Your New Favourite Band: Outshine Family interview

Hey, no problem. The lines are a bit blurry actually, as the ethos of what I/we do hasn't really changed overall, although since the name-change to Outshine Family whilst living in London, the band has become more simple and specific than it had been for a while, with primarily John Chantler, Carina Thoren and myself. The idea was to be able to constantly shift shape and work freely with musicians and friends, so the incarnations have been different in different parts of the world.

Function's The Secret Miracle Fountain seemed to take you in a huge variety of directions, and yet to your great credit it still worked well as a composite whole. While it still manages to pack a lot in itself, would you regard Galeria De La Luz as a somewhat more straightforward and/or cohesive record?

Thank you. Yes, I do see Galeria... as a more compact communication, although I don't tend to think of that in positive or negative terms. To me, many of the elements, ideas and themes cross over, but are presented more densely perhaps. Looking back now, this was partly my intention, but things rarely go as planned and that's part of how this music occurs.

The last record was produced across some twelve countries with the help of around thirty people; this time, however, you seem to have recorded with more of a core group. What impact did that kind of focus have on Galeria...?

There were actually even more people on this record, but you're right, there is something of a relatively close-knit guild that makes up its core. I guess it has made the instrumentation perhaps more cohesive, i.e. having Quinlan Kirchner and Matthew Golombisky as the cracking rhythm section on a good few tracks helps glue it together. The whole Chicago crew I was hanging and working with brought a lot to it; the orchestral sessions that appear on various tracks also helped it all sit together.

Did you make a large part of it in London, or had much of it already been completed by the time you moved there? As someone who has travelled quite a bit, how do you find London as a place in which to make music?

It was mostly recorded and mixed in Chicago – much of it with Patrick (Liddell, Chicago composer) – and a bit more was done to it after I moved here. Regarding London: it's such a dense place in so many ways and on so many levels. So it has enormous creative potential, but at the same time it can also be harder to get things done here, because you constantly find yourself up against the survival struggle that naturally ensues in a big modern city, as well as the competitiveness of the industry, the traffic, the increased concentration of humanity's diaspora/fall etc. I've been working really hard on building up my landscape gardening business here in order to try and get some money behind me specifically for buying land in Australia, so unfortunately I haven't actually been doing as much music as I would have liked. But thankfully that's now starting to change this year with much else... Next year, I hope to be recording from home in the Australian bush.

Did you essentially spend four whole years making the album then? If so, was it an on-and-off sort of thing, or were those four pretty intense years?

No, it was actually made a lot faster than that – probably 75% of it happened in 2006 and '07. Those were a couple of fairly intense years of doing music and touring. I've just made some adjustments and tweaks here and there since then, mostly without having access to individual tracks etc.

Were you listening to/influenced by any artists/types of music in particular over that period that you think may have left a mark on the album?

Hmmm... Thinking back, I was really enjoying a lot of the great jazz and noise and academic music I was being exposed to in Chicago at the time. I'm not from a trained background, so I just loved meeting all these guys and gals who could talk music just as well as they could play it; I imbibed a lot there – especially from Patrick, my main coconspirator, whose involvement was pivotal throughout the whole undertaking. My going to Chicago originally developed from a conversation between the pair of us when I had benn living in Northern California, and he was able to assemble the orchestra and many of the players that appear on the album. It was inspiring to see some big bands seriously kicking out the jams – like Tomorrow Music Orchestra on a few occasions... twenty-five people or so on stage, blowing up some wild storms.

I'm really fortunate to know many exceptional musical artists, and I'm regularly nurtured and inspired merely by the many and varied works of my friends. I also don't tend to pay that much attention to media, so am only intermittently aware of great new stuff, mostly brought to my attention now and again by friends.

Galeria... is out via blackmaps, a new label out of London/Tokyo who count an ex-Warp A&R staffer among their number. Tell us a little of what the label is about and how you got together?

Stuart Souter turned up to a Function show at SXSW in Austin in 2006. It was the Locust Music showcase, with Richard Bishop. His response to our performance was totally open-hearted, perceptive and genuine – I knew straight away I had, at the very least, met a good friend. We stayed in touch, and his unbridled passion for music has eventually manifested in his own label, which I'm really happy and honoured to be a part of now. blackmaps have also signed my very close friend and collaborator Pascal Babare, a prolific and uniquely-talented writer of beautiful songs who I am certain will be well-known in the future.

How have you found the reaction to the record so far?

Interesting, in that each review tends to sound like it is reviewing a different record. It has been generally quite good and sometimes exceptional, but mixed overall really; I think it might have confused some people! My best reviews usually tend to come from 64 year-old Wisconsin grandmas on flights – zero rhetoric. That being said, it's always great to hear that people are getting very positively lost in it. A lot has gone into it... We know it's a slow-burner, and that it rewards listeners with decent attention spans.

You’ve also played a few shows – how have they gone? And how easy have you been finding the process of translating the songs to a live setting?

Yeah, it's been fun developing material with John and Carina – both are great company, with such energy and sensitivity musically. We've been playing around with the presentation of the older material... We're doing some totally upside-down versions of a few recorded songs now, while also coming up with some very enjoyable new sounds along the way. It's been a long time for me since a real recording intensive, well overdue.

What’s your plan for the rest of the year then? Are you going to tour some more, or will you perhaps start working on some new music?

We plan on a having creative lockdown somewhere remote in Europe during the summer, to write and develop material for the next Outshine Family record, which is something I'm very much looking forward to... Perhaps then we might look at having some proper studio time back in London or wherever, if we feel it's necessary. Ideally, we'd like to have as much of an album done as possible before I return to live in Australia towards the end of the year. I'm also slowly but surely working on an instrumental record (i.e. more sound-based compositions, maybe without any vocals or much percussion); then we expect to play a bunch more shows in autumn.

And finally, what are some of your own new favourite bands?

How new is new?!? More often than not, my new favourite band tend to be old bands! At present, the list would have to include: Tim Hecker, Richard Skelton, The Drones, Elephant Micah and The Necks.