Balls In The Air

Julian Hamilton is one half of The Presets, and right now he's hunkering down in preparation for a hectic schedule. “You just try and get a bit zen, organise your day properly and hopefully get through everything you've gotta get through,” he says. “Whether that's making new songs or rehearsing or touring or preparing kids' school lunches… We did the hard yards as all young bands do; we can handle it again.”

The Goodbye Future remix bundle (of which an exclusive club edit of Goodbye Future was first released to streaming service Rdio before anywhere else) gives an opportunity for Hamilton – and his partner-in-crime, Kim Moyes – to reflect on the difference between making music for their fans and music for themselves.

“You want your songs to be played on radio. [But] you need them to be three minutes long and all that nonsense. We like to go and make extended mixes because that's the kind of music that we really love. Radio's never going to play a six-minute version of a song but we'd much rather listen to that six-minute version.”

Hamilton is realistic when it comes to compromise. “We still like to make pop songs and sometimes – especially for commercial radio – you need to edit things down stupidly. You're cutting out words and lyrics; things that are really important to a song. It's like selling a car and taking the wheels off, but certainly you have to make some severe edits in the hope that the national radio might play it.

“Sometimes television commercials will use our music and they'll hack it to shreds and that's fine, because we've already released the song the way we've envisaged it. [It's] the same with the remixes; people can do all sorts of crazy and weird and wonderful things when they remix our songs but because we've already put it out ourselves, we're happy for it to be released in all these other directions.”

Timeline is a run of shows The Presets are creating with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Billed by the ACO as 'a kaleidoscopic surge through 42,000 years of music', the concept may be intimidating but it offers the band an opportunity to do something completely different. From the Renaissance to Radiohead, Hamilton has enjoyed immersing himself deep into music's history. “There's a lot of music that has passed down through oral traditions like folk music, and a lot of that you can have only vague approximations of because some of the instruments don't even exist anymore.

“Some of the old African drums or some of those Norwegian horns from the 1300s; we don't really know what those things looked like. We have a vague idea but it is tricky presenting some of that stuff. But that's part of the thrill of it.

“We've been doing this band for ten years and making our own music for a long time so it's been nice to delve back into the past a bit more to explore music from all of history; it's been really fun for us.”

Also in The Presets' immediate future is Groovin The Moo, and there are similarities when it comes to preparing for each show.

“[Timeline] will see the audience sitting down and having a more cerebral response to what's going on, whereas with Groovin The Moo we're presenting music that's for the body to jump around and dance to. So they're very different responses we're looking to get from different audiences. That being said we want them both to be interesting. Whether we're making a three-minute pop song or a two-hour orchestral work or a 55-minute festival show we always want to make it as good as we can.

“There'll be moments that we're really popular and really super cool and there'll be other moments when we're daggy and people don't like us and you can't really have control over any of that. The one thing you can control is making music that you dig. That's the goal; make music that we dig.”