Architecture In Helsinki
The Australian band Architecture In Helsinki first came together as a high-school project in Albury, New South Wales. In 1999 the trio of Cameron Bird, Jamie Mildren and Sam Perry moved to Melbourne and within a year had become a quintet with the addition of James Cecil on drums and Kellie Sutherland on clarinet. The band further expanded to eight member for their 2003 debut album Fingers Crossed, which introduced to the world an unconventional collective with an unconventional sound, rooted in a distinct melding of instruments and roles. They built on this success with a second album, 2005’s In Case We Die, which received three nominations at the ARIA Music Awards the same year.
In this lecture at the 2007 Red Bull Music Academy in Toronto, four of the band members sat down to discuss their roots and reveal the influences that lie behind their panoramic sound, from old calypso to out-there ’60s production mavericks.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt Good morning, everyone, just fresh off the night liner, about half or two-thirds - mathematics was never my strong point - please give a warm welcome to
Architecture In Helsinki. So how many people are we still missing? James Two. Torsten Schmidt Just two? But there used to be more, right? James There used to be eight, now we’re six. Torsten Schmidt So the whole slimlining thing has come to Australia as well. James Yes, economic rationalism. Torsten Schmidt Everyone was a bit confused because obviously with the dear Howard government,
a collective is not the first thing you’d think of with Australia. So how did
you come to this form of organization for a... band? What is it? Cameron Yeah, we’re a band more than a collective. Within the band we’re all into
engineering and production, we’re all total music nerds. We all do a whole
load of other stuff but Architecture is the main thing we do together. Torsten Schmidt Now this whole collective thing with loads of members and interchanging
projects seems to be a pretty popular thing in Australia and New Zealand. Is
there a particular reason for that? Gus Southern air. I don’t think there’s anything in common between them. James We come from Melbourne and there’s a lot of great producers and musicians
there and you want to be able to collaborate with your friends, work with them
and do different things. And that just sort of happens organically. Also when touring with
the band, we spend a lot of time with the same people so it’s nice when you
have the chance to do collaborations with different people, it opens things
up. Torsten Schmidt Before we go into greater detail, can you introduce yourselves and give us an
idea of what you do within the formation? Cameron I’m Cameron, I’m like the project coordinator of some sort. I write the
initial ideas for the songs, sing and do other bits and pieces. That’s one of
the things with the band, we all multi-task and do lots of different things. Gus I’m Gus, I play lots of instruments in the band and get big-headed about the
way I think things should sound [laughs]. I also do lots of other
productions and collaborate with other people as well. James I’m James, I play various instruments as well and I’m involved in the recording and
production of our songs and those of other artists. Sam My name is Sam and I’m pretty well just a straight up musician. I’m the bass
player. James Sam’s a dilettante hip-hop producer as well. He’s very shy about it, but watch
out. Torsten Schmidt So you don’t have to feel too bad that you’re just a musician and don’t dabble
in 800 different fields... So how long are you going to be on this tour and how long have you been on it so far? James Forever. This tour is about four months from start to finish. We’ll be on tour
for about eight months of this year. Torsten Schmidt So when do you actually get to do your music? Cameron That’s the thing, it’s really not recommended if you want to maintain
creativity in your life. Your creative bones are disabled, as hard as you try
and as much as you say you’re going to keep producing music, it becomes
increasingly hard to force yourself to keep that part of the brain working.
You just end up watching TV. Torsten Schmidt So there you are on the tour bus all the time time and all these people who
theoretically could do all these different things. How do you... Once you get to the
recording, because you still need a business card in the form of a record... How do you manage to... I mean, it’s quite a few cooks in the kitchen James Well, we were going to talk about the first single off our new album as a way
of talking about how we work, in terms of producing, so maybe we could start
by talking about that. Torsten Schmidt And then go into all the bits and bobs? James Yeah, just how we got to the finished idea through the various demos and all
the recordings and whatever. Cameron It’s also the only song we’ve ever written on tour, which is an interesting side note. James We have no idea how familiar people are with our music. So we have no idea
whether people want to hear the finished track and then go back and talk about
how we wrote it, or whether you want to wait until the end and go through the
demo stage. Anyone want to vote for hearing the finished track first? Two, OK. Cameron What we would do would be to play all the influences on the production and the
song and all the background behind the song and then play the original demos,
then phase two, phase three, then the final track and some of the remixes and
collaborations that have been done. So shall we start before the track? Torsten Schmidt Start from the beginning. Cameron This track started out, it was just something we came up with just walking
down the street or whatever. We try to keep a happy medium between working in
the computer realm and the more traditional realm. We’re all about trying to
make computer-recorded music have an element... As a band we’re all hugely into dance
music but we all come from a rock background. I think that we’re always trying
to fuse together the sound of sequenced music, but playing it live. That’s
something we’re really conscious of not doing on this record, and particularly
on this song, was giving it that dance music vibe but having an organic feel
to it. Initially, the idea for the song came from the song “Brown Girl In The
Ring”, one of
the initial influences, but also Alan Lomax, who’s an American field recordist. Torsten Schmidt That was quite a while ago. People claim it to be the first recordings of popular music. Cameron Yeah, that’s right. And to us, the way he works as a musician, or artist, or
whatever he is, documentarian, is really inspiring. He goes out to these
native communities and records music and song in its most pure form, before
there’s any notion of commercial gain. To me the most inspiring music is music
that comes completely from the soul and there’s no other motivation for making
it. In actual fact this is recorded by Alan Lomax, though it’s not the
original version which was the inspiration. This is Lord Invader, who’s a calypso
singer, and this is from a recording Alan Lomax did of “Brown Girl In The
Ring”, which is a traditional Caribbean schoolyard chant, or a folk song. And
this is done in New York in the ’50s by Alan Lomax. (music: Lord Invader - “There’s A Brown Girl In The
Ring”) (music: The Esso Trinidad Steel Band - “I Want You
Back” / applause) James OK, that was like drinking four coffees for me. I had four coffees already and
that woke me up twice as much. So next maybe we can play the Aloe Blacc. Cameron Basically, there’s like a few different elements that we were trying to draw
together in doing this. One of the other things was Trevor Horn productions and
in particular the Art Of Noise, a 12" called “Moments In Love”. He was a huge influence
for us in the making of our music, just the drum sounds and the synth sounds,
how they all sound like they’re recorded in 5.1 times seven. He has so much
depth in his production. (music: Art Of Noise - “Moments In
Love” / applause) (music: Aloe Blacc - “Patria
Mia”) So that’s some of the contextual soup we’re trying to make this track from and I guess... Torsten Schmidt Writing a track is not exactly a cooking show. You’re not sitting there going,
“I need some more of this.” James We’re just setting the scene, I guess. During the time of writing this album
Cameron moved to Brooklyn, New York, and the rest of us were in Melbourne. The
way we went about writing, Cameron was writing melodies and lyrics, doing
demos and emailing them to us. We’d all work on our little contribution to the
arrangement and that would slowly get assembled in the studio. Then, after
we’d demo-ed everything a couple of times, we’d go into the studio to do the
final recording. Torsten Schmidt Why did you leave Fitzroy in the first place? Cameron Just a change of scenery, a new creative challenge, I guess; to be making
music in a new environment, new city, new people. It’s pretty easy to be very
comfortable in Australia. The quality of life is not dissimilar to here, it’s
relatively cheap to live, the climate’s amazing, better than it is here. It’s
a pretty easy place to be creative, so I guess I wanted to put all of us in a
place where we had to do new things, a way we hadn’t worked before. (music: Architecture In Helsinki - “Heart It Races (Demo)”) James ... it’s actually the oldest song on
the album. That demo, which is the earliest one we have, is already quite
close to the finished recording and it formed the basis for the final
recording we did when we were in New York. Torsten Schmidt How many people were involved in the recording of this demo then? James Pretty much everyone. Cameron James is recording this in the home studio set up that he has and, as you can
probably hear, or any purists would hear, the reverb on there is not out of
the box, but from a plate
reverb he’s
acquired which takes up about half of his house. It’s about as big as that
room, and is how many kilos? James About a couple of hundred. Cameron Yeah, it takes a lot of people to move it. That was the initial recorded demo
version. James It has a lot of percussion. There was a banging basketball recorded as the
original kickdrum. There were recordings of Gus kicking a tin can filled with
water, and gum nuts, which is Australian fauna. Plus some there are some fake
steel drums there, courtesy of the Roland JV
1010, the cheapest Roland synth and a firm favourite of ours. We ended up getting an amazing steel drum
player, a Trinidadian who lives in New York, and on the final version we end
up keeping both because there’s something really cool about the artificial
steel drums. Maybe it was Trevor Horn. Cameron He did laugh when he heard them. James He laughed at us a lot. Cameron It was a pretty amazing experience getting this guy to record these steel
drums. When we first met him we were about to play a show in New York, and
last summer I wanted to learn how to play the steel drums. I went looking for
a community band I could play steel drums with, and I found the New York Steel
Pan Network and contacted them and talked to them about getting lessons. The
teacher basically told me if I wanted to buy a steel drum worth playing it was
going to cost me about $5.000 and the lessons would be about $100 a lesson. So I opted
out of it, but a few months later we found this guy Patrick Davis, who plays
on the record. He was this complete virtuoso who had been playing since he was
four years old. We played him the song once and he basically soloed over the
whole track. We have 15 minutes of him soloing and we only used two parts.
One day we’ll release a 12” which will have a six minute steel drum solo. But the
experience of being in the studio with him - in Australia there’s probably
only about five steel drum players in the whole country - so being in the
studio and trying to work out how to record him with the engineer was an
experience, because we had no idea how to record it or make it sound right. So
that was an interesting part of this song. James We should’ve called Van Dyke Parks but none of us had the courage. Cameron So there’s a great deal of percussion, we sample a lot of it into Roland
SPD-S’s and they’re all played
out live. There’s no, or very little, sequencing of drums. We wanted to keep
the percussion very live and we wanted to have big arpeggiated, swelling synth
effects all over it. It was the kind of song that when we were in the studio
mixing it, it kept growing and growing and getting more ridiculous each time
we mixed it. So, I guess this is where it ended up after all. (music: Architecture In Helsinki - “Heart It
Races” / applause) Architecture In Helsinki Thank you. Torsten Schmidt Those are muscular speakers. James Yeah, they sound great. I have little ones at home, about a quarter the size
of those. They’re great though. Torsten Schmidt When you do write you’ve got so many people involved, but obviously someone
has to take some sort of lead in orchestrating the whole thing, maybe even
conducting. How can one imagine that actual process? Cameron Too many creative minds, you can’t imagine it. James When it works, a lot of the time it’s sort of organic. You can have
disagreements about which direction it’s going to go, but nine times out of
ten it just becomes evident which one is working better. Nine times out of ten it’s
organic and one time out of ten we defer to Cameron. They’re his songs, so we
can have a tie-breaker, basically. When there’s a lot of people in the band
who are interested in being involved in production it can go from being
totally, intensely joyous to being quite intensely tense. But that’s a beautiful thing,
I think. Cameron No physical violence. The next part of the process is collaboration and
remixing with other artists. With this track, at the last count there must
have been about 15 versions of it, from everyone from some guy I found on the
internet who lived in Northern Sweden and did some really crazy sort of Nick
Cave-y cover of it, all the way through to people like
A-Trak and DJ Rupture, who
have done really great mixes and versions of the song. For us, that’s always
been a really super important part of the collaborative process. It’s the best
way to meet other people, to learn a lot about production and broaden our
horizons, everything from programmes to how to get a good drum sound. In the
process of this song, the remixing was where I learned the most. Torsten Schmidt When you say you meet them, are you actually sitting down with them or just
exchanging parts? Cameron A bit of both. Some people, we’ve been in email contact with them for a year
and never met them - someone like A-Trak, who I’ve spoken to like 60-something
times on email and I’ve never actually met him. It’s like that weird thing
with the Internet, you create these relationships with people you never meet.
In some ways, they can be really close friends, but then you don’t have the
reality of meeting them. James Sometimes that helps stay friends. Torsten Schmidt Is that when you’re coming straight off the tour bus? James We smell a lot. Cameron I don’t think we mentioned Chris
Coady, who was the final recording
engineer and mixed the album for us. After we’d done all those demos we went
on tour with a band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for about five weeks, and
then at the end of that we went to Chris’. About ten days before the end of the
tour we still didn’t know who we were going to make the album with. We found
Chris on MySpace and we were incredibly lucky because it was really a meeting
of ears at his studio. It’s a small studio, which he runs with Dave
Sitek, who is part of TV On
The Radio. They’re kind of two total freaks who have this basement studio
where they do all sorts of crazy stuff, like feed drugs to young
impressionable bands so they’ll do what they want. That’s Dave’s production
style. That was an amazing experience, Chris is a genius. He’s also mixed and
recorded Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, Blonde Redhead, !!!, etc., etc., so
look him up, he’s great. Torsten Schmidt You’ve been talking about Van Dyke Parks quite a lot. As well as an arranger
he was also a music nerd and there are some albums that are pretty much
unlistenable to a regular listener. But music nerds will go totally crazy for
them - “Oh my God, the recording here” - like the one with the tour bus in
America. James Yeah, Discover America. Torsten Schmidt It’s almost an audio play. James Yeah, that’s a party album [laughs]. One of them was being offered two-for-
one when it was released because it did so badly. Cameron Warner Brothers pumped so much money into the making of the album [Song Cycle], and when it
came out it was so unaccepted by mainstream standards. There was an advert
running in_ Rolling Stone_ that said if you buy a copy you get two for free [laughs]. A lot of
people hate that record but for a lot of people it’s one of the most inspired
things they’ve ever heard. James And it’s not so bad, because nowadays when you buy a CD you get about 50 for
free, so it’s a pretty good ratio. Torsten Schmidt What I was leading to is, you got all this work going into the actual
recording for people to listen to, may it be on headphones or nice little
speakers. You’re touring about half the year and you can’t take that reverb on
stage with you to create that sound, unless you get a really good rider and
some extra budgets. James In Switzerland. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, Switzerland might do it. But outside of Switzerland how do you rearrange
those songs for doing them live? Gus We have an amazing mixer, amazing front-of-house guy, who brings everything
together amazingly well. He has a lot of experience in being a nerd as well.
He researches what he can do to make us sound great, and we do have a lot of
the original samples from the tracks we recorded on Roland SPD-S drum pads, so
we kind of play the productions again. Torsten Schmidt The front-of-house guy has an incredibly difficult job because there’s no
venue in the world that’s like another. Cameron He takes longer than any other front-of-house guy in the universe. Torsten Schmidt Will you go on at 1:00 tonight instead of 8:00? Cameron Yeah, exactly. He’s really into the Mad
Professor style of
live mixing, live delays with kick triggers and stuff. We’re trying to
recreate the recorded sound while understanding the live thing can never be
the same as the record. It’s about recreating something which is hopefully
challenging. Torsten Schmidt But it’s not only recreating, because on the one hand you’ve got this nerdism
thing to make the ultimate recording, but on the other you’ve got all these
people who come to the show to actually enjoy themselves. Those are
essentially the ones who are paying your rent for the next 20 years. So what
are you giving them? James We’re definitely much more of a live band than we used to be. We used to write
our music in the studio then try to recreate it live. Now, they’re mostly
written and developed on the road as a response to playing in front of an
audience, so we definitely try to engage with the audience and create a
reaction. One thing we’ve noticed with a lot of bands, when they’re very
production-heavy and they’re playing live, they’ll use a lot of backing tracks
and be playing along to click tracks, which is the kiss of death for us. So
many times we see these bands whose records are amazing and live they’re so
boring. We’re not going to name any names, but it’s like they can’t react to
each other. The human interaction is lost live because everyone’s listening to
a computer. The way we’ve struggled with that, we’ve found these amazing
samplers you can play with drumsticks and you can get all these electronic
sounds, usually coming from a sequencer. But we play them all live with
drumsticks. Not to say that what we do is better than that, but that’s our
approach for trying to keep the sonic textures we love from electronic and
sequenced music, but to keep the live performance as a live thing which is
happening between six people on stage. And which can totally fall to pieces at
any moment. Which is a key to being a live band, the possibility that
everything can go wrong is exciting and when that possibility is gone then
instantly it’s less interesting. Torsten Schmidt Now, the way things are going over the last few years is maybe beneficial for
you to a certain degree. Maybe ten years ago there wouldn’t have been a market
for you, so to speak, but now there’s some crossover between indie and the
club people and it seems the white boy is learning to dance again. Or at least
is trying to. James They’re trying. Maybe websites and magazine and forums that were traditionally
indie rock have definitely opened up to hip-hop and dance music. But we find being
labelled as an indie rock band is still something we have to struggle against
because we get categorised as that and a lot of indie rock fans won’t listen
to anything that’s not indie rock. We don’t like being called an indie rock
band, but at the same time it’s great being embraced by the indie media. So
you’re right in that way. Torsten Schmidt So just a bit of time for a spot of shoegazing now and then. So there you are
going out on the road to a city you’ve never been to before and not knowing
what to expect there. Can you take us through some of the typical first 50
moments of being on stage, the general receptions in maybe the past week or
so? James The past week has been good, because this is our sixth or seventh North
American tour, although we don’t always go to Canada. So we’ve built an
audience, which now is really positive, North America has been great in that
way. Touring in Europe is still really up and down for us. Sometimes it’s
good, sometimes it’s: “Oh my God, what are we doing?” It’s often hard to tell
until right at the performance. But the last week has been great. Torsten Schmidt I guess the worst crowds are the industry ones, full of journalists and
professionals, like, “Come on, impress us!” How do you win them over? Cameron Throw things at them. Torsten Schmidt Have you ever had things thrown back? Cameron Yeah, we usually get pelted. It’s not uncommon playing festivals to be pelted
with something, and usually that’s sign of someone not being into your music.
When you’re playing to a crowd of several thousand people and playing the kind
of music we play, the odds are usually that the reactions are polar. So yeah,
for us the romantic notions of playing live are still there in some way.
Because when you play so much you become very systematic about what you do,
the way you set up, and certain things have to go right for us to get our live
show feeling special. We’ve got 25 channels of crap that our mixer is trying
to wrangle. We play live with three synthesizers, drum machines, drums, brass,
guitars, bass, so there’s a lot of things that have to blend in order for it
to work. Torsten Schmidt Is that synched in anyway? Cameron No, vibrations. Torsten Schmidt When you say you’re getting a lot more systematic about it now, no one really
wants to end up in a Keith Richards state of mind. How do you keep that
systematic up? Cameron Coffee and tequila. James And Tupperware. Torsten Schmidt For sandwiches? James No, cables. Cables in Tupperware, that’s the key. Divide all your cables by
category and have a Tupperware container for each one. Cameron We have some pretty ridiculous systems. The longer you go on the more anal you become about every single detail of
your existence. James For example, we have all our cables with colour-coded cable ties and they all
go into a matching coloured bag with our initials on them, so on stage we know
every cable is in the right place. We probably all spend at least an hour
everyday on the bus reorganising our suitcase. It’s a weird mania you get into
when you’re on the bus for long periods of time. Torsten Schmidt I guess, there’s rarely a more annoying than being onstage and you don’t sound
the way you want to sound because of a £2,50 cable. Cameron Yes, that’s true. I feel like this interview is turning ’round into a
psychological… We’re going to start breaking down here. Torsten Schmidt I want you to lay down and I’m going to take you back. You’re in the room and
it’s up and down, up and down. No, so it’s up and down, and after an up gig
it’s usually kind of alright to get on the bus and go to the next city. James If you’ve had a shower. Torsten Schmidt OK, here is the real insight into rock & roll stardom. Showers. James I feel we may be boring the hell out of everyone. Torsten Schmidt It’s just a preparation for keeping it real. James Can we play some music to wake everyone up? We’re going to play A-Trak’s remix
of “Heart It Races.” (music: Architecture in Helsinki - “Heart It Races (Trizzy’s Rusty Tin Can Mix)” / applause) Cameron With going through the people we wanted to work with on the remixes we were really wanting each one to be super different from the last. The next one I’ll play… This version is... I talked to DJ Rupture, I don’t know if anyone is familiar with him at all. He’s a DJ from Brooklyn, he lives in Brooklyn currently, who is starting to delve more and more into production, I guess. And I was talking to him about working on this mix and we wanted to get a vocalist in to do a ragga version of the track. So he created an instrumental from the original and we got in this guy who’s name is Lee G who’s done some tracks with, I’m not sure how to pronounce, Ghislain Poirier, I think he’s from Montreal. But, that’s where we heard his vocals before and we hooked up with him and went to this studio in Brooklyn. He rolled this joint, which was one of the biggest joints I’ve ever seen, and smoked the whole thing. And he was about 6 foot 5. He went in to this studio, with a window right in front of the control desk where we were sitting and he did this entire take twice, then he fell over. It was a pretty phenomenal experience, seeing this guy do this vocal take. James Lee G also had a gig for awhile, he was on tour with Beyonce and when she would come out on to the stage dressed as, what’s her name, the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, he would be with his shirt off, and oiled up one of four giant slave throne carriers. Cameron For three months in America, his job was to do that. His contract was basically he would get up in the morning and have to go lift weights for like three hours, and then he would go down, set up his little stretcher thing that he carried her on and then walk out at the start of the show with her on the thing and that was his job. Two hours and then five minutes at the end of the night, and he did it for three months on the tour with Beyonce, Missy Elliott and Alicia Keys. It sounded like a phenomenal experience. So, anyway. (music: Architecture In Helsinki - “Heart It Races (DJ Rupture Mix Featuring Mr Lee G)” / applause) Yeah that was a pretty incredible experience, working with that guy for us. Torsten Schmidt So there you are as a songwriter, then all of a sudden comes in this giant and rewrites your lyrics. Cameron Yeah, yeah, it was great. I loved it. We gave him the lyrics and we gave him an instrumental of the original and he wrote the lyrics over the top of the instrumental with references to the original lyrics. It was awesome. Torsten Schmidt So when you write lyrics, obviously a lot of bands for their second, or bigger, album they usually fall into this problem after they have been touring and stuff. With the first one they are getting most things off their chest they’ve always wanted to talk about. And the second one is more or less on a clubs, airports, minibars, and maybe if they’re lucky, groupies. And, “Oh life on the road sucks,” and I mean 95% of their core clientele don’t care. Cameron Yeah, I think we are all too neurotic and idiosyncratic in the way that we work to fall into the trappings of trying to write a song about life on the road. Because really we know that it’s boring to everyone but us. Torsten Schmidt So a piece of advice would be to try to cultivate your own neurotisms? James Well, I think Cameron was talking about Alan Lomax and how it’s the agenda behind writing the music in that certain way has nothing to do with anything besides the music. Then kind of at the other end of the spectrum you have Coldplay and in the interviews they say, “Well we try to write music that was going to work well in a stadium,” because they have a certain BPM and when you have the delay on the guitar and the back row is x meters, if the delay is too short, it sounds weird for the people in the back. So we just want to try and stay more towards the first point than the last point. Torsten Schmidt Poor Chris Martin. James Very misunderstood, poor guy. I feel for him. Torsten Schmidt Shall we take a minute for him? James Let’s take a minute for Brian Eno. Cameron So the last version of all of this stuff we wanted to play was the cover a friend of ours from Philadelphia did. They are called Dr. Dog and they kind of exist in this world, which is kind of thirty years ago. A lot of musicians are into that retro thing and referencing and trying to recreate the sound of a Beatles record or whatever. People are always going to be really into that. But these guys kind of live it. When you meet them there’s no irony involved whatsoever. They are kind of authenticly stuck in 1974. Torsten Schmidt Pretty good label name as well. Cameron Yeah, totally. So we’re doing a cover in exchange. We’re going to do a cover of one of their songs. Torsten Schmidt What year will you be stuck in? Cameron Yeah, I don’t know probably 1991. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, dont do any of that future 1981 shit. Part of the brief? Cameron There’s no brief. They did a cover version of our song. This is the way we wanted to try to end our little story of this song. (music: Dr. Dog - “Heart It Races” / applause) Torsten Schmidt So you said you’ve got like ten or 15 remixes of that track alone. You’ve got
unhappy people at the record company then, because you won’t ever make any
money. How is this going to work? Cameron On a trade basis. A lot of the stuff we do we just trade with other people. We
find that’s a good way to work for us, and we get to work with people who want
to work with us in return. Torsten Schmidt But still with the trading, that means you have to do something in return,
which means having another week off to do that. Cameron True. James It would be nice to get paid, and hopefully one day it will happen, but it’s
better than not doing it. Torsten Schmidt When you say “it would be nice to get paid,” how many copies did you actually
sell of the first album? James We’ve actually released three albums. The first album... Cameron I’m not really sure, probably the first album did about 20-something thousand
in five or six years. The second one is about 80,000. Torsten Schmidt Including the remixes? Cameron No, that’s just albums. Torsten Schmidt Including the remix album? Cameron No, the remix album didn’t sell at all [laughs]. It’s funny, but I guess it
harks back to being placed in a world which we don’t have the same ideas as. For
many people, the idea is that a band who play traditional rock music shouldn’t
be involved with people who produce dance or hip-hop. It’s this ridiculous
pigeonholing. Torsten Schmidt Apartheid. Cameron Exactly. So when we created this album, which was all our tracks remixed, a
lot of people looked upon that as being dirty words. So commercially, not that
it was done for those reasons, but it didn’t really float. We have a lot of
spare copies, so if you want a free one, write to us. James We have a show tonight by the way, so hopefully you guys can all come. Torsten Schmidt A great part of the whole... You guys live off fans who come to the shows, I guess. Cameron No, we don’t, like vampires. That can be the next part of the conversation
right now. The only way we can make money off music is by selling music to
films and ads. Live music is about to die because everyone’s decided bands are
getting paid too much and charging too much money, which was caused because
they weren’t selling any records. So bands started making their fees higher
and touring more. So in doing that, less people are coming to the shows
because they’re playing more and they’re charging more because they can’t make
any money off record sales. So it’s a domino effect, where musicians won’t be
able to sustain any form of income unless they start selling songs to Apple. Torsten Schmidt But where in that food chain are you, when there’s Barbara Streisand with €800
a ticket, which is what she’s charging in Europe? James We can’t really get away with that. Basically our tours pay for themselves
now. To an extent, our North American tours pay for our European tours. Our
albums are released in North America and Europe and the UK and Japan. So when
we say the second album sold 80,000, that’s cumulative over the whole world.
There’s ten of us in the bus, so to fly ten people around the world, rent a
bus, have food for everyone, etc., it becomes very, very, very expensive. But
obviously we want to play for everyone, and there’s also pressure from the
record companies to do these tours, and it’s important that you go and play in
Sheffield again and again and again to nobody [laughs], which is a horrible
experience for anyone. As much as we love Def Leppard. So we’re at that point
where, I don’t know, it’s a deep question, I think we’re just doing it and
hoping it takes off. But it’s got to the point where we’re doing it and it’s
sustainable, but then again we can’t really stop. Once we’re not touring
anymore we don’t get given dinner or have anywhere to sleep and we can’t eat
any fans. I don’t know what I’m talking about, really [laughs]. Cameron It is an interesting time to be in the creative world. In so many ways there
are no rules and everything is being redefined and everyone is trying to work
out new ways of trying to make what they do financially viable and to be able
to continue. So if anyone has any ideas or questions about that? James Does anyone really know where they stand on file sharing? Do they really know what they think? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who really knows where they stand on that, as an example. And that’s something that directly
financially effects us and no doubt will all of you in the future. Torsten Schmidt Still, it doesn’t hold you back from doing things like a little 7" for fans which is probably the least financially viable thing in the world. James That’s something we wanted to do. We didn’t bring anything because we were
really light, we just jumped out of the bus into a taxi. But we love being
able to do 7"s and LPs, in a way that’s just something from our generation and
generations before. But a lot of kids, I had the experience of going to record
shops and coming back with something, but that’s not the experience for kids.
It’s all in their hands or in their phone. That’s something we’re coming to
grips with and the whole industry is coming to grips with. What is that
culture and how do you take advantage of that and at the same time do
something that’s interesting abd that has value for fans? That’s really challenging. Cameron When A-Trak did that mix I said, “We’re getting that pressed on 12", do you
have a list of people you’d like us to send copies to?” He said, “None of my
friends play records anymore, they just play Serato.” To hear that from a
world class DJ, that the tool that he became known on has just become totally
irrelevant in the last few years. Well, not irrelevant, but obsolete. It’s a
strange time for everyone. James Then again on the positive side, the fact that Cameron was living in Brooklyn
and we were living in Melbourne and we wrote, arranged and produced this whole
album together without actually being in the same room, is just a totally
incredible thing. And all the relationships we have with other artists that
are possible just by file sharing and using computer software for the
recording rather than tapes. We use tapes in the studio sonically, but all the
editing is done on computer. I’m not going to mention any brand names. That’s
a positive side of what’s going on and there’s this incredible online cultures
and blogs that are in so many ways so much more exciting, relevant and personal to fans
than magazines have ever been. So it’s this dual thing, but as far as making
money from it, that’s the real challenge. Torsten Schmidt So how do you afford to still do videos? James We tour. Cameron Yeah, this is true. Videos, that’s a strange thing too. A lot of people are saying, as far as a video budget, people are just watching them on YouTube anyway and everything is
compressed to hell so a lot of labels have stopped spending as much money on
videos, except for Kanye. But really, there’s no point spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars because people watch them on an iPod or something. Torsten Schmidt So did you find you had to create different visual angles for representing the band? Cameron Not really. A lot of us met at art school in Melbourne and it was more of a
technology-based art course, so it sort of tied together everything we do. I look at music and art and video as being all
tied together to make the artist or the band. So definitely no, we’ve always
been into the visual element of what we do. Torsten Schmidt You’ve developed a pretty distinct language, too, as well. Was it all granted
to the “interdisciplinary approach?” James That’s always been part of what we do. When we first started out Cameron did
the artwork for the album and we had friends do the videos. Torsten Schmidt It’s always Cameron doing everything. What are all the other people doing? James Sam’s doing a lot too. Sam I did some covers but they weren’t good enough. James That’s changed a little bit more recently because we don’t have the time and we want to
work with other people. Being in a band is a whole cultural thing. There’s not just the music and that comes, I guess, from our experience of getting
into music: You buy the records, you look at the covers. It’s the whole
package rather than just music in an abstract way. Torsten Schmidt So how much does Spinal Tap come
into your lives? Cameron Only the thing with the cucumber at the airport. We come from the school of
the romance of buying a record and staring at the cover and being immersed in
music as a beautiful thing. We hope that survives because at the moment it
feels like people’s relationship to music is very different to where it was
five years ago. It just feels more disposable than ever and I hope people can
hold onto it in that passionate, romantic way that seems to be not defined at
the moment. Torsten Schmidt Like in many areas of life, the whole haptic aspect of life, haptic and
interchangeable. Cameron For sure. James Part of me is like a real old fogey, dismissive of having your whole
music library on your mobile phone and watching TV on something like that.
Part of me thinks that’s really horrible, but then part of me tries to keep an
open mind and appreciate what it’s like for children [laughs], because it
hasn’t been my experience. It’s important to keep an open mind and keep
interested in what’s going on. It’s the same conversation I’m sure people had
when television was invented - it’s not the same anymore and people won’t talk
to each other anymore. And sure, television does stop people talking to each
other but it’s also a beautiful culture unto itself in some ways. Torsten Schmidt The obvious one we’ve saved for the end. Helsinki is about as far away from
Melbourne as you could possibly think. So why on earth? James Because it’s as far away from Melbourne as you could possibly think. Torsten Schmidt And why the architecture? Cameron We actually just went to Helsinki for the first time over the summer. Torsten Schmidt Did the mayor greet you? Cameron No [laughs], we were petrified. It was like meeting someone, a child we were
meeting for the first time 20 years later. Torsten Schmidt Which is pretty rock star-ish, I guess. Cameron Oh yeah, totally. We turned up in the town having no idea what to expect. Australia
is an incredibly isolated country. From a young age you look at America and
Europe and they seem terribly exotic and far away lands to us. The concept
when we started the band - and probably more than one of us didn’t know where
it was - but the buildings seemed so far away and represented something mystic
and exotic. Torsten Schmidt Taka-tuka land. Cameron Exactly. But there’s no real reason for it, none of us are architects or know
anything about architecture. It’s a really uninteresting story. Torsten Schmidt Any more uninteresting questions because these guys need to soundcheck and all
those really uninteresting things of being on the road? [pause]This is
pretty unusual, you’re probably not going to do a two-hour talk in every city. You arrive in a new city, rock & roll realism, what do you do until the show? Cameron Coffee, coffee, coffee. I’d like to be an advocate of my favourite part of
travelling, which is Chowhound.com, which
is a food forums website which I use in every city I go to in the world. It’s
an incredible resource for finding good restaurants. Yesterday we were in Ann
Arbor in Michigan, so I searched that and there are 100 posts of people
arguing about which Korean is good and who does the best barbecue. That’s my
favourite way of experiencing a city, is through eating. Chowhound is how I
infiltrate different cultures, and their foods. Audience Member Yeah, OK. We havent really gone deep into the discussion of the music industry at the Academy so far. I think it’s maybe a good thing because it kind of gets a bit depressing but I just wanted to know for the record, you talked about the Internet and stuff, how old are you guys? Architecture In Helsinki 28, 27, 33, 26. Audience Member OK so also the next question is, are you bitter? Gus I think you could tell. Audience Member No but it’s like you can smell a certain bitterness. But I mean overall. Oh, OK so it’s bitter sweet. OK, thanks a lot. Cameron I’m personally still excited enough about the actual act of making music. That’s what we get the most joy out of so it’s kind of making sure you separate yourself from all that other shit. Because it can totally get you down. I think that we’re very conscious of keeping up the positive vibes. Audience Member G’dday. Cameron G’dday. Audience Member I’ve got two questions. the first one is how long has the band been together? And the second one is you mentioned the Mad Professor before, do you have a mix from the Mad Professor, did he do a remix or? Cameron No, no, no. I wish. We’ll work on that. Audience Member Oh, yeah so how long have you guys been together? Cameron Oh well, I guess the band started out... I started playing music in 1999, for the first time, I’d never really written or played any instruments. So after a few months of writing music I decided I was going to try and get together a band to play the songs I had written. The name of that was Architecture in Helsinki, but then over the next few years after that it was more like something that happened on the side when we werent busy at school or whatever we would just go, “Oh let’s do a show.” It had existed since then but on and off. It’s changed a lot throughout its time. It’s kind of like that game Katamari [Damaci]. It’s an amorphus blob that kind of like rolls across the horizon picking up at different things along the way. Audience Member So there are a lot of remixes of your tracks, have you done any remix packages for download or any acapellas or stuff that we could remix. Cameron Yeah yeah we can hook you guys up, whoever wants any parts, we have four tracks of our new record up on an FTP. If anyone wants to talk to us afterwards we can give you the details. Audience Member OK, nice. James We’ll talk to Wulf and Torsten and put the details for our FTP server up and you can download. Most of the tracks have already been released but there’s one that we might be releasing as another single, so you never know. Torsten Schmidt Well, that’s some very effective 21st century A&Ring, even without the Internet in the first place. So you might go and shake hands first and you know. Cameron We don’t want to meet you, we don’t want to meet you. Torsten Schmidt It’s getting too personal. Cameron Alright, let’s IM now. We’ve got a computer here. Torsten Schmidt We’re not ready for that sort of commitment yet. But yeah, before we let you go on to your other commitments maybe a song or two from the first album to send everyone off? Since we’re old bitter dance folks. Cameron Yeah we can play, we’ll play two things. This is a remix that we did for a Brazilian group called Bonde de Role. We just did this a few months ago, so this is an example of a remix we did for someone else. (music: Bonde de Role - “Office Boy (Architecture In Helsinki Remix)” / applause) James Some of the same steel drum session found its way in there as well. Cameron Yeah that was the steel drum recording 30 minute solo, we cut a little bit out of it for that track. James Just kinda dig through and find notes that work and then it’s great having solo’d steel drums on file. Cameron We’ll sell them to you very cheap. James If you need an F sharp steel drum. Cameron Yeah, um, this track which is the last thing we are going to play you was a remix we just got a few weeks ago from a UK, amazing freak artist called Max Tundra. This is a remix he did of our latest single... (music: Architecture In Helsinki - “Hold Music (Max Tundra Remix)” / applause) Torsten Schmidt After all these remixes I’d like to end it all on some original material. I
think “Do The Whirlwind” was a favourite for many people. But we’re not going
to play it without saying that after being in Melbourne for six weeks and
having no chance to get you in because, surprise, you were touring again, I’m
glad we went to the other side of the world and made it happen. And please
give a warm thank you. [applause] What is it we’re going to hear here? Cameron I’m embarrassed to say the only version I have of this song is a very low-res
one, so I can play it. Torsten Schmidt Do the low-res MP3 and we can see what these guys do to it. Cameron Haha, that’s right. (music: Architecture In Helsinki - “Do The
Whirlwind” / applause)