NEW! Midnight Juggernauts Interview 2.0
I recently spoke to Vincent “V4″ Vendetta, the lead singer for Midnight Juggernauts, about the band’s as-yet-still-untitled upcoming new album. It sounded almost exactly like this, except that I cleaned up the language tics such as “ums”, “erms”, ellipses and half-completed sentences that would otherwise result from overly literally transcribing human speech, because I’m not David Mamet.
Baron von Luxxury: I loved your first album (2007’s Dystopia) and the new single “This New Technology” is fantastic. When can we expect the full album?
Vincent Vendetta: We’re going to be putting out some more songs over the next few months. The album is pretty fresh, we mastered the album the night before we flew to for the US. So its all new for us as well! We’re still planning the release, its going to be like the last album which we did ourselves and licensed out (to EMI). So now we’re planning our next videos, and early next year we’ll finish the album and come back for a tour.
BVL: Did the band self produce the album again or did you work with outside producers?
VIN: We always try to have as much control as possible over the record and sound. But this time we did some work with this engineer from NY Chris Moore (TV On the Radio). It was interesting having “a new mind” in the circle! It was a great experience having him around. Normally we want to be in control of every sound, and we’ll have something in mind and we’ll do everything to follow that sound. But for this album we let go and left more space for “happy accidents” to take place. It feels a lot more live and raw, definitely a different animal.
BVL: So he became the fourth unofficial member of the band, you let him into the inner circle?
VIN: Yeah, and that was a bit scary at first for me! But we got along really well, it was good to have anew way of working and thinking. One thing he introduced that had a big influence was encouraging us to let go, so that when we’d get together in the studio we’d jam out and see what happens. On the past album we’d spend a lot of time in our home studios with our heads down trying to follow a sound we had in mind. But with Chris there, he guided us to create a live, raw sound, which is definitely a big element of this album.
BVL: Your first record defined your sound as a true hybrid of indie rock and post-Daft Punk dance-ness. From the new single it sounds like the rock side “won” that battle. Should we expect that from the album?
VIN: There are a few other songs with that approach but it’s hard to define what the album is. The production is very different, but it still has lots of synths for example. In fact we actually got into a room together with a bunch of Moogs and Arps that hadnt been used in 20 or 30 years at this studio call Sing Sing in Australia where this guy had all these toys in his attic. So we had an opportunity to dust them off and play with the sounds, and that comes through on the record.
BVL: The analog, vintage sounds?
VIN: Yeah, there are lots of toys we incorporated on this album, not just synths but also loop pedals and delay pedals. We spend a lot of time playing with them, it could have gotten to the edge of being self indulgent but we tried to reel ourselves in! We still like to do a good pop song with hooks.
BVL: Tell me about the songwriting process for the first single, “This New Technology.”
VIN: Every song is different but normally there’s one member who will come up for an idea or a sketch for a song. He’ll bring that to the band and we’ll jam it out and something will be created in the rehearsal room. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This New Technology started with Andy’s guitar riff. In 2008 we were in the road for 8 or 9 months, in fact I didnt have a home for 12 months just because we were constantly on the road! So we got an apartment in Paris for a few months so we had a bit of a base there. While we were traveling we are always writing, recording sketches on our laptops or iphones. So while we were in France Andy came up with that riff, then when we got back to australia earier this year we spent a lot of time jamming on the sketches. “This New Technology” took on a whole new character when we started jamming on it with keyboards, and somehow a song was born.
BVL: “This New Technology” sounds like it starts with a few layered loops. Are those samples or recordings of the band playing live that you looped?
VIN: Thats all live loops – Daniel our drummer has a lot of delay pedals he plays with now, so there are a few more unpredictable elements, so every show is a little different.
BVL: Has your live show changed for this new album?
VIN: Yeah, every song has a different approach now. Daniel triggers samples from pads, and on some songs we build loops for the song. Its a bit unpredictable but it makes it more fun for us to play live. There is a laptop for some songs, for the dancier tracks we’ll use Ableton Live for arpeggios. We’ll def come back early next year for proper tour, no dates yet, hopefully a month or two. We want to dedicate more time in the US in 2010 because on the last tour we spent most of our time in Europe and neglected this side of the Atlantic.
In case you missed it when we posted it the first time, which would be forgivable if a bit mystifying (why? What else could you have been doing? DON’T YOU READ EVERY POST?!) here’s the aforementioned first song from their forthcoming album, along with one of my favorite remixes from the bunch:
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mp3: “This New Technology” – Midnight Juggernauts
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mp3: “This New Technology (Nile Delta Remix)” – Midnight Juggernauts
And here’s the interview I did with Vin, Andy and Daniel on their last US tour with Justice, where we talked about Jeff Lynne, Australian stereotypes, ELO, and also Jeff Lynne:
xx,
Baron von Luxxury is My Fake Name
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