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sum of the parts |
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hailed as one of australia's premier live electronic arts nubreed walks way tall in the melbourne breaks scene and now with an album due they are inevitably making inroads on the big bad world. nominated for three dance music awards last year (best debut artist, best live act and best new release), nubreed have also plucked a best new artist second place in the uk's breakspoll awards. things are definitely happening in the breaks crew's camp when we take in to account that the upcoming (and much anticipated) album deal is with mob records. run by dj tayo, mob is the original home of the seminal stanton warriors and it is no small achievement from the three lads to have inked with them. but wait... there's more. nubreed has impressed many with their re-mixes especially in the uk where they hit the uk top 60 singles chart with their re-rub of tiesto and junkie xl. they have also re-mixed way out west, skunk anansie, scritti polliti and groove terminator. big ups for all that but where nubreed have really done the yards, and subsequently earned the kudos, is on the stage. mention nubreed to anybody with half a clue and nine times out of ten their immediate response is along the lines of, 'they go orf'. there is rarely any coincidence involved in a good live show. often the 'magic' that makes a band greater than the sum of its parts is the result of the right chemistry slow-cooked hot-pot style. and so it is with nubreed - jase, mykel and db have been pals for sometime. long-time cohorts even. mykel explains. "the three of us have always worked together musically from a young age because we've always been mates. we've always been stuffing around in bands. it just so happened that we came together at one point, after doing heaps of different things on the side, and thought let's get together and do something. we always knew that there was something there. you know, we just needed to find a way to crack it. you know we had a lot of different influences - hip hop, funk and even at that stage a lot of alternate rock thing. we were always interested in things like drum&bass and then the dance thing opened up for us in the early nineties through drum&bass and we discovered things like house and techno. our first experimentations were with drum&bass and breaky-type things. it developed into what is now nubreed. with the influences of guys like phil k. that whole breaks thing that started with sasha, digweed, northern exposure, we've been riding that wave ever since." all music's organic whether created on guitars, computers or found sounds. it still has to go through organic systems and processes in the human brain. this is where nubreed shine. not just the vehicle of one person's organic processes nubreed indeed has three brains actively involved. mykel agrees with the sum-of-the-parts thing. "with the three of us, you could say we are like a triangle. sometimes it goes a bit scalene, sometimes it goes a bit right angled." isosceles? "oh yeah definitely that one. but it's all on a pretty much an equal basis. we know each other's weaknesses and strengths and try to work either of them accordingly. so we come together with ideas. jase will come up with a beat, he's the beat nut of the three of us. dan and i come together with our ideas, production based melodics and basses and so on. i'll do maybe a three-four hour production at home and try to put together ideas and if it's working i'll take it into the main studio and fling it on the other guys. and without being too precious they'll rip everything apart and put it together in ways that they see things working and ultimately it turns into a nubreed production." after eight months the album is in what mykel termed it's final hour. but guess what? there's going to be more than one record. "coming into the album project we actually had quite a few tracks that we had in mind and they were predominantly dancefloor bases. which was where we'd built a lot of our credo, you know on the club/underground thing. we decided that instead of that we wanted to challenge ourselves and push the whole vocal dynamics. try to write songs as such. it was an interesting journey with that whole blasphemy thing of vocals on breaks. the whole unless it's a female with a beautiful subtle voice it's not going to work. we really flew in the face of that. you could say even a rock type vocal which we found worked really well because breaks are so big in their dynamics. with dan's voice it just fitted so well with what we were writing. however bearing in mind that the label we had just signed to was very much a breaks label that predominantly had a certain sound then we figured that maybe they weren't so appropriate." the end result of that is good news for breakheads as nubreed will be releasing one album in the u.k. and another one here in oz-dom. in the mean time y'all should go catch that mad-breaking nubreed thing in the flesh. |
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credits |
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reproduced without permission from atm oceanic magazine (issue 3). to be used for private and research use only. |
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© copyright 2003 gavin stok. all rights reserved. |
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