Warm The Sun

For a band steeped in a love of elongated jam sessions, light projections and mind alterations, Dreamtime are proving to be quite the quiet achievers in the Brisbane music scene. In the space of the past two years the trio – Zac Anderson (guitar/vocals), Catherine Maddin (bass/vocals) and Tara Wardrop (drums) – have released a celebrated debut album, played a number of profile shows and found themselves ensconced in some exciting boutique festival line-ups. Yet 2013 is already shaping up to be a monumental, defining year for the band, as they release their second album Sun before travelling to the United States to play in the world-renowned Austin Psych Fest alongside genre luminaries such as Roky Erickson, Silver Apples and The Black Angels as well as Aussie compatriots The Laurels and Ride Into The Sun and some of the most exciting bands on the planet (such as Deerhunter, Warpaint and The Soft Moon). Being accepted as part of the bill is a dream come true, but didn't just drop in their laps either.

“Total perseverance and harassment,” Maddin laughs. “We had about ten people all sending in recommendations to it. It's weird, because it's people who know people who know the people who run (Austin) Psych Fest, that sort of thing. I don't know actually how we got on to be honest. It's something we have dreamt of being a part of since we started the band, so to be actually doing it, even if we are way down the list, written in tiny letters, it's so unbelievable.”

“We asked them directly too,” counters Anderson. “Last year we tried to get on the bill and sent them our first record (2010's Dreamtime). We just bugged them until they gave in, basically.”

“We've set up a few shows around the States while we're there too,” Wardrop continues. “We're a small band with not a lot of money coming in, but that doesn't matter in this case. We're seeing it as a holiday anyway, so every show is a bonus, and we're looking forward to just seeing the sights and seeing some great bands and just enjoying ourselves. We're opening the final day too, so it's a little nerve-racking, having to spend two days watching amazing bands play before we have to get up there…”

Such nerves are unwarranted if the strength of the new songs on Sun are anything to go by. Recorded in the leafy suburb of The Gap, the album is richer and denser in sound, but also is imbued with more melody and a warmer aesthetic, most notably on tracks like Centre Of Mind and The Road. The band certainly benefited from lessons learnt from their first effort, building on elements that were only fledgling a year ago, yet Sun also sounds vastly different in other areas.

“We've probably learnt more this time around; the first record was quite easy but then again we didn't know what we were doing or what we wanted,” Anderson explains. “When we started recording (with George Bennett) we used some really nice old '70s recording equipment that gave the songs a really warm feel. I was also listening to a lot of music where the bass really dominated things, it's the prominent thing I hear. One of our favourite bands is The Cosmic Dead, and their sound holds this power that is pretty much created by the bass and drums building and holding down this groove. You can dance to it; it holds this trance-like power. We didn't have much time either, so we dropped the treble, and I really wanted the bass to be right up in the mix, driving things. So there's this big bottom on the record now, and it sounds really good. Who knows though, we'll probably do something totally different for the next album.”

Psychedelia is a label that is either used far too liberally (because a song stretches beyond five minutes, uses a tremolo or wah-pedal, or features cyclical rhythm patterns) or garners a scabrous disdain in the Australian musical wilderness, a strange thing to acknowledge when Australian music has generally resembled an aural melting pot ripe for eternal permutations of any genre under the sun. Dreamtime embody many psychedelic tropes, but unlike many of their contemporaries they do not see psych as a dirty word, and feel that the Antipodean tides are shifting.

“It does look like we would struggle to get gigs (in Brisbane), and we all openly love psych rock, which could be off-putting, but things are changing,” Wardrop states. “Psych is such a broad term, too, so there are lots of bands that we play with here that aren't anything like us, but kind of suit us too. We played the Lost Race festival last year, and there weren't many bands like us at all in that psych sense, but the festival and people fit the mood. Really cruisy, no clashes, a really positive vibe, lots of people experimenting and changing their own sounds…”

“And I guess the renewed popularity of big international bands like Os Mutantes is really opening up new doorways for smaller acts to come through,” Maddin adds.

“We're camping at Austin Psych Fest and to me that is one of the most exciting parts,” Anderson enthuses. “We were invited to this underground psych festival held in Sydney called Wormwoodstock and it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to in my life, me and Tara just lying in the grass in front of a band, there's no competition for music, I'd never heard of any of the bands yet everyone was on the same wavelength and having a blast. I enjoy the niche element of psych music here, it makes things special, but it's also nice to have people that get where you are coming from.”

While a Dreamtime show seems steeped in improvisation, a set is mostly governed by hours and hours of rehearsal time whereby the monstrous jam sessions have been honed to the songs that exist in the live arena. Anderson is quick to assert that the tight precision of the live Dreamtime experience is derived from improvisation and vice versa.

“I can get bored with our songs pretty quickly; I was over the songs on Dreamtime before we'd put it out,” Anderson admits. “I just love getting into a space and being in the moment of a song, seeing things take shape. Sometimes the best thing is when you haven't practised together for a while, and you just get in there and jam things out, see what happens.”

“We don't often jam live although we'd love to be able to do it and do it well, like Earthless,” Maddin finishes. “But jamming is a big part of writing for us. The title track on Sun is the product of a massive jam that we recorded and it's probably our favourite song to play. The songs we record are very intensely worked over and perfected.”

Dreamtime will be playing the following dates:

Friday 5 April - The Time Machine, Nambour QLD