Interviews

in conversation

Fiend Magazine (Issue 10)

Dandelion Wine tell Fiend about their upcoming album, ~An Inexact Science~.

What’s changed between this album and the last one?

Hmm, well five years later….a lot! You’d hardly recognize us as the same band in many respects. We started off as more of a four people in a room playing kind of thing but at the same time we were doing theatre soundtracks and remixes with a more studio-y approach. I think eventually we started to realise that we preferred the results of writing as we recorded and experimenting a lot more – the results were generally more atmospheric and ethereal and more “us” in a lot of ways. That, coupled with a greater understanding of orchestration and layering frequencies has lead us to where we are now.

What precisely does "an inexact science" refer to?

It’s one of those things that has a lot of layers to it: it initially came up when talking about microphone placement and music in general. Basically music is all physics but all the scientific knowledge in the world is not going to create something of artistic value, yet you are dealing with these concepts while you are recording without consciously realizing that. If we were striving to create an album that was technically perfect, it would be highly unlikely that we would arrive at some of the sounds we have. Going about recording an album, trying to make it technically perfect, would probably not include taking a pristine vocal track and running it through an old germanium fuzz. The way those old analogue bits of gear respond is often inexact by nature and that’s where the beauty of it is. From there it spreads out into other areas: it’s only been in the last few hundred years that there’s been a clear distinction between art, religion and science. Previously, it was all seen as part of the same whole. Related to this is the way societies actually lose knowledge along the way – as one particular paradigm starts to take over and be considered “the one”, concepts that don’t fit in tend to get undermined and forgotten.

You are now officially a duo?

Well, seeing our last member (violinist Daniel Stefanski) has moved to Botswana, yes – at least for the foreseeable future. It’s been a long line of Spinal Tap-esque exploding drummers and the like until we finally realized that we basically are a duo! Seems the universe has been telling us that for a while but we weren’t really listening! It’s opened up the creative side a lot and hell, touring’s much easier and cheaper now! I guess we were always scared of it becoming a bit karaoke with just the two of us but we’ve found a way to do it where we’re still doing the bulk of things live and not just playing a couple of incidental bits of a backing track. It means that we both end up juggling a lot of different instruments to pull it off (a challenge we enjoy) but playing live is still really important to us and we don’t want to lose that aspect. We won’t rule out the possibility of adding a string section at some stage either...

Europeans seem to have really picked up on you guys - what is it about your sound that you think hits that indigenous aspect of places like eastern Europe?

Good question! In part they seem to have an affinity for less direct and straightforward styles of music there. I guess they also relate to the medieval and folk elements and instruments because there’s more of a tradition of that over there. We’ve had people come up to us in clubs in Poland and be a tad baffled as to how an Australian band does music like this because we don’t have any real history in that respect but maybe it stems from the fact that Australia is a huge mix of almost every other culture... we don’t know!

I know that your influences stem from metal to dreampop and shoegazery stuff: yet you guys seemed to get pegged somewhere between trip hop and folk. Tell us about your curious relationship with genre!

Ah, the G-word! Well I guess the folk part is obvious: there’s lots of dulcimers, lute, flute etc in there and there’s been a lot of folk influences but it’s folk in more of a world and medieval sense, not those god-awful whinging Missy Murray people! And trip-hop… well really, trip-hop is just a euphemism for “it’s got bits of electronic stuff but it’s not really pounding and there’s too much going on for it to be called ambient”! Once you add in the swirly guitars, then it doesn’t really fit so people come up with all kinds of crazy descriptions like “medieval triphop” and “dark electro folk”… which of course are all better than adjectives like “crap” and “bollocks”!

You guys also have an unusual relationship to goth/industrial and electro. As part of the crash frequency team and playing gigs around the local spooky traps (touring with Ikon and Immaculata, playing gigs at Melb. goth club Cabaret Nocturne), you guys definitely are part of that scene... but you also have a lot of connections to the indy scene, too. How important is it to you to keep things broad?

When we first started playing gigs most of the other musicians we knew were in folk or indie bands, so that’s who we played with. It wasn’t until later that we started to do goth clubs, which also coincided with us becoming more ethereal and electronic. It’s not so much a master plan to keep things broad but more just a matter of playing to people who want to hear us and because we don’t fit into any neat genre it means there’s not one particular audience for us. There seems to be the goths, the indie types, the world/folk lot and the theatre/arty crowd as well. Unfortunately, they don’t all hang out at the same places! Although that keeps things fun and interesting for us. It’s really also just a reflection of us as people - as punters we go to all these different places to hear different kinds of music as well.

What now?!

~An Inexact Science~ is just about to come out, so we’ll be doing a lot of playing: a lot more Australian shows this year plus we’ll head back to Europe later in the year for another tour there. We’ve also got another EP in the pipeline too. It’s a bit of a diversion: less atmospheric and layered and more like just straight up medieval doof. Well as straight up as we get anyway...

Boring but necessary: can you give us a quick rundown on how you got to this point?

Formed many moons ago in the late 90’s as a four piece – we kind of thought we’d end up like Lush or the Clouds or something but it came out darker than that and we started adding flute and dulcimer… we got more instruments and more pedals and then less members and more technology. We’ve had a couple of independent releases here in Australia before we released ‘Light Streaming Down’ which was distributed in Europe and the US. We ended up touring Europe a couple of times in 2002 and 2003 and getting to visit some of the most amazing places around. Now we’re just itching to go back! Strangely enough we’ve done a lot more gigs in Europe than we have in other states of Australia so we intend to rectify that this year.

What’s the one thing you learned the hard way?

The one thing? That’s way too hard… we’ve kind of learnt everything the hard way. From how to book a gig to how to book an international tour, from making posters to building websites - well, both of those might still need a little more work ;-) Even recording and engineering is something we’ve learned by doing, even before we really had the gear to achieve what we wanted. We’ve always been self-managed and never had some one to guide us through everything so we’ve just dived in and been really DIY about it. Sort of like “yeah, we should go to Europe” so we just start researching and give it a try. We’ve not been a band to sit around and wait for promoters or labels to offer us something – we just do it off our own bat. Dive in, then see if we can swim. If we can’t, well there’s always doggy-paddle!

What are your current inspirations?

There’s some great European things that have come out recently like Faun, Wolfenmonde and Warren Suicide that we’ve been listening to a lot as well as some great Melbourne atmospheric bands that are doing some awesome stuff. It seems like it’s getting harder and harder to find interesting stuff these days – it’s all still there but it’s harder to find amongst the media frenzy over Sabbath and Accadacca sound-alikes!!! And I think I need to track down some good banghra because I get excited whenever I hear Punjabi beats lately! I think the world map on the kitchen wall is also an inspiration…

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