Disasteradio hits town this week to play ‘Night of the Freakin Hamiltrons‘ at Flow bar. Mammoth caught up with him to chat about all things 8-bit.

MM: Could you describe your music in a single 10-syllable word?
D-RAD: Electrocardiographicalist. (I cheated, maybe that’s 11)

No that’s 10 i think…
Oh wait, ‘Overintellectualization’

I think the first one was better. It sounds like a very specialised physicians title.
Well, it has electro and cardio and graphical.

You often list your band members as ‘Luke Rowell + Robot’. How pressured are you feeling going up against an all-robotic band?
Haha, correction: ‘Luke Rowell & Computer’. But like I’m totally scared of The Trons - they’re meccano right? I used to play with my Grandad’s set all the time, it’ll be a really weird corruption-of-youth thing. at least we’ve got an achilles heel in our iron-based overlords: Rust!

Do you think there’ll ever be a point where your own machines become completely self-aware and ditch you?
I’d hope so. I mean, the Electric Dreams scenario is far more awesome than the Never Ending Story one. I’m not passing on a legacy to a mere being of flesh and blood. When the time is right, I’ll spill a bottle of champagne on the keyboard of my pentium four and it’ll become self aware.

Visions seemed to include a lot more vocals than previous albums, what brought about this change?
That ended up becoming the big plan for me. You try to say so much in a song without words, but it’s much MUCH easier to just spell it out. I’ve always wanted to write proper songs, but it seemed like a weird, convoluted process.

Like with melody and rhythm you pretty much know how to go, but words… you can say any goddamn thing you like and you don’t know whether it sucks or not. Part of the solution was finding the right rhyming dictionary (including common phrases and references to popular culture).

I’m kinda lucky that I’m writing this moderately self-aware cheeseball stuff, because you couldn’t get away with hammering a rhyming dictionary to death if you were playing minor chords on an acoustic guitar underneath it (which is ‘real music’.)

No one ever had any fun doing it that way anyhow…
Unless you count staring intently into the bathroom mirror and crying as fun. (Actually people like Joanna Newsom and Leonard Cohen, etc. really fucking depress me with there genuine-ness, *sigh*)

Speaking of fun, your set with turntablist Alphabethead was one of the highlights of this summers ‘Camp A Low Hum’. How did you meet and how did this collaboration come about?
Haha, it’s a long-ish story… My brother is good pals with ‘Tourettes’ (Melbourne-based Kiwi rapper) and I was at my bro’s place when Tourettes and Dave (Alphabeathead) came over because Dave worked on his album. Now I’d done a university music paper with Dave and I knew he was some kind of genius, but I didn’t know of what crazy magnitude until he gave a demo at a workshop for a composition paper I was doing.

So then I had my CD release and Blink and I decided he’d be perfect to open for the show in Wellington, along with Kazaam Blam!, so it was like three solo dudes all doing different sorts of music. At the CD release show, Dave was going to DJ after I played but we got him up early on my last song to do some improv scratch stuff. Then we got the idea to do a whole show together, which ended up being so much fun and a really intense learning experience.

And you’ve played with him a few times since then, are you planning any further collaborations?
We’d like to do at least a tour or a fringe festival show, that sort of thing. It’s a really fun dynamic because we jump between supplying melody and supplying rhythm. I mean, most of the time he is being a rhythm section but we always accidentally intermingle and stuff.

He taught me huge lessons about dynamics. I’m always wanting to jump straight in, whereas he picks the exact right time to jump in. His ability to work a dynamic and build tension is amazing. I’m just all about musical instant gratification, haha.

So basically he’s taught you not to blow your load to early… Are you sure you didn’t find him in a Men’s Health clinic brochure?
He’d belong there, what with that amazingly crafted head of hair and his gentlemanly sensibilities…

As for Disasteradio, what are your plans post-‘Visions’?
To release the next album codenamed ‘VISIONS 2’. I’m veering towards more tunes with vocals a la` digital pop, trying to work on narrative and stuff like that. I’ve been getting into a bit of DJ shadow / DAT politics / Aphex twin-esque territory.

I don’t know what I’m writing anymore! I’ve been trying to remove stylistic chains a bit… as in still make synthesizer pop, but synthesizer pop that transcends synthesizers and pop (I guess that’s been the plan all along, haha.

I got an MPC1000 this week so I’ve been really busy working my live tunes into it, finally breaking free of the backing track. I can still do synchronized visuals along to that too, I did some really nerdy-type thinking and I think I’ve nailed it

I’ve got a couple of awesome films to score - one sci-fi short film and an animated short film…

Any more porno’s?
Not a bean. There were plans I had with a pal but we kinda forgot about that. (If you’re curious about the D-Rad scored stick-flick, have a look for “Asia’s Try-Out” on www.extremefineart.com… *NSFW!!!*)

And finally, If we played ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’, what specialty would you be as my ‘phone-a-friend’?
Possibly PC gaming from 1985-1990. I’d be pretty good for that…

Thanks, I’ll make a mental-note. Looking forward to seeing you slay the robots in the city of the future!

disasteradio.org
myspace.com/disasteradio

Fri 21 Jun 2008, 9pm: Ignition Fringe Festival - Night of the Freakin Hamiltrons @ Flow Bar