Chaos In The Club

"We're moving to London in December, so it's our last chance in a good while to come over to Australia and do some shows,” explains Louis Helliker-Hales. For anyone looking to skim-read, that's pretty much the most important thing you need to read about NZ house/bass filial duo Chaos In The CBD. 

From sleepy Devonport, Helliker-Hales and brother/bandmate Ben have been concocting attention-catching genre-mashing club sounds for several clubbing seasons. Recently their successes took them a few thousand kilometres north of their hometown, relocating briefly to Paris, where they toured Europe, partied harder than a five-day-old baguette, and fell in love with the French club scene.

“We went to Paris about a year ago, after signing to a French label, and fell in love with the scene over there,” he says. “We wanted to move there, to Paris, but it makes more sense to move to London to start with, at least our girlfriends can get jobs there and we can speak the language. But we still love Paris, and we had such a good response in the clubs over there.”

Unlike most southern electronic music producers over the last few years, the brothers are not moving to Berlin, but instead risking the high-rent, low-temperature life of London. “We're keen to spend time in Germany, particularly in Berlin. We're quite fascinated by the clubbing thing there – clubs like Berghain, the Panorama Bar, it seems very cool there. We're listening to a lot of deep house and techno at the moment, and particularly sounds from Germany. We'd like to explore it there, definitely.” 

It's a cheap flight from London, certainly cheaper than Auckland to Melbourne or Sydney for a fix of techno and deep house clubbing. But if their dreams of full-time music production don't come true at first, they can't even make coffee – breaking the 'New Zealander in London' stereotype (one that blesses many expats with great coffee, mind you). “We've been saving for the last six months,” Louis laughs nervously. “We're ready to go as soon as our visa comes through, and ideally we'd like to find ourselves with shows straight away – we have friends in London who are promoters, and hopefully we can make a job out of it. But if not, I guess I might have to get a part-time job,” he concedes uncertainly.

When they compare their chances of making a living out of music in Auckland to the brighter lights of Blighty, the risks seem far outweighed by what they've already experienced as the gains of being international guests in a more lucrative scene. “The money is a lot better over there than here, people are prepared to pay to go out if there's a decent show on offer. Here, we play at a ton of nights, but they're free to get into. In Auckland, people don't seem to be prepared to spend money on club entry, but they spend all their money instead on alcohol,” Louis laments. “In France, we got paid quite handsomely – it was a welcome change to get paid so well. Also,” he adds, “girls don't dance to techno in Auckland.”

Chaos In The CBD have been invited across this much smaller pond for one last showcase of their current loves in R&B, UK bass and, increasingly, European techno-influenced sounds. Although they'll be playing mostly their own music, they warn us not to expect a live show. “We don't do anything live, even though we play about 50% our own tracks and remixes,” Louis admits. “We play with Serrato. One of us will be focused on cueing and playing tracks, and the other one can be grooving. Serrato makes beat-matching easier, so we concentrate more on selection and programming. But we're not 'performers' – we hope the music stands up by itself.”