Cut Copy: New sounds and secret weapons

22 November 2010

by Jason Treuen

Zonoscope isn’t just the title of Cut Copy’s new album, it’s the name of their new secret weapon. The band won’t say what the instrument is or what it looks like, but they do credit it with inspiring much of their new material.

“We built it from scratch,” explains guitarist Tim Hoey. “Whenever we were working on a track and stuck for ideas, someone would suggest that it needed more Zonoscope. Then the song would truly begin to take shape.”

While it remains a mystery for now, it’s indicative of their hands-on, DIY approach that also saw the Melbourne group use pots, pans and old mattresses to create their third record, the follow-up to their #1 ARIA Album, In Ghost Colours.

After arriving home in early 2009 from countless laps around the globe, the band (Hoey, singer Dan Whitford, drummer Mitchell Scott and new addition/bassist Ben Browning) threw themselves into the studio almost immediately, renting a warehouse in Melbourne and “camping” there for the next 12 months.

“It was a pretty lo-fi studio set-up there and we didn’t have heaps of expensive recording gear. We built these drum enclosures out of mattresses and used a lot of strange percussions or found objects like pots and pans and whatever we can get our hands on,” Hoey recounts.

Locked away in their makeshift HQ, the band also fell in love with the Fairlight CMI, one of the earliest synthesizers.

“We were really fascinated by it. It sounds archaic, but not in a real cool vintage synth way. It sounds kind of daggy. We listened to a lot of records that used it – Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, Peter Gabriel, Todd Rungren records… It was the beginning for a lot of the tracks.”

And for the first time in the band’s lifespan, they jammed. “I’ve never considered us a jamming band. The idea’s always been quite repulsive for me, but still aren't exactly of Santana standards though.”

As repulsive as it seems, it’s also the final stage of their nine-year trajectory that saw Cut Copy start as Whitford’s producer project and bloom into a full-blown band. But for all the change, Hoey still maintains that Zonoscope isn’t a departure from the band’s shimmering organic/electronic hybrid-pop but rather just the next step in their evolution.

“It’s more an overhaul of our sonic palette,” he explains. “We used different synthesizer sounds, different combinations of pedals, controlled noise rather than straight guitar feedback and Dan has approached his singing in a different light.

“We were really interested in creating a very hypnotic record. It starts out as a transcendental meditation and ends with a very euphoric hedonistic 16 minute epic reminiscent of the Manchester scene without really sounding like it was from that time.”

After leaking teaser track Where I’m Going back in July, Cut Copy’s first single proper will be Take Me Over, which goes to radio this week. It’s a bouncy blast of ‘80s electro-pop complete with fat, woozy synth, home-made percussion and at the other end of the spectrum, a choir.

Listen to Take Me Over here
Cut Copy - Take Me Over (Premiere) by modularpeople

“It’s certainly one of the more pop moments on the album,” says Hoey. “It also features this soul vocal ensemble we recorded in Atlanta with [engineer] Ben Allen. We used them on a few tracks in reference to David Bowie’s Young Americans and early ‘90s acid house records like Primal Scream’s Screamadelica.”

Now out of the studio and with Zonoscope penned into the schedule (it’s out February 4 through Modular), Cut Copy are feeling a lot of things – anxiety, anticipation, sunlight – but one thing they’re blissfully unaware of is pressure. That’s despite In Ghost Colours earning them global success and universal acclaim (tastemaker website Pitchfork scored 8.8 and named it the fourth best album of 2008).

“For us all our goals are artistic ones and the only pressure comes from that internally – are we achieving exactly what we want to say on the record? We’ve always maintained that if you’re being completely honest with what you’re doing, youre going to find an audience for it. You don’t want to be compromised by the idea of an album being voted ‘Album of the Year’ or getting on commercial radio.”

For them, a far more pressing issue is designing their new, “more theatrical” stage show for the new year.

“We really want to change the live set and make it reflect old Talking Heads shows,” explains Hoey. “We’ve created a whole world for this record and we thought it’d be really great to make a show that reflected that, as opposed to just jumping around and telling other people to jump around.”

But don’t expect the band to tour themselves silly like last time. This time around, the lads are planning a limited run of tour dates before returning to the sweet confines of the studio.

“We definitely want to put a cap on touring this time so we can get back and make another record really quickly,” reasons Hoey. “After this one, we had so much music left over so if we don’t go on tour for a month we could have it ready… We have heaps of little sketches of ideas sitting around on the hard-drives.”

No doubt the Zonoscope’s already on stand-by.