Australia, SONY BMG RECORDINGS

Profile:

Name: Jamie (who did the interview) Frank and Manuel
Ages: teenagers at heart
Heights: Taller than the average bear
Average Heartrate (BPM): don't have one of those fancy beat-counters, sorry
Heartrate when mixing(BPM): We don't DJ
Fingernail lengths: Variable
Bedtimes: Mostly non-existent
Favorite Pop Songs: "Rock Me Amadeus" by Falco and "I'm Not In Love" by 10CC
Favorite Nursery Rhymes: Anything by 50 Cent
All-time Favorite Breakbeat Choon: "Bombscare" by 2 Blind Mice
Favorites Bands: Led Zepplin, Elbow, Depeche Mode, Interpol, Japan, Beach Boys, Deus
Model: The "Hornet" off-road racer by Tamiya
Monster: Cookie monster back in the day when he was still allowed to eat cookies
Ice Cream Flavor: Variable
Food: Anything Japanese
Movie: "Jane's Flexible Love Machine Part 19"


The Interview

Big up to Sue from Stunt Company and Thrive for making this interview happen! Great to get a chance to interview you chaps who are signed to "Sony and BMG". How are the Labels treating you? I hear nothing but bad info from people who get signed to a major label. But I know if your talent and professional skills are at its best and your record is selling everything can be great! Whats it like?
Being on a major label has certainly opened the doors for us to be exposed to a much larger audience than just an underground club audience. We just felt that the music we were producing might have bit of an appeal to people outside that scene so we thought we'd give a major a shot at promoting what we do. It's certainly been a bit of a rollercoaster and we've learnt a lot. We signed at a strange time when Sony and BMG were merging so obviously things took longer to get done and communication was quite difficult but the upside is that our album gets out to far more countries than if it were out through a smaller dance label. The thing we've also found, is that we have always been supported for the music we release through them and have never
experienced any commercial pressure on their part which I think is a common misconception about major labels. People have come up to us and asked if we branched out and wrote "songs" because they asked us to but really, we went with a major label because we had songs that we wanted to be heard by a diverse population. It might happen with other bands, I don't know, but our sound hasn't been altered by any label execs and we'd never allow it if they tried.

Please describe your sound (what kind of music do you play/produce)? Personally as a breaks dj, I am only interviewing you guys cause your sound is breaky, I love your vocals and your drum patterns are like rock breaks so I can mix your excellent tracks within a breaks mix!
Well, when we write our club tracks, we write music that we like to think has a good balance of atmosphere, energy and groove. Stylistically we've always had a problem defining it. Defining one track wouldn't really apply to the next one we made because we produce a track in a way that best serves the music for that track and the feel that we want to convey if that makes sense? We've never thought there was a point in being a breaks, house, rock, techno or any other genre-based band. We just write music that the three of us are happy with. We like the energy of rock, the musical textures of classical, the solid grooves of houseS I could go on because there is so much music that we are in love with that finds its way into our writing.

Is this Infusion's first album to date?
Six Feet Above Yesterday is actually our second album. Phrases And Numbers was our first but was released on an independent Sydney-based label called Thunk back at the end of 2000. It only came out in Australia and Japan.

What does your name Infusion mean anyway and how did that name come about?
It was a name that I came up with the night we decided that it could be a good idea to form a live act that played electronic music completely live after having a 4 hour jam session. It wasn't really that thought out. I just was looking through a dictionary because I'm a nerd and came across the word Infusion and thought it vaguely connected to the idea that there was a fusing and combining of ideas and sounds while playing and creating our music in a live way. Seemed like a good name at the time! People will think of us every time they reach for the tea bags.

Your current album, "Six Feet Above Yesterday"(now out) includes 2CDs. The first CD has all your orginal tracks, and the second CD has your extended remixes one by the legendary Adam Freeland and Dylan Rhymes (more value for the purchaser btw, now I don't have to buy the vinyl remixes thanks!). Do any of you gentlemen dj? And how did you get Adam Freeland to remix your track, "Better World"?
No, we don't really DJ. I have on the odd occasion because I've been buying vinyl since I was a kid and I love buying 12"s but it's nothing I concentrate on at all. Frank has a bit of vinyl collection too and used to do the odd DJ gig here and there around 94-96 but was never serious. He actually used to scratch really well and that came from his hip hop background. He was a massive hip hop lover. We don't come from a DJ background, just more from a general love of good music and some of the most interesting music to our ears was only available on vinyl. We do love the process of release vinyl and remixing and getting great people to remix us and so on. Our vinyl is actually
released on our own Music For Vinyl label and not through SonyBMG because we want to be able to control that side of it. We weren't convinced that a major could do that great a job at it so we stipulated that we want to retain our vinyl rights. It also allows us to sign up tracks that we hear and like and get them out there which is fun. As far as the remix Adam did goes, that happened because we've been friends for a long time now. Frank and I produced a few tracks on Adam's Now And Them album in 2001. He came to Australia that year and we worked in our studio for a few months which was great fun and we
really clicked. Our remix of our track Starwater, It's Alright (stripper mix) came
out on Marine Parade and then we did Dead Souls later for him. It's just a cool label and lovely people so it just a loose, fun relationship we have with him and the Evil 9 guys. We have a great time with them- very talented and cool people and there's just a nice mutual respect thing we have. We feel the love.

What type of gear are you using on stage? I notice you use a Nord lead synth, a laptop and mics and I believe a mpc drum machine or sampler unit of some sort. Are you guys using albeton live on the laptop? Looks like you have the laptop playing something and someone tapping on the mpc drum machine, the vocalist is playing the Nord lead, and the guy in the middle of your pictures is mixing all the channels together, Am I wrong? How do you play anyways live electronic music anyways?
What we have on stage is all hardware. We don't run anything off laptop because we're not convinced. How we play works really well for us and MPCs don't crash. Sasha tried to convince us to do the Ableton thing but we just don't trust the idea of using laptops in sweaty clubs. Everything basically runs off our AKAI MPC4000 and that also controls an AKAI Z4 rack mounted sampler. Every track is in loop-mode, no pre-arrangements, and Frank just mutes and un-mutes the individual elements (all one-shot samples from our studio like kick, open hat, closed hat, snare, sound 1, sound 2 etc etcS) to create the arrangement as we play. The laptop we use on stage is just a large
hard drive to load the samples into the MPC and Z4 and is also USB linked to the Z4 which provides a graphic front end so as we play, if some individual sound needs to be adjusted, Frank can quickly go to the page and tweak it. No audio at all runs off it. Sometimes at larger festival gigs we'll have Logic loaded up on it too to use the EXS and trigger some longer one-shot samples off a little controller keyboard like long brass recordings for Daylight Hours and tracks like that. Then, we take all the individual outputs from the Z4 and MPC and feed them into our mixing desk, about 16 lines off those machines. I also have an MPC1000 that I can run extra drums and sequences over that's
synced to the 4000 which sometimes helps transitions between tracks. We also have 2 Lexicon effects units- one reverb and one delay and the delay is also synced to 4000. I also have an iPod that I play atonal noises from that I can fade in and out over the mix. Manuel has a keyboard (we replaced our dying Nord Lead 1 with a Roland synth) and a TC Helicon voice processor that's great at thickening, vocoding, compressing, pitchshifting and all kinds of weird processing on his voice. He runs those things through a little sub-mixer and that comes down into my desk so we end up with about 28 channels or so of audio that I mix, EQ and effect. Separating as many channels is really important for us because its great to be able to highlight different sounds for different gigs by EQing and just changes in level. It makes for a pretty rough set-up and isn't the most pristine, perfect sounding mix coming off the stage but we think its more important have as much control and ability for adaptation than it is to have a CD quality sound.

How did you guys first get together in the first place? Was this a school band? And how did you get signed to a major label?
Infusion started in 1994 but Manuel and I actually met in 1988 in high school and started writing music together from then (usually a mix of 808 state, Jean Michel Jarre, Genesis, the Cure, Eurythmics and Yello, if you can imagine that). There was a guy called Danny Dunn who got me into acid house, new order and depeche mode around that same time. This was in a city called wollongong, about 1 1Z2 hours south of Sydney. I went to university in 1992 studying film, video and sound art in Sydney and manuel went on to study an art degree in Wollongong. While I was at university, I met with a collective of electronic artists called Clan Analogue and through them met a guy called Ben Askins who consequently was also from Wollongong. What you have to realize is that Wollongong had NO "scene" or any interest in any of the music Manuel and I were into so meeting a guy into the same music who was from there was eye opening. I invited him to come over to my house with his Juno keyboard and we had a big jam session that lasted a few hours- just running little sequences live on Alesis MMT8 machines and playing stuff over the top and syncing a drum machine and generally just making it all up as we went along. We had a ball so we thought "we could do this in front of people, like a band!" This was April 10th 1994. So that night, I thought of the name Infusion and asked Manuel if he would like to be involved (he's classically trained and can play all kinds of instruments). So, we started playing raves and clubs in 1994 and 1995. Then, we had to get a keyboard repaired so I took it to my friend's (Danny Dunn, as mentioned before) shop and I met Frank (also a great friend of Danny's) who was working there. He repaired our synth (he studied electrical engineering) and we got to talking and realized he was into similar stuff to Manuel, Ben and I. It turned out that he was ALSO from Wollongong so he came over to my little bedroom studio, wrote a track and I asked if he'd like to be involved in our little live outfit. He eventually said yes. Ben then got more and more involved in his day job and left in mid 1996 so from that point on, it was myself, Manuel and Frank. Our first gig was at the Wollongong University band competition. We didn't get a place. The major label signing to SonyBMG happened in 2003 (When it was just BMG) because we had demos of tracks that we were working on for our album, about 5 tracks and someone at BMG heard them and were keen to chat about it. A few dinners later, we decided they seemed to understand enough about what we were trying to do and after 11 months of contract negotiations, we signed.

What sequencer are you using in the studio to produce your album?
We've been Logic Audio users through and through since
2001.

PC or Mac for production and why?
We were PC users in the studio but recently went Mac simply because of Logic Audio. PC s are still in use, though, because they can do a lot of things that Macs can't. Being able to cross between both is great.

If you use Albeton live are you using the Operator built-in synth to synthesize any of your sounds? It won some awards at the last NAMM show and I was curious who uses it?
Nope, we've never used Ableton. Many other producers we know swear by it and one day we'll look at it but we like our set-up the way it is right now and it works well enough for us. We've never been ones to change for the sake of change- we used a Pentium III 966 up until a few months ago as out main computer before we got our G5!

Do you mainly synthesize all your sounds, or you use a mix of patches that are preinstalled in your synths?
Synthesizing and processing sounds takes up a lot of our time because we love having our own palette of sounds to play with. They come from a combination of a lot of old hardware synths, patching through to external effects processors and tweaking with plug-ins once they get recorded into the computer. Again, its all about find the best of both worlds to get the sound you're after.

What is your favourite sampler? There seems to be so many.
Well, live, we can't go past the MPC4000 but we don't use it to sample as such. After we create all our sounds in the studio or our bedrooms, we just import them into the MPC and Z4. We record our synths down as audio into Logic or, on the PC, using Soundforge and tweak from there so we don't have a need for a real sampler as such. We do use a couple of soft samplers, though like EXS and I'm in love with Kontact 2. We used to have an Kurzweil K2000R which was pretty awesome but bloody heavy.

Did you ever use your own drum kits by recording your own drummer?
On Six Feet we used a drummer friend of ours and recorded him at a good studio here in Melbourne and we cut up what he did but not too much. We want to do a lot more of that for the next album because we love the sound of real drums we treated properly. They still need to punch, though. Adam Freeland and his co-producer Damian Taylor know how to do that really well. We're jealous of them!

What monitors do you use for your production system? Are Dynaudio systems in use in the Australia? Is there a standard in Australia?
We use Mackie 824s. They're great for writing/listening on and have a good bottom-end for small speakers. They can sound a little bright in our room but I really like them. A few of our friends with money have Dynaudios and they're good but we do like the sound of the Mackies. It's a very personal thing and just comes down to whatever you enjoy listening to and get to know inside and out. We've never been ones to buy standard gear because it's standard, just whatever we're comfortable with. The only standards I know in Australian studios are NS10s.

What other residencies do you host/play atSany other weekly/monthly events?
Nah, we don't do residencies. We're too all over the place location-wise to commit to a residency. It's kind of hard, too, with 100kgs plus of equipment. It's a little different to just carrying records. It doesn't make sense for us, either, as a band to do a residency. Though if Fabric ever proposed that to us it might be a different story...

Where is you favorite place to play so far? You guys have been touring everywhere!
Choosing a favourite place is hard because so many places are amazing for so many different reasons. We really lucky to be able to play in so many cool countries and most of the time the crowds have been pretty awesome. Argentina is up there, as is Tokyo, Manchester, London, Toronto and most of the cities here in Australia. There are too many. It's nice to have problems deciding which place is the best and I'd never get complacent about that!

How did you like playing at "Creamfields"? Looks like allot of people there!
I',m assuming you mean Creamfields in Liverpool this year? It was a little odd. It was amazing to see so many people out there in front of the stage (about 15-20,000 or so) and they really got into it but we only had half an hour to play which, for a festival is pretty close to being normal but considering the way in which we play, it's barely enough time to warm up. That day we also played with our UK guitarist and bass player which we like doing at larger events because it gives us more scope in what we can play. It was a good day but would have
been nice to play at least three
times longer.


Goto page 2

INTERNATIONAL LIVE ACT Coverage:

INFUSION

Record Label Affiliations: Sony & BMG recordings

Interview Oct 2005

Interviewed by Somsay.