The Brag

Oscar + Martin
Living The Highlife
By Luke Telford

Earlier this year, Melbourne’s Oscar + Martin released their first album, For You. It’s charming and playful, indebted as much to modern RnB and hip hop as to avant-garde pop. And it sounds as though they don’t take any influence for granted; one track plays like mutant doo wop, underpinned by naggingly dense percussion, and the next almost resembles a tranquilised Usher tune, with little but rubbish-tip percussion to cling to amidst indolent swirls of bubbling, textural synth. Listened to as a whole, one of the most striking things about the record is its consistency; it’s clear the pair share a few ideas about music.

“We both really appreciate the idiosyncratic side of sound,” says Oscar Slorach-Thorn. “We like finding objects and using tape and broken things – obscure sounds and interesting rhythms. But then we also really appreciate RnB and pop and that kind of stuff, in a very similar way. We both like romantic stuff, too. And stuff about dancing.”

Dancing. That’s one thing this music can lord over most of its peers in Australia. Without any contrivance or apparent pretence, an Oscar + Martin live set somehow manages to make everyone in a room move unselfconsciously. Arrangements melt and become malleable, billowing into jams in which both members abandon their instruments to cut loose along with the crowd. That it manages to successfully pour elements of highlife and Afrobeat into an already packed sound can be understood in the context of the music that informed the record. “I was listening to a lot of soul at the time – like Curtis Mayfield and Al Green and Marvin Gaye. But there was also stuff like Flying Lotus,” says Oscar. “With the highlife stuff, Martin’s parents run a thing called the Bawat, which is an international music thing. I really like to dance to it, and like the feel of stuff like that.”

Perhaps most importantly, For You reveals two young dudes who have their heads firmly screwed on with respect to the process of writing and arranging pop music. Some of the tracks sound as though they only just hold together for all of their generic allusions and muted weirdness, but everything – from rudimentary guitar to happy accidents arising out tape-loop experiments – has been carefully considered. This respect for the elements of a piece of music makes sense in light of Slorach-Thorn’s other musical love. “I listen to a lot of modern classical stuff like Benjamin Britten, Gavin Bryars, and Steve Reich,” he says. “I listen to that probably about 50% of the time.”

Curiously, he has the most to say about spiritual minimalist Arvo Pärt. The appeal of this composer to him is apparently ineffable, although Oscar does his best to explain it. “Arvo Pärt I listen to more than anything,” he says. “To me, it’s the sense of relationship within his music and the fact that there are clear melodic figures – the way that there is, within his music, a sense of strife and a sense of grief and flaw, and struggle. And within that music, as well, an absoluteness that comforts that struggle, holds it to itself, and caresses it within. Every single sound is so equally important.” This throws new light onto For You. Note how whole the pieces sound, in spite of their disparate and sometimes eccentric elements. It’s even more remarkable given that Oscar’s method of composition couldn’t be more different from how you’d imagine Pärt would write. “Most of my songs I write while riding my bike,” he says, “so I’m quite adept at doing chest hits and clicks and claps and stuff to make a beat – and I’ll just sing along to that while riding.”

Far from an indie affectation, this has more to do with the peace and absence of distraction that often accompanies exercise. “Your body’s just in a loop, and your mind has more space than it ever does, really,” he says. “You’ve just really got this internal place that you can kind of contemplate on things, and things just come up into your brain. They just sort of appear.” Once the spark of an idea has emerged, Slorach-Thorn spins it into perspective by recording and re-recording demos. Given that this results in a number of final versions for some tracks – ‘Chaine Maile’ has no fewer than three finished versions – and that the music itself is so intricately layered, it comes as something of a surprise that no remixes have yet surfaced. “It’s actually a bit heartbreaking,” he says. “We’ve set up a whole bunch of remixes, but the hard drive we had all of our sessions on carked it, and it’s been getting file restoration done. We’re picking it up tomorrow, actually, and then we’re going to be sending out a lot of stems to hopefully get four or five remixes done over the summer.”

For such a restless-sounding act, it’s unsurprising that they’ve got a lot in the pipeline for 2012. Besides producing a hip hop record for a friend, Oscar shyly admits a solo record will see the light of day in the next few months, as well as more O+M material shortly thereafter. “Martin and I have a bunch of work that we are developing, and kind of figuring out. We definitely want to make another album, and possibly not play as many shows in the mid-year – and then I would, ideally, like to take the music overseas.”

What: ‘What I Know’ single launch
With: Mrs. Bishop, Flume, Conics
Where: Oxford Art Factory
When: Friday December 16