No one is banging out a couple of mixes a day. “No one in the band pretends to be a super-pro engineer. the inference: don’t mess too much with the formula or else you might end up sounding like any other jazz funk combo. And it’s the reason why the forthcoming album (‘Mood Valiant’) was, once again, mixed by Perrin and Bender and not some hotshot in L.A. It’s an approach that has served Hiatus Kaiyote well.
Bender had done a bit, and Perrin had been producing his own music for a few years previous to that. We had a digi002 and were just having a crack.
We had a real shitty setup - a bedroom studio of sorts a ghetto shopfront we converted into a control room-slash-rehearsal room. “We produced that first record ourselves, because we could,” recalls Simon “We were all living in a house together. Instead they channel the energy of their early days - when they were all piled into a share house in Melbourne’s gritty old northern suburbs - jamming and creating great music by chasing a vibe. Sure, they have had technical assistance - Nick Harrera most recently has been helping them with tracking, and they spent a week here and there at Rockinghorse Studios and Park Orchards Recording Studio - but it’s more about keeping momentum in the session than it is to have another independent set of ears or a taste guru. It’s not to say they’re illiterate in the ways of studio science, far from it, but they’re desperate to maintain a wide-eyed, self-conscious naivete… all in service of the vibe. The band’s outrageous success is so based on an apparent, gonzo, ‘whack this into that and see what happens’ studio work ethic that you get the feeling that everyone is wary of recording their new album in a traditional way… you know, in a recording studio, with an engineer and a producer… that sort of thing.
He acknowledges that the booze-heavy echo chamber might be a killer recording space but sub optimal for video conferencing, and he shuffles the milk crate a little closer to his laptop. “It sounds so cool that I’m recording down here.” Perhaps not a grand piano, but still. Actually, it’s a wine cellar, but hewn out of solid rock under his folks’ house in Tasmania by a South African industrialist. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Bender in a cave when I Skyped him. Which is why all four of the band members - Naomi ‘Nai Palm’ Saalfield (vocals), Paul Bender (bass), Simon Mavin (keys) and Perrin Moss (drums) - are so keen on space creating the right conditions for cool ideas. Their music isn’t so much about faithfully documenting a song or musical ideas, it’s about building a virtual time and place for your ears. Hiatus Kaiyote want to take you places with their music.
#HIATUS KAIYOTE SHEET MUSIC FULL#
Me? I’d put it through a Space Echo, and use a mono tape version full of weird little ‘fuck-out’ tape aberrations. It’s so clean that it’s impossible to tell. I’m thinking, ‘I fucking hate how clean this is right now’! I mean, it could be the world’s most beautiful grand piano recorded in the world’s most beautiful room with million dollar microphones but it ends up sounding so good that it could just as easily be a sampled MIDI piano played in someone’s bedroom. I’ll be driving around listening to the radio and I’ll hear some really shiny pop song. It wasn't until a trip to Rio de Janeiro in late-2019 to work with legendary Brazilian arranger Arthur Verocai on "Get Sun" that the vibe of the entire album shifted.“There’s one thing that trips me up sometimes. Her lyrics, even those written before her illness, took on a prescient quality. As Nai recovered, the band turned back to their work with altered perspectives. Nai rushed back to Australia and into the hospital, where she underwent a life-saving mastectomy. Her mother’s death from the same disease was never far from her mind. Then, during a brief swing through the U.S., Hiatus’s frontwoman was diagnosed with breast cancer. By the fall of 2018, backing tracks had largely been laid, ready for Nai’s vocals. The six year journey of the album originally began on the road, as they began to add new material to their live sets in while touring in support of Choose Your Weapon. Behind everything is Hiatus’ familiar sense of musical adventure, their knack for making the complex sound simple. The result is an album that relaxes into a groove: sunlit, sublime, masterful. Mood Valiant has been in the making for six years, but that interval reflects more hustle than hiatus.
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