How did the band Double Happiness come together, and what is the story behind the formation of the group?
Most of us used to play together in a Garage Punk band called PLEBS, so that’s how we know each other. Double Happiness is a kind of reincarnation of an old solo project I had. The idea was to do a Vaporwave take on Shoegaze using sampling and live guitar. That kind of fell off, but when PLEBS finished up I had a few tracks kicking around that I brought to the others to get things started.
We had heaps of logistical things to think about, because all of this stuff was essentially electronic music with live instruments, and we were all used to playing in punk bands. We used to just have two guitar pedals in a backpack and throw them on the ground and then go look for someone who could lend us a pick, but we can’t really do that with this kind of thing.
How does the band navigate the fine line between artistic expression and accessibility in the creation of new music?
You go in with the most outrageous idea you can think of. Something extreme, personal, weird – your vision, completely uncompromised. Then you put on your listener hat and ruthlessly gouge chunks out of it, with no regard for the original concept, until it sounds listenable. These processes work against each other, so it’s good to keep them separate and do them in that order. The first one is for when you’re staring down a blank page. The second one is for when you’re reviewing everything you’ve ever made and noticing that it’s not very good.
You also have to move on quickly when it doesn’t work. I gave the Speedcore Bossa Nova idea that I had maybe 90 minutes before moving on, for example. There was a band called McDonald Duck Eclair that actually pulled that off, but even when trying to copy them note for note, I couldn’t make it work, and you gotta just call it when that happens.
I have almost no control over how a track or idea will turn out, but I can tell pretty quickly if it’s going somewhere worthwhile. You have to basically remove yourself from the process and just react to what the song is doing – shepherd it where it needs to go.
“Electric Sheep” and “Staring At The Walls” suggest intriguing titles. Can you provide insight into the meaning behind these titles?
Electric Sheep I wrote when there was a lot of debate about whether AI could be sentient, and whether it was a living thing of some kind. The song is about if that turned out to be true, and what it would feel like to be one of these distributed network beings. I imagined it being a kind of nightmare, because these AIs are trained on human interactions, so they would kind of think they were human. “But then if I’m human, why can’t I eat or sleep? Why am I having 10,000 simultaneous conversations across the world” etc.
I never really knew what Staring At The Walls was about, but looking back, I think it’s basically about agoraphobia. Because regardless of how intensely someone might fear the things outside of their home, there’d still be a desire to experience some of these things. So the lyrics are kind of a negotiation between those two states of mind, stuck in a deadlock.
In the song, I made these states of mind two different people just so it’s clearer. One of them is having nightmares of the other going outside and getting hurt or killed, and the other is just counting the days and wanting to leave. But the more I think about it, there more it seems like it’s really just one person.
Are there any challenges or breakthrough moments the band experienced while working on these singles?
For me anyway, it was bringing the songs to the band to learn. I had a lot of lockdown songs that were all purely on Ableton, because I was in this tiny apartment and I couldn’t really make any noise on physical instruments. The songs made total sense on the computer, but when we went to play them they were just rubbish. Not even songs.
As soon as we met up for the first time all the problems became obvious and I wrote these two shortly after that. I say “I wrote them”, but the way that everyone interpreted the tracks contributed a lot, and I was anticipating what they’d think and want to play the whole time, which grounded the tracks in reality a bit. It was like “oh yeah people are actually going to hear and play these, and they won’t immediately understand what I was getting at if I don’t fix them up”. That was also when it became clear that having 12 different synths probably wasn’t going to be practical for the live set.
In terms of production, what techniques or approaches did the band experiment with for these singles?
The production was all bedroom, and I think you can hear it in the tracks. You know when you listen to an old record, something by Led Zeppelin maybe, and you can hear them all hanging out in the room jamming together. You get a clear picture of wood panelling on the walls, pints balanced on over-sized amps, smoke and sweat in the air and the desk all lit up. Whereas with music made on a laptop, it all exists inside the box. There was no performance that was captured at a moment in time, and whenever you play a recording that was made in the box like that, it’s kind of your own legitimate and private performance of the composition that the producer dialled into the computer.
I love both these kinds of recordings, and I guess I wanted a little bit of each. So I tried to keep the mics far away, and to generally keep things pretty raw. There’s a few bits where you can hear my chair creaking or the cat in the background, but I also used heaps of software synths. Actually I think all the synths were done on Massive and FM8, because they were easy to get when I was a kid and I just never felt like I needed to do something that they couldn’t handle.
The simplest way I could put it is to say that I was trying to capture the atmosphere of my room and treat that sound as a sample to make loops with and build an electronic song out of.
How do you stay connected with your artistic roots while embracing innovation and evolution in your music?
This might contradict my answer to the second question a bit, but I think there’s a bit of a false dichotomy between being true to your vision and being relevant to audiences. Like if you’re in another country for example, you want to say what you mean, but you have to say it in a language that people there will understand. It’s more like that. It’s not that there’s a true set of notes that we need to play or a specific artefact that we need to produce, it’s more like an interaction that we want to create.
It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of like anything in music, I guess. It’s not any specific notes that make a chord major or minor, it’s the distance between the notes. It’s not any hit of the drum that sets the BPM, it’s the time between the hits.
So I think what’s important isn’t the exact sounds we make, but how those sounds interact with the people that hear them. Doing that translation from notes to human experience is easily the most difficult thing I’ve ever tried to do, and I’m always completely surprised by the effects of combining different words with different sounds. But anyway, to answer your question, that’s how we try to do it. If you think of it as a conversation, you don’t have to compromise anything.
As a band, what goals and aspirations do you have for 2024, considering the momentum generated by the release of your singles?
We’ve gotta get an album out this year so that we can finally quit music and get real jobs.
But aside from that, another big goal is to get more darkwave into the live set and work out how we can perform it as a band. I really don’t want to involve the laptop on stage and be staring at it like some office bugman through the whole show, but you gotta buy so much equipment and sync up all this midi in order to go without it, so it’s been a challenge. I reckon in a couple months we’ll have it worked out though.
Once we have a set put together with shoegaze guitars, darkwave sequenced synth bass and post punk songwriting I think it’s going to really blow peoples’ heads off.
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