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 LUKE DUBS, the keyboardist half of instrumental hip hop duo HERMITUDE, tells JODY MACGREGOR about their new album, Threads.
Threads marks a departure for the Blue Mountains hermits. Where their previous recordings have been based on and inspired by samples, Threads takes its cues from the live playing of Dubs and Elgusto.
“We were driving up the mountains one day and we thought to ourselves we can keep sampling and keep making the music that we make and go down that road, but we’re also both musicians and we’ve been playing in bands for years,” says Dubs. “We’ve got the know-how to write our own music and chord progressions and song arrangements. So we’re like, let’s try and stop sampling and actually instead of starting a track from a dope sample that you find on a record, actually coming up with a dope sample.”
Locked away in their Sound Heaven studio in the Blue Mountains, that’s exactly what the two of them did, with Elgusto playing most of the drums and Dubs performing his usual keyboard duties to form the basis of the tracks. Avoiding samples was more of a guideline than a rule though, Dubs admits. “The tracks that we did use samples, we tried to manipulate quite heavily so you can’t really, hopefully, tell that they are samples.”
Threads follows on from their fine Rare Sightings release of earlier this year, which has a very different sound, much closer to their previous album, Tales Of The Drift. Dubs explains that they released it both to fill a gap as well as to put a capstone on their previous work.
“We’re like, shit, we don’t want to have a gap of three years in-between releases. We ended up stopping Threads for a few months and we put Rare Sightings out, which is a little EP that we did which came out at the end of last year. That was some beats we had lying around from the trip, we wrote that stuff overseas. We just wanted to do something completely instrumental, something to keep our names out there. Something for the heads as well, just for Hermitude fans who were into what we’ve done in the past.”
With the addition of contributions from guests like vocalists Hau, Elana Stone and Urthboy (a frequent collaborator Dubs calls the third member of Hermitude), Threads was finished, and they came to the really hard part: deciding on the track listing.
“It’s funny when you finish the record and you’re trying to get the track order together because there’s a straight-up roots-reggae track and there’s a really dark, dubstep thing and then there’s a poppy, hip hop thing, so getting the track order is always something that’s quite important.” Sometimes it can be a cause of friction between the two musicians. “There’s a few arguments here and there. After we throw a few glasses and plates at each other we come to some kind of agreement,” he laughs.
Given that this album is a departure for them, does it mark a completely new direction they’ll be following on their next release?
“We don’t really dictate, it’s very spontaneous. We might do a medieval-classical-pop type mashup next, it’s always hard to say.”
You can catch HERMITUDE at the Sol Bar, Coolum, Thursday Nov 6; the Step Inn on Friday Nov 7; the Miami Tavern Saturday Nov 8; and the Great Northern, Byron Bay, Sunday Nov 9, with support from Horrorshow. THREADS is available on Elefant Traks/Inertia. www.myspace.com/hermitude
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