The Sweetest Jams

If you've heard a Shooga song, you should count yourself as a lucky human. Yes, the (currently) five-piece self-described coven are talented musicians and artists, but also, in listening to their songs, you're witness to an exercise in aural ephemera that will never be replicated. Not even the songs on their SoundCloud or Melted Wax, their 2012 track that breezed in at #82 on 4ZZZ's Hot 100, were planned in any way, nor will they exist in any incarnation outside of those recordings. The philosophical implications are terrifying. Of course, not all reasons to start a band that operates on improvisation are so deep.

“Laziness,” Gifford laughs. “We can't be bothered to remember songs, even though some of us might prefer us to remember songs.” Jokes aside, “we have a genuine interest in improvised music,” Gifford says. “I've studied it in the past and played with a lot of improv. We were involved with a lot of improvisation through stuff like Audio Pollen, in Brisbane–“

“And Akemi in the Blue Mountains,” Simpson continues. “Medlow Bath, Blue Mountains. It's an experimental underground venue that hosted lots of international artists. So that was the key for me, anyway.”

“I think that improvised music is really healthy, good for any musician to do,” Martian explains. “It will expand your range… I think it's been really valuable, in my experience.”

Naturally, the longer the ladies have played together, the more attuned to each other's musicality they've become to the point that – even though no fully-structured songs exist – there's a common theme to latch on to.

“There's definitely a Shooga sound,” Simpson says. “Some people have said to us that they wish they were on drugs when they listen to us. Sometimes we will play second-last or something and everyone will start going to sleep, they'll get really relaxed and hop into this sort of trance, and then some other band, random and completely totally different pace, different style, will come on, and it sort of throws the whole gig. So that's something we have to become more conscious of. Some people think we should maybe be playing at 5am when everyone's coming down.

“We're all artists – we make our own headgear or costumes, and we've done installations. One of our things is that we always have lights, lots of gaudy fairy lights and LEDs. We try and bring more and more visual stuff into it. We started off playing with fluoro hoods and lots of lights, and a blacklight so everything was glowing, and then it became very difficult when we started getting these gigs, like, house shows during the day, and all of a sudden we're exposed, and we started looking kind of ridiculous in these hoods in the middle of summer without the darkness and the lights.”

Hooded or otherwise, if variety be the spice of life, let Friday be the first of many times you make the effort to experience a Shooga show. “[It's] a bit like stream-of-consciousness writing, really – it's like that instantaneousness, in the moment; completely in the moment, all the time, because you're always listening,” Gifford says. “You don't have time to think about anything else except being there in the music.”