For the past few months talk about town over the lockout laws has been rattling everyone’s bones. The fear of losing our once vibrant and iconic nightlife and live music scene has really chucked everyone in the deep end. And while a travesty such as this could leave us all wandering aimlessly, quite the opposite has happened, the community has banded together, shouting from the top of their lungs.
We’ve been writing it on the walls and signing petition after petition to save Sydney and tell Mike Baird exactly which pipe he can stick his lockout laws in to go and smoke it….within a 10 metre radius of course.
Rattle Sydney is the event fanning the dying flame of Sydney’s nightlife. SUIIX will be there, and they’re telling us everything we need to know about it.
Rattle is just this, a celebration and statement to all things great about Sydney’s live music scene, with a killer line up including The Ruckus, Kallidad, Thunderfox, King Colour and SUIIX. Hosted by the Botany View Hotel in Newtown, the event is sure to be an absolute banger and rouse up the masses to take a stand and reclaim our great city.
Happy got in touch with Sydney outfit SUIIX to get an idea of what to expect and where these guys stand on the changes that have been washing over our nightlife.
HAPPY: You guys have just come back from Brisbane and Bigsound, the biggest music conference in Australia, it wasn’t your first time…how did you find it second time around?
SUIIX: Intense but fun! Because we don’t have management at the moment I had meetings from 10-6 on the day of our showcase and then had to jump on stage not long after to perform and it felt a bit weird switching to a completely different headspace. Then we had a few sound difficulties, but we think the show went ok! We somehow spent the rest of the night at Dominoes…shoutout to Newfarm Dominoes – 5 stars.
HAPPY: What have the lockouts and amendments to lockout laws meant to you guys? What do you hope for Sydney in the next phase of live music?
SUIIX: Well the closure of so many live music venues as a result of the lockout laws has meant that all of the shows we’ve played in Sydney this year have occurred at the same, very small handful of venues remaining. There’s obviously so much less buzz happening around the city now and tourists are even being told to bypass Sydney and go to Melbourne for nightlife and live music.
In response to growing concerns, our guitarist Robbie has started a new campaign called “Keep Sydney Closed” which makes absolutely no sense. You can learn more about this movement right here, have your say!
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HAPPY: Rattle! How did you come to be on the lineup?
SUIIX: They asked us and we said yes :)
HAPPY: How important are events like this to young musicians such as yourselves and can we expect to see more in the future?
SUIIX: Well we need to keep sending out the message with events like this, and protest rallies, that the current restrictions are detrimental to the cultural reputation and character of this city. If we become complacent or comfortable with these laws, they’ll never change and #casinomike wins.
HAPPY: Having played around Australia, where did you find the best live music scene and is there something Sydney could learn?
SUIIX: Melbourne is the obvious choice but I’m going to go outside of Australia and say Berlin because the main difference I noticed was that people there don’t care as much about who you are, whether they’re friends with your friends or how much buzz you’re getting, they’ll go to your show purely because they don’t know anything about you.
I headlined my first show at full capacity (yeah it was only 60 people but still) in Berlin with one song on my Soundcloud, it was really unexpected, but it happens all the time there. I think we need to make more of an effort here in Sydney to go and check out music we’ve never heard of.
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HAPPY: You’ve also just released a new single Pacific Dreamer! Congratulations! Some great names behind it, including Grammy Award winning William Bowden of King Willy Sound. How did this come to be and how was the overall production process?
SUIIX: Thanks! Pacific Dreamer is kinda unusual in that it was originally an assignment for my music production course that was never intended to be a SUIIX song. I was experimenting with manipulating samples (the bass is constructed out of the whirring sound of an electricity generator) and listening to a lot of ambient electronic music at the time and watching this Russian film about mermaids and trying to make sense of these feelings I was having towards someone.
All these influences melded together and created this moody underworld pop thing. The SUIIX tunes I’m working on now are quite different, but it fits pretty well with the debut EP coming out next month.
HAPPY: What advice would you have for young musicians trying to make it in this new climate of limitations to the live music scene?
SUIIX: There might be some artists starting out who try to play it safe and be ‘radio friendly’ due to the relative lack of music subcultures and underground scenes here (compared to places like Berlin).
To that sentiment I would say don’t be reluctant to play music that doesn’t have an audience or fits a scene here. You just need to carve your own niche. Sydney needs more of that. SUIIX will come and see you play and support you. #KeepSydneyWeird
HAPPY: With Pacific Dreamer, you actually produced the single, what was the reasoning behind that choice?
SUIIX: I’ve always produced my tracks independently in the past but yeah, it can be challenging working on your own sometimes. This year’s been particularly hard because I was recovering from a pretty serious illness I was in hospital for which slowed progress down for me a lot.
Recording and producing songs myself gives me a lot more time and freedom to experiment. As fun as it is recording in a studio with a band and engineer, I feel most intimately connected to my music when I’m recording in my home studio, it feels more pure.
HAPPY: Finally, the cover art for the single is absolutely stunning, how did this come to be and how important is the visual to your act and your music in general?
SUIIX: I used my photoshop 101 skills to manipulate this artwork of Iceland by Irene Talley which I blended with a digital image I made and added glitchy colour effects to. I always imagine visuals when I make music so it’s cool to see if I can recreate some of those ideas in my head, though I’m really not great at photoshop at all.
This image of a figure being submerged in this colourful sea of feeling is supposed to be both ominous and hopeful. It’s about the experience of processing emotion and making sense of it, and I think that represents the overarching theme of the music in general. I’ve always liked the idea of constructing these landscapes and worlds in music as a way of expressing human experience and emotion and somehow finding a sense of truth and meaning within that.
