The Sonic Men in the Fluffy Suits

Originally published in Tabula Rasa – the Swinburne Student magazine Mar 2002

After the underground success of Orchid For The Afterworld, SonicAnimation have follow up with another dynamic album, Reality By Deception. Ian Bennington caught up with Adrian Cartwright and had a chat about Mariah, the Techno-Tubbies and breaking into the music scene.

Tabula Rasa: What sort of musical influences have you had?
SonicAnimation: As far as inspiration goes, one of the main bands that influences me was Underworld. And The Prodigy (too). I guess it’s the way that they put vocals into dance music and it’s not cheesy.

TR: You toured with The Prodigy a little while ago.
SA: Yeah, they were fantastic.

TR: I can hear their influences in your music.
SA: We’re trying to keep our own sound, so we don’t listen to any one band too much. Basically in the past year I’ve just been listening to various radio stations, all different styles of music. About the only thing I don’t like is opera and R&B.
TR: Opera is a bit slow
SA: and R&B just drives me crazy. (And there’s) too much of it. I’m sick of being bombarded with it. Whenever you watch Saturday morning shows on TV and they have all that Mariah Carey sort of stuff. You can basically get any piece of music and put any other vocal line over the one that they’ve written, it is that similar.
TR: I guess that’s the problem with that sort of music, distinguishing between the tracks.
SA: It’s all about how they look as well as much as anything else.

TR: A lot of the video clips now are close to softcore porn, as opposed to some of your film clips. There’s the one with the two…
SA: Robby and Theo
TR: Yeah, the techno-tubbies. They’re fantastic.
SA: That’s our favorite, and it was done so cheaply as well. We made those costumes ourselves – well, we got a costume designer to help with the difficult bits. It was a lot of fun. We were tearing our hair out at one stage, but we got ’em together.

TR: Where did the idea come from?
SA: It was actually from Morgan Evans who directed and stared in out last clip. He also did Love Lies Bleeding for us and Frontside’s LBP. We originally thought, lets get some really trashy old bear costumes from a costume shop and completely annihilate them. Then we though we would rather make our own. So we got a friend of ours that we used to work with called Don de Monty who drew up with the original designs for us. We worked closely with that design, he is a really good artist. It was so much fun putting that clip
together. That scene at the end where it’s in a nightclub, we invited all our friends to the nightclub and we dressed up outside. They didn’t know what was going to go on. It was really, really good.
TR: How hot are those costumes?
SA: Those original ones were terrible. It was like wearing two doonas, ‘cos they’re all foam inside. We’ve had new ones created for when we are touring that have a backpack with a fan in it. The whole thing is lined with parachute material inside and it all inflates. It’s all very comfortable.

TR: What do you think about using samples from other peoples work in your music?
SA: In the past we’ve sampled other people. It tends to be so much of a nightmare getting samples cleared so now we do our own samples. We get friends of ours who are really good at afflicting their voice and making it sound a bit different, getting them to say particular things or copy things that we’ve heard from somewhere. Apparently when you copy things it’s all right, it’s not a sample. You’ve got to be really careful with samples and it’s such a nightmare these days that it’s not worth it.

TR: You guys have been together for about ten years now…
SA: Yeah, we were in a band together before this, Scarlet Garden which started in about 1994…
TR: You must have seen the evolution of the Australian dance scene?
SA: Yeah, we were very much a part of that, which was quite exciting. I got into it around about ’94. Rupert was overseas in the UK before then. Around ’88/’89 he was going to all acid house parties, so he’s been in it for a long time.

TR: Back then there wasn’t much happening on the Australian scene. What do you think of the way Australia has evolved? Have we created out own persona or are we just copying what’s happening overseas?
SA: A bit of both. Australian dance music has got its own sound. It even varies from state to state, you get a distinct sound from what people are into. There are so many subcultures now as well. There are hundreds of subcultures to what is collectively known as dance, it’s quite incredible. We were in a documentary a couple of years ago and the (filmmakers) were putting together a one hour show. They had done their research and though there was about four or five subcultures. They found something like thirty and they ended up with about 200 hours of footage to put into one hour.

TR: Do you have any advice for bands starting out and people producing their own music?
SA: Yeah, if you are looking to get signed up and go the way that we did, I would say the best thing to do is get out there and network with as many people as possible. I hate that word ‘network’’but get out and talk to as many people as possible. Don’t just limit it to record labels, talk to people who run festivals, talk to booking agents and people like that. Don’t give up, it took us a long time. People like to see that you’re not going to give up before they get interested. They want to know that they can pour a lot of money into you  and you’re not going to disappear tomorrow.
TR: That you’re not going to have a breakdown and disappear.
SA: It does get hard, it doesn’t get easier.

TR: You were signed to Festival after years as an independent. How much difference did that make?
SA: It’s one of those common misconceptions that you’re best to go with the small independent labels, but I don’t think that is true anymore, ‘cos you have to be successful.
Singing up to a big label has been fantastic from our point of view. One of the things we were able to do is say we wanted full creative control. That’s the most important thing
because they will try to manipulate what they want you to do. We’ve got a great label and they’re just letting us do our own thing and that makes all the difference. I know money is not an issue with a lot of artists, but it can become an issue after a while. If you’ve got the money to do what you want – to create something good then that is so much better.

TR: What about promotion and distribution?
SA: You have to let a lot of your control go, so you have to trust the people who are going out there and doing that stuff, that they are going to do a good job. You work really
hard to put the product together and one person could let the whole side down.

TR: Where do you want to go from here?
SA: We came really close to going gold on the last album and we really wanted to do that. Beyond that we want to go overseas and try a few countries like Japan. We reckon’ that we would go pretty well over there so we want to try that. Especially with the big hairy creatures, they’d love that over there!