Creatures Of Art

There is no band in Australia who have done as bang-up a job at bottling the festival experience than Art Vs Science. Every summer, they seem to be at our collective front door once again, a hamper full of irreverent, sometimes surreal bangers offered before us. Parlez-Vous Français?, Magic Fountain, Flippers… these are songs of unhindered joy. Five years on from their first EP, the trio of multitalented musicians understand their niche.

It was that first Splendour tour where we were just like, ‘Holy shit,’” Dan Williams laughs. “I mean, we’d all played in shitty rock bands before that, and had never really played to more than our family, our friends and those dudes you always see hanging out at bars. But then Splendour… they were our first shows, really, so I think we felt we had this niche thing going on. I don’t know, it just seems to work for us.”

While some might disregard Art Vs Science for the songs that stamp the ‘party animal’ tag on the band, there’s a lot more going on, as the synth-driven electro and disco numbers like Video Disco can attest. With a three-year gap between major releases, 2014 has been one of experimentation, with the communal I Was A Child Once project pairing with the release of EP Create/Destroy, and a more critical eye being cast on them. Now there’s their latest single, Creature Of The Night, a footwork-y and minimal – yes, minimal – track, with that slightly dark repeating vocal: “Good afternoon, Son.” It’s trippy and a bit avant-garde, but you can still hear the fun.

“Yeah, I guess it was a bit of a departure for us,” Williams says. “I mean, I guess not consciously. Our tastes have changed, and we wanted to do something a little more minimal,.. Jim [Finn] said, ‘I’ve written this creepy poem thing, I think we should build something strange around it.’ And it all came together in the city one morning, like we managed to track most of it in a few hours. It was really fun, because usually someone comes in with a song and it’s finished six months later.”

That keen interest in trying something new is a good sign, as fans are still waiting for a full-length release to follow the bombshell that was The Experiment back in 2011. Create/Destroy has shown that Art Vs Science are ably aware of their place in Australian music, and that they are willing to try new things. “We’re sort of tinkering with some new tunes and stuff at the moment,” Williams says. “We did the EP earlier in the year, and now we’ve got some new material that kind of came from that. But we’re meddling with some new toys, and we’ve all got some good ideas that we’re excited to try out. So yeah, we’re still in the stages of figuring out how everything’s gonna fit together, but we’re hoping to have something out late this year or early next year.” So the festival continues.