The Brag

Seekae
Sharp Cuts
By Mikey Carr

How do you open this thing?” Alex Cameron asks nobody in particular, as he attempts to extract a newly-purchased Playstation 3 controller from its seemingly impenetrable plastic packaging. He has a butter knife jammed into the back of it and is trying – with little success – to prise it open. “Let me have a go,” John Hassell offers, his efforts proving no more successful. Someone suggests trying to use a lighter to burn a hole in the side, but all that does is vulcanise the plastic and make it even harder and more durable. In desperation, Alex goes to borrow a pair of scissors from the guru next door, and soon their controller is free.

While it might seem irrelevant, this absurd exchange I’m witnessing encapsulates a few very important points about the Sydney outfit: that they’re normal guys, they’re willing to experiment, and they’re maybe a little too enthusiastic about video games. In fact, if you look in the liner notes of their forthcoming sophomore album +DOME (due out this Friday), you’ll notice the band have thanked Blizzard Entertainment for fuelling their bordering-on-unhealthy love of StarCraft.

Since releasing their debut album The Sound Of Trees Falling On People back in 2008 – which the band produced and released themselves, later signing with Rice Is Nice, who re-issued the album – Seekae’s popularity grew exponentially. Their debut was chosen as FBi album of the week (beating Madlib), and was flooded with critical adulation and a very unexpected surge in attention – so unexpected, in fact, that most of the band had decided to go travelling just after releasing the album, meaning they couldn’t capitalise on its success through live shows. “Yeah, we blew it,” Alex says with a laugh.

This easygoing attitude is ingrained in how Seekae approach not only the music but how they work together as well. It’s what fuels the band’s creative process and constant experimentation. “Half the reason we like playing music so much and being in a band together is that we just like to flip it up,” John explains. “We don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, what’s the sound we’re after?’ – it’s just like, if it sounds good we’ll whack it on there. I think that spontaneity is why we enjoy working with one another.”

The new album certainly stays in line with this sensibility, ducking and weaving its way through various different influences within electronica as well as other genres, like hip-hop and modern minimalist classical music. With +DOME running at just over half the time of The Sound Of Trees, Alex maintains that Seekae “covered more ground in 40 minutes on this album than we did on 80 with the last.” He’s not wrong. Where The Sound Of Trees sounds like a complete album, with a degree of sonic consistency, +DOME sounds more like a collection of songs, the band showcasing new ideas and influences, and bending them into their own shapes and forms. “It was quite a transitional period for us in terms of what we were listening to,” John tells me. “When we finished The Sound Of Trees and started work on +DOME, we were really into wonky style music, so there were all these ideas coming out of that. But as the process progressed and we started to write together more and incorporate drums and other live elements, we moved away from all that. [+DOME] changes direction quite a lot.

Having played extensively as a live band in the time between albums, Seekae found the limitations of having to reinterpret music made on a computer too constrictive. Deciding they wanted to re-orient their approach to their recorded music around elements that would work well when played live, +DOME began to take on a more robust shape, favouring a more visceral, direct sound to the ambient quality of The Sound Of Trees.

“The way that our last record was received – and obviously it wasn’t on a large scale or anything – but from the people who were talking about it, what we often heard was ‘Oh, I just put it on and I go to sleep,’ or ‘I put it on when I’m studying.’ That’s kind of cool I guess,” Alex explains, half sarcastic and half dubious, “but for this album we wanted to have more balls, we wanted to have more attitude.” He tells me that when Seekae finally started playing live, they weren’t getting what they wanted out of the shows. “And that sort of shifted our music. That’s why we wanted to get the growling bass and the faster tempos; I think that’s where most of the shift came from. We just wanted more balls.”

“We wanted to create the album out of bounds of a computer,” John adds, “as much as it is a lot harder to do. We changed a lot in terms of how we approach songwriting, which some people may not like – but for us it was definitely the right thing to do.”

Progress is part of the process for Seekae. In making +DOME, what they wanted to avoid more than anything else was repeating themselves; so while certain parts of the album borrow from contemporary trends within electronic music, the band consistently tread new ground on a personal level. “I can see why people might say it’s derivative or what have you,” says John, “but the songs sound a lot less like each other than the songs on The Sound Of Trees. Where one song might sound like one thing, the next song will sound like something else again.”

While many would have been happy with a sequel to The Sound Of Trees, Seekae were never interested in such a project. With almost three years between albums, they have come a long way as musicians, and are still growing and experimenting with their sound. “I think we’re starting to get more of an idea about where we want to head, the more we do,” John says. “We’re moving to England for a few months. We’re going to have a lot of time where we’re just going to be practising and doing nothing else, as well as trying to get some recordings done there – and I think that will really fine tune where we want to head.”

It’s often said that a band’s second album is their most difficult, but talking to Seekae about +DOME you never once get the sense that they ever doubted themselves. Just like their abortive attempts at retrieving a PS3 controller from its packaging, they are willing to try out any ideas with dogged determination. In this sense, we can look at +DOME not as an album in itself but as a document of a band in transit; a slice of where they’re at now and a signpost to where they may go.

Who: +DOME is out on March 25 through Rice Is Nice/Popfrenzy
Where: Manning Bar, Sydney University
When: Saturday April 16