Once upon a time (present day), in a town not so far away (Brisbane), there lived four musicians who called themselves Nikko. They were a happy bunch who regularly played their music live for the people of Brisbane, but rarely thought of recording their beautiful prog-shoegaze-pop music for posterity. But one day, while booking another normal show for Nikko to play, a simple administrative error by a well-known local venue was to change all that…

“July 4 is the kick off for our tour before we head up and off”, bassist Sam Whiting explains of the first show of Nikko’s first interstate tour. “Ric’s is kind of our stomping ground – we’ve played there every month or so since we started. The show’s going to be our EP launch as well, so we’re pretty excited about that.”

The story of the self-titled EP’s genesis is continued by guitarist Jackson Briggs. “It’s weird how the EP came about. Ric’s accidentally put ‘Album Launch’ on their website when the show was announced, when it was just going to be a normal show.”

Sam jumps back in. “It was meant to be ‘Tour Launch’ because we didn’t really have a recording to launch. So then we were like ‘Oh shit, we should record something’. It was good because we didn’t have anything recorded that showed where we are as a band now, so now we do.”

Since this impromptu prompting to record, only a couple of months ago, Jackson and Sam report that the unfocused genre-hopping that has defined previous demos and limited releases has been reigned in, making this EP all the prouder the effort. Sam confirms that while early Nikko recordings were poppier and structurally more conventional, the band have unanimously veered towards longer, more instrumental and improvised sounds, bringing out labels like the aforementioned “prog” and “shoegaze”.

“I think our sound’s really starting to gel now. It’s taken a while for us to find out what we can do and what we’re best at.” Jackson offers more. “A lot of the more conventional verse-chorus pop songs that we used to do got stale. We started going more in the direction of longer, more instrumental songs. It’s come that now everyone’s got the same idea of what we are, and what we’re trying to do.”

And back to Sam. “As a live band – because that’s really what we are, we don’t really exist in any other medium but live performance – that stuff so much more fun to play. We’re not a jam band, but we can improvise on it.”

So as a primarily live band, is recording therefore a necessary evil? “It’s definitely necessary, but I wouldn’t say it’s evil. This time around we recorded with mates, so we really enjoyed ourselves in the studio. We got more done than we thought we would. We were a bit reluctant to record the last song on the EP actually, E Song, because it’s a real  live song, like the whole thing is like this big drain and we didn’t think it would work well on record, but our friends Andrew and Riley who were engineering just wanted us to try. Andrew said ‘We need some atmosphere’ so right before we recorded he turned off all the lights, and we just went really hard in one take it sounded awesome, so we kept it!”

NIKKO play Ric’s on Friday July 4, and you can grab their independent EP at the show.

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