwdriver. And as if to channel their appeal further afield, two Star Wars figurines alluding to the duo's name sit either side of a PC. This minute room is where they created their most diverse album yet.

Up Rising turns the cold, industrial, synth-based style of their previous two albums into a more accessible, ambient, song-based format.

Harvey, a former jazz musician, lights up when he talks about the vocals on the album, from the aggressive braggadocio of Scribe and Tiki (of Salmonella Dub) to "a girl doing a girly diva thing. We're hoping this one should make quite a big difference because people like to sing in the shower".

Short, who has played guitar in metal bands for years, favours the shaolin minimalism of Scimitar and the Slayer-style riffs he plays on Raining Blood.

Short: "We're not trying to paint ourselves into a corner stylistically, we're trying to paint ourselves out of a corner, in a way. After we did Morning Light everyone expected us to write 10 more Morning Lights, whereas we went, 'Right, we've done that, let's try and do something completely different.'

Harvey: "Let's do something really jungly, or really techy or really jazzy."

But as with their stylistic differences, neither has stepped into the other's territory. Short has never been to Europe, Harvey has never been to America.

"We're going to swap soon. It's just, you go to a certain place and you make friends," says Short. "You don't have to go through the whole, 'Do you guys have Vegemite?' 'No, we don't have kangaroos'."

We were going to swap this November, but I had my mates who I met in the States last time saying, 'Nah, come back! We'll hang out and talk about heavy metal and get drunk at this bar where they serve Guinness' - all the kind of things Matt wouldn't wanna do. Matt would wanna sit down and talk about Steely Dan."

* Up Rising is out now.