Dancing In The Street

Anthony Kupinic started Pludo as a side project after he decided that the band he had dedicated a large chunk of his life to (A Sound Mind) were not headed in a direction that he personally wanted to go in. While there are elements from that group's pop leanings in Pludo's sound, it's clear that he had very different plans for where he wanted to take his music. Pludo encompass many ideas, with big electronic soundscapes delving into tracks of ambience and light through to much dancier numbers. It wasn't until a chance encounter with street performer Alex Cooper that he realised exactly which direction he and his music were really headed.

“I met Alex in Sydney and he was busking on a bucket drum set,” Kupinic explains. “Growing up, his mum never really supported him doing music. She never bought him a drumkit – she considered it taboo to get involved with music. So when he moved from the US to pursue music, he just started playing on the street with the bucket drums. I saw him playing and I thought, 'Fuck, this kid is incredible!' He was so entertaining and pulling off so much sound with such a little amount of stuff. We had a jam literally straight on the street with no rehearsal. We play to a click so he put the headphones on and the first thing he did was duct-tape the headphones all the way around his head! You get crowds on the street if you're interesting, and just from this we had a crowd of about 70 people. He never knew any of the songs and we just started jamming and freestyling in the street around what I had previously written.”

Kupinic says from this moment he knew that Cooper had to be a part of the band. He was packing some demos at the time and from this first performance alone they managed to sell 70 copies. He estimates that Pludo have sold about 4,000 copies of their demo on the street at over 200 shows in the last four months, an incredible achievement for any act.

He says that the addition of Cooper to the live set is invaluable and provides a much more interesting live show than a dude clicking away at a MacBook, an all too common sight at electronic gigs.

“There's just nothing entertaining about that,” he says. “A lot of it is pre-recorded – let's say 98 per cent and there's no real performance or nothing spectacular about it. Now we're adding some electric guitar and stuff like that. We keep telling people that our style is somewhere between a band and a DJ because it's really hard to explain what we're actually doing. It has the rock elements now, and the electronic and the ambience as well. I think [the current live show] is a really good indication of where we're heading in the future.”

The band's new single Haywire is accompanied by a video that shows the guys going nuts doing what they would do on stage. The complicated set-up is not without its downsides.

“We wanted to give people some indication of what they can expect from our live show,” he says of Haywire's elaborate video. “Our live set up is similar to that except we don't trail it out over such a huge space. We're still kind of figuring out our set up to be honest. Because we play on the street as well between all the shows we break so much stuff! My email is full of dealing with companies about warranties.”