Recording The 'Poverty-Stricken Way'

Holy Holy's Tim Carroll extends his hand across the table for a handshake as he takes a seat across the table, diagonally opposite. He sports a burgundy V-neck jumper and his hair is pulled back, accentuating an impressive bushy outlaw beard. His bandmate Oscar Dawson arrives shortly afterwards, his long curly locks hanging past the sheepskin collar of his denim jacket. Dawson orders a wrap, mentioning he feels as if he's approaching the blood-sugar precipice — perhaps he's prone to 'hangry' outbursts?

The pair first met as volunteer English teachers in Southeast Asia during their gap years. Carroll reminisces about carefree afternoons spent playing "six-a-side soccer on this basketball court" with the locals before they "moved around and went right up to the north": "We were staying at a Buddhist monastery both meditating with monks at, like, 4am." Dawson interjects, "That only lasted for me for a coupla days," blaming his lack of flexibility and "the wooden floor" for the uncomfortable nature of this activity.

"There was one funny technological relic that we made use of over there, which was the mini-disc," Dawson remembers. "Our old friend who we were travelling with, Marcus, had this mini-disc [player] and he had a microphone so we could record onto mini-disc. And so we had a couple of guitars and we recorded a few songs whilst we were over there, which, I don't know where those mini-discs would be now, but they're definitely not Holy Holy songs and I don't think that we'd ever want them to see the light of day." Carroll laughs nervously.

This outfit relies heavily on the wonders of modern technology for their songwriting because they're based in different states: Dawson lives in Melbourne and Carroll has moved to Tasmania. "In terms of our pre-production, we'll quite often do a thing where I record a sketchy little idea just straight onto an iPhone — just with, like, one verse and a chorus idea — and then I'll send it to Oz [Dawson] and then maybe about two weeks later Ozzie's reply will come, and that will be multi-tracked with guitars and bass. And then I'll kinda have a think about that, and then go back and adjust it or put vocals on it. And then we'll send it to our drummer [Ryan Strathie] in Brisbane and then he'll add drums to it and we can get to a pretty nice position within that process."

Dawson believes that "the poverty-stricken way" they initially recorded tracks "actually works out best for the music". "We do a take and if we decide we're gonna do another one, we just record directly over it," he explains. Carroll elaborates, "We'd be recording over Ball Park Music and, like, Emma Louise records, which was kinda funny 'cause you'd be hearing these songs and you'd go, 'Oh, yeah, just erase that now we're going on top.' And sometimes we'd be like, 'Oh, we've got this much left on the tape,' and it would be influencing how long we could play for — how long the songs could be. Looking back on it now it's kinda funny, 'cause I'm sure if we asked Sony for some more tape they would allow us to record a bit longer."