I’m standing in the doorway of The Espy’s Gershwin Room, with Ben Garden, trying to ascertain whether I need skeletal reconstruction after a decibel-tearing set from his group, Grafton Primary. He’s as apologetic as you would expect, given that he’s still high from the performance. He’s glad I enjoyed it, moreover.
“Funny story that, actually,” Ben’s brother, and co-creator, Josh Garden, tells me months later, ahead of Grafton Primary’s debut album, Eon, launch and tour. “The guy who did the sound, we hadn’t met him before as a sound tech. He does a lot of industrial, hardcore and metal bands…after the show he was telling us that he did all kinds of nutsoid things. I’m glad he did. I’m sure it re-set a few people’s cartilage. Also, probably, printed us indelibly in memories. I don’t know if that always happens, but that’s the beauty of having different sound techs on occasion.”
Not sure how funny that story really is, readers, but it is a lovely summation of how refreshing a conversation with Josh Garden is. He is thoughtful and articulate in discussion. It seems ingrained in his psyche to consider both sides to every story and viewpoint. As someone who speaks to a lot of them, I assure you: being diplomatic, optimistic and kind about musical genres, and a diverse people’s view of them, is not every musician’s forte.
Perhaps it is because Josh and Ben come from a classical background, devoid of arrogant rock posturing. Traversing a childhood of piano, flute and singing lessons, and an adolescence of jazz and contemporary styles, they also appreciated the record collections of their parents. “Some classical, some ‘60s and ‘70s rock. Dad was a big Queen fan,” Josh confirms. The ‘80s sounds of “*Michael Jackson*, Madonna, the Eurythmics – “all those great electronic acts” – were part of the Garden’s development too. However, it was the awakening of the ‘90s, the rise of “house and trance and progressive”, that prompted them to “pretty much jump over.”
“Neither of us wanted to write classical music,” explains Josh. “It was more just a grounding we had in breaking music down into its parts; understanding melody, harmony and arrangements is how it all came together.” How it’s come together indeed. Since their EP, Relativity, was released twelve months ago, Grafton Primary has performed at festivals including the Big Day Out and Good Vibrations.
“It has been a fairly quick turn around,” Josh agrees. “All the material for the album was written since the EP, with the exception of the last track – an idea we’ve had floating around for a few years. We had to build the album around it,” he laughs.
Music theory being a vague memory of my own childhood piano lessons, I can’t appreciate the similarities between classical music and electronica. In the measured tone of a good music teacher Josh suggests, “Go check out Daft Punk. You can hear heaps of classical elements in Daft Punk. One of the things is repetition. It’s almost that notion of drawing people into a higher state, or trance, through use of melody. Rhythm is less of a big deal in classical music. They don’t have a lot of percussion, but at the same time the melody, the harmony, is what you hear in electronica. I think the beat is the main thing that sets electronic music apart from classical. There are a lot of similarities in the arrangements and the more I listen to electronic music, the more I hear them. It seems that a lot of things grow from a lot of other styles, whether other people hear them or not.”
In a previous interview Ben had expressed an interest in using more ‘real’ musicians; more indulgent instrumentation. Is that an idea that translated into Eon? “Not so much,” Josh says. “It’s an album we produced ourselves and there are a lot of live sounds on the album but it’s a real exploration of electronic sounds. We’ve really pushed the synthesiser sounds; we’ve pushed the spaces, the echoes. The actual mixing [of] the album is part of the music, but we’ve tried to give it a real human feel with the electronic sounds. It’s not like lots of blops and bleeps; it’s quite warm, a rich texture. Electronic sounds can be very beautiful and have their own character about them.”
Lyrically, then, Eon is “very much about the present and looking at the future of industry. It has a couple of different paths. One leading to famine, disease, all your Old Testament…There are a lot of issues going on in the world now and a lot of people have that outlook, ‘The whole world has gone down the gurgler.’ There’s another viewpoint which is, ‘We’ll figure this out somehow.’ I think the tension that weighs between those two stories is one that comes through in the lyrics.”
Importantly, for those of you who like to leave your apocalyptic fears at the edge of the dancefloor, Josh cites another dynamic that has been an important factor to his creativity. “I’ve been very much in love for the last few years,” he laughs. “So those two stories have been filtered through my own experience of being in love.”
The anticipated release of Eon will be, as is the trend, followed by a national tour culminating in huge festival shows. The unanswerable question of course: Small rooms or big festivals?
“One of my favourite shows [was] at Pogo in Melbourne. It went off. Everyone ended up rushing the stage. There were about forty people on stage; I was just passing the mic around and screaming into it. It was just unprecedented: the [crowd] were so in the zone, they knew exactly what was happening with the performance and they were really into it. But then, when you see a group of people, en masse, tuning into something, that’s also a pretty powerful experience too. I’ve yet to see it hit that same [Pogo] level with a festival, but that’s partly because festivals tend to be about diversity. So you’re not going to be able to appeal to everyone in the same way.”
Catch Grafton Primary on its Eon launch tour this month.
Fri Sep 5 – Melbourne, East Brunswick Club
Sat Sep 6 – Sydney, Oxford Art Factory
Fri Sep 12 – Adelaide, Jive
Sat Sep 13 – Canberra, ANU Bar
Fri Sep 19 – Brisbane, The Zoo
Sat Sep 20 – Gold Coast, Streetkid
Thu Sep 25 – Wollongong, Wollongong Uni
They also tour as part of Parklife, proudly supported by inthemix. For all the latst check out www.inthemix.com.au/parklife:
Sat Sep 27 – Adelaide, Parklife
Sun Sep 28 – Melbourne, Parklife
Mon Sep 29 – Perth, Parklife
Sat Oct 4 – Brisbane, Parklife
Sun Oct 5 – Sydney, Parklife
shapazz says...
no way....had no idea ben garden was in grafton primary. used to love his remixs of craig obeys old tracks!
Vocoda says...
GP rule! Can't wait to see them at ANU Bar.