Australian indie dance band Art vs Science is set to electrify Kuala Lumpur next month.
Australia’s Art vs Science has crammed the kind of heady career rise experienced only by the luckiest of bands. In just four years, the indie dance outfit from Sydney has gone from playing in regional pubs to headlining national festivals.
While Art vs Science sounds more like a geeky textbook title than something you would expect to hear blasting from a club, the three-man band produces just the kind of thumping, electrifying beats you’ll want to move your body to.
On Oct 5, the group appears at the Heineken Green Room concert at KL Live as the support act for US indie outfit The Gossip.
Dan Mac (born Dan McNamee), the band’s lead singer explains the science behind its artsy name.
Move your body: (From left) Dan Mac, Jim Finn and Dan Williams from Art vs Science. Don’t judge a band by their name. “Well, we’ve heard people use the phrase ‘Art vs Science’. When we started making music, we were really paying attention to the different ways of writing and how initial artistic ideas would just randomly pop into our heads and we would just start playing them,” the laidback singer shares over a phone interview from sunny Florida in the United States, where the band is on tour.
“The scientific side comes from the structure of the songs, sort of like putting things together in a way that would work for the crowd and for us. Because we’ve always been aware of both the artistic and the scientific sides of our music, we decided to go with that phrase.”
It all began after Mac attended a Daft Punk concert back home. Inspired, he roped in his former high school friends, Jim Finn and Dan Williams to form an electro-pop dance band in 2008.
“We went to see Daft Punk play in 2007 when they came down to Australia and it was just amazing to watch how they brought the big beats that just made the crowd go wild,” Mac tells us.
“We were playing in a rock band (Roger Explosion) before but after seeing the concert, we really thought that dance music was the way we should be going and it would be a lot more fun, so we started playing dance music after that.”
Having inherited a vintage Ensoniq keyboard from Williams’s uncle, the three twenty-somethings set out to create dance music made without computers or decks. Indeed, the band’s unique style, which combines dual keyboards and drums, has been likened to Daft Punk and The Presets, but with a rockier edge.
“Everything we play is live. We use four keyboards, a microphone and live drums so we don’t need samples, backing tracks or anything like that. Honestly, it’s just a more natural way to create music as a live band because you have much more freedom in your performance,” says the singer, who also plays the keyboards and guitars.
“Like if something malfunctions or doesn’t go according to plan, you can change it and make it different every night. It also depends on the crowd – you could add a section to the song if it’s going really well or shorten it if you need to get to the next song. And also I think watching a band play live is a much more natural and exciting thing than knowing that something is coming from a backing track somewhere.”
Such was the inherent energy of the trio that they were booked to perform before they even had any songs! Undeterred, they wrote seven tracks and recorded them all in just 48 hours – while locked up in a room with lots of coffee and wine, of course.
Mac speaks candidly of the creative process: “We just sit in a room together and one of us will start playing something. If we like it, we’ll just play along and jam up the idea. Lots of our songs just come out that way because it seems like a more natural way to write.”
Their hard work paid off when their epic rock-rave track, Flippers won them the Splendour in the Grass Unearthed competition, held by Australia’s national youth radio station Triple J. just a few months afterwards. Before they knew it, they were playing to thousands of screaming fans.
By mid-2009, Art vs Science was performing to sold-out shows and was becoming a steady cult favourite.
Its live shows, typically high on spectable and energy, have been known to include inflatable penguins and other sea creatures, which fans notoriously bring out for performances of the hit, Flippers.
The group also independently produced and released its self-titled debut EP in May the same year. The band members say they swear by two simple principles when they perform: 1. Loud music played 100% live and 2. Absolute, unrelenting fun.
“When we perform on stage, the energy we put out is really about expressing ourselves but if the crowd picks up on that and they get excited too, then they also put out the energy and so it will just go back and fourth,” a buoyant Mac enthuses.
“It’s like a reciprocal relationship between us and the crowd. If we get into it, then we make them get into it and then it sort of builds on top of each other. So it really goes hand-in-hand, out energy and the crowd’s energy.”
In doing so, Art vs Science has earned a reputation as a live powerhouse and is now widely acknowledged as one of the best live acts from Down Under. In 2010, it toured Britain in support of La Roux (in March) and then Groove Armada (in May). It also received three nominations at the ARIA Music Awards last year for its 2010 EP, Magic Fountain.
Now, the group is all pumped up about its first full album, The Experiment, which is due to be released early next year.
“I think an album allows us more freedom to move in more directions because when you have an EP with only five songs, you’re sort of limited to what you can put out there. An album allows a little bit more freedom for experimentations, so it’s really good to get the chance to write a whole album and release it out to the world,” Mac contemplates.
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