Filling The Void

Things have been going from strength to strength for burgeoning Brisbane psychedelic outfit Blank Realm in recent times. They've built a solid reputation both at home and abroad for their intoxicating live shows and a string of increasingly excellent recordings, culminating in the recent release of their third album proper, Go Easy. By far the most accomplished and accessible foray yet for the four-piece – comprised of the Spencer siblings Daniel (vocals/drums), Luke (bass) and Sarah (synths/vocals) plus their friend Luke Walsh (guitar/engineering) – Go Easy is the result of a whole new studio approach for the band, one which has paid handsome dividends.

“This record I guess was the first one we've done where it wasn't completely improvised,” Daniel Spencer explains. “Most records before this were just cut from improvised sessions and then we'd put things on top of them – overdubs and that kind of thing – but this is the first time we actually wrote songs and kept them for a while. We probably played them for close to two years before we recorded them – we went over to America with them and everything – so we really played them a lot before these recorded versions came about.”

This approach may have changed the feel of the individual songs over time, but it didn't affect the collaborative nature of the Blank Realm writing process.

“No, the four of us always contribute fairly equally to every song,” Walsh continues. “Someone might have an idea for a riff or a melody, but even if that's the case we bring it into the group and it's totally changed by everyone else's input. I think some of our best material seems to come out of a group effort where we're just playing for a few hours – usually something just comes out of the ether from that. I think we all know at that point together whether it's something we should continue with or drop, and if we continue with it I think we each allow each band member to contribute equally – we never dictate what someone else plays. We've been doing that for a long time, so even though it might sound a little random or left up to fate I think there's a sort of group mind that results over a number of years and we all just know when something is good or we're happy with it.”

 “Yeah, we don't discuss things that much, it just happens, we're pretty much on the same page,” Spencer agrees. “We all grew up listening to the same music, so we know where things are going and we don't have to talk about it. 

The songs did change over the course of this process, but not always in ways that were completely perceptible.

“I guess we don't notice because we're playing them so often, but if we do go back and listen to those early versions they have changed a lot,” Spencer admits. “You add new parts into them, and the words change a lot – I used to change the words pretty much every time we played, but now they're on record I have to keep the words the same, which is hard.”

”And I think we always try to leave some type of the performance and the melodies unstructured, because we always started off improvised and even with these songs that have become so familiar to us we like to try and just weave some of those elements where it gets a bit crazy with guitar solos and synth solos coming in – we try and leave that fairly improvised so every time we play there's something slightly different,” Walsh asserts. “I think that's fairly important – we never want to be stopping and arguing over how we played this differently last time, and how we need to make sure that it's right on the beat and really tight – that's not really a concern to us, it's more about having that same energy so even if some of the structures of the songs vary from time to time, or we drop a chorus or bring in a new verse, it doesn't really matter as long as we're hitting that energy that the song feels like it needs.”

Without doubt Go Easy is their best attempt yet at capturing Blank Realm's live power in the studio.

“Yeah, I don't think any of our other albums have captured that in the past,” Spencer agrees. “We record all of our own stuff, and Luke's getting better at recording – he's recorded a heap of other bands now as well like Per Purpose and Martyr Privates – so that process has gotten a bit better. I feel like this is probably the first one that captures what we sound like live, where maybe before the sound was a bit thin.”

The Blank Realm sound itself has changed a fair bit over the journey – there's less drone now and more conventional melodies – but the band feel that this is a normal evolution rather than anything forced.

“For us it seems like that,” Walsh ponders. “When we started it was a lot more abstract and definitely a lot more difficult to listen to, but that was just a function of the fact that we were doing it pretty much to entertain ourselves before we started doing tapes and that sort of thing and people started getting interested. Then we started playing in a lot more 'rock' venues, which influenced the sound in a way – definitely not in a bad way – but I guess we wanted to be more entertaining.”

Blank Realm have been compared to many disparate bands, probably because they're drawing from a wide pool of influence.

“When we started we were pretty into krautrock and Can and also stuff from New Zealand like The Dead C, or American bands like Pere Ubu and that kind of thing,” Spencer offers. “They were the touchstone bands that we kind of started out thinking about and really wanting to play music like, but we're all big record collectors and we listen to a lot of music so it's hard to say anymore what the influences are, it's changed.”

There's an incredible underground rock scene in Australia at the moment that's finally starting to garner wider attention, and Blank Realm feel happy to be part of this bubbling movement of likeminded bands, even if it's unintentional.

“We have a lot of our friends who we feel are doing great music now in different states, it's really good,” Spencer enthuses. “I don't think that there's been another time where I've felt like all my favourite bands are Australian, and I definitely feel that at the moment which is exciting. They're all pretty different in a way but I guess there's something linking it all – maybe it's just an attitude that's a bit different to the popular music that's around.”

Blank Realm will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 12 January - The Primitive, Brisbane QLD
Friday 25 January - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 2 January - GoodGod Small Club, Sydney NSW
Saturday 9 January - The Gasometer, Melbourne VIC