DARRAGH MURRAY chats to PHOEBE BAKER of ALPINE about their evolution from a high school project to a band about to embark on their first headline tour of the east coast … along with the group’s apparent disposition to peculiar ailments.

The music of Melbourne-based Alpine recalls the infectious dance pop of LCD Soundsystem with meandering dreamscape of Britain’s The xx. And while 2010 proved something of an early peak in the group’s fledgling career thanks to regular Triple J rotation, it hasn’t been without some challenges.

“We’ve had quite a few strange illnesses,” Phoebe states emphatically. “I think I embarrassed Ryan, our bassist, on the radio a month ago when I said he has had trench foot. Me and Lou got whooping cough, which seems a bit weird. We’re just waiting for the other members of the band to get some crazy, bizarre illness.”

Phoebe assures me that they’re fully recovered from these strange medical complaints, which would condemn musicians of more fragile constitutions to the bedroom, and reveals her eagerness to showcase their debut release, Zurich, to the likes of Brisbane when Alpine begin their east coast EP launch in mid-February.

“It’s great to go to different cities and explain our music to different people. We’re quite a young band, so it’s good to get out there and go to different towns, hopefully gain new fans and put on a really good show,” Phoebe says, “Because it’s our first tour we want to make it very special, so my mum is actually making outfits for Lou and I – she’s a bit of a seamstress.”

Phoebe reveals that while always being part of bands throughout high school, it wasn’t until she and fellow vocalist Lou began collaborating with guitar teacher Christian that the entity now known as Alpine truly started to take shape.

“We sporadically got together and worked some tracks, and eventually we got a band together and we started playing live. It was probably just over a year ago that we got the full band together. It’s was a slow process at first, but now we’re all the best of friends.”

Despite the title of their EP fitting thematically with the name of the band, Phoebe explains that the idea for the title did not derive exactly from the Swiss city, but rather was inspired by more particular sentiments.

“We had this rehearsal space in Kensington in Melbourne in this amazing huge industrial warehouse and we called it Zurich. So every time we went to rehearsal, we were meeting at Zurich. So we decided that the EP would be appropriately named after the place where we spent so much time getting all the tracks together.”

Commenting on the different approaches employed by the band evident on Zurich, Phoebe provides some valuable insight into how particular songs come into existence, explaining that more often than not, songs rely on both fortunate circumstance and musical sincerity.

“We feel like we don’t have a definite agreement on what the kind of sound we want to create. It’s kind of hard to describe – you just sense it when you felt like you’ve got the sound you want, or your own sound, I guess. All the songs have different vibes to them and it just kind of happened that way. “

ALPINE play Alhambra on Thursday Feb 17, supported by Boy In A Box. Their debut EP ZURICH is available through Ivy League. Check out www.myspace.com/alpineband for more information.

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