New Moon Rising

Midnight Juggernauts don't rush things. Vendetta and his bandmates Andrew Szerkeres and Daniel Stricker have spent three years each time crafting the two records that followed their debut album Dystopia, with the newest Uncanny Valley finally being delivered. Their touring schedule for The Crystal Axis kept them busy for about a year after its release, but they have taken a long break from recording and even from playing shows – it actually was almost two years. With this large amount of time elapsing, a recent run of shows across the country to support the first single from Uncanny Valley, The Ballad Of The War Machine, gave them the opportunity to hone their chops again ahead of the launch of the record proper. Vendetta says that he actually was pretty rusty and had to spend a considerable amount of time just relearning the old songs before getting out on stage again. 

“Our April run was our first run of shows for a few years I suppose,” he says with an inflection in his voice that suggests he is only just having the realisation as he discusses it. “It was good to get back into it because after a break like that it's hard to tell what it feels like onstage again. We had a really good time and I guess the first few shows felt like a bit of a warm-up because I'd forgotten how to play a lot of the songs and forgotten some of the words,” he laughs. “Beforehand we had some pretty intensive rehearsals to get back into it. The Groovin' The Moo tour and the Tame Impala shows, [for] which we jumped on board, were all ages and it was funny looking out in the crowd and seeing a lot of young people that were probably about seven years old when we started. We definitely played to new crowds, which was good for us.”

Uncanny Valley seems like the next logical progression for the band. While it's practically impossible to pigeonhole what they do into any pre-existing genres, they inhabit a sound that is uniquely theirs and very identifiable. After recording The Crystal Axis in a remote beach house in Australia, they decided to isolate themselves once again for the follow-up, albeit in completely different surroundings.

“I think we had a kind of direction that we wanted to go [in] and we definitely wanted a cohesive feeling for the whole album,” he reflects. “We spent a bit of time in this village in the south of France where a friend had this church that was converted into a studio. We spent a bit of time in this idyllic French location writing and recording so I think the atmosphere of that place followed through onto the album. There's some dancey elements but a lot of it is quite laidback. It's not like it's banging dance tunes.”

“We like taking our time for better or worse,” he chuckles. “It means that we have a more relaxed pace for recording and there's not so much stress in the studio, but it also means ten years between albums! We're glad we finally finished it and can put it out there.”

Taking such a long time to work on the record, lovingly crafting it every step of the way, it must become harder to then finally acknowledge that the project is finished and the album is ready. Vendetta agrees. “Yeah it can be dangerous,” he admits. “There's three heads in this band so it can take a while for us all to decide it is a finished piece of music and it's ready for the world. We all felt pretty happy with the album as it was. You don't want to work it too hard either. With a lot of songs there were elements of stripping it back when it all felt like it was getting too dense.”

“We feel like – especially with this album – we try to have different approaches and different flavours. With this one we started with some sessions jamming in this French village and threw down a lot of ideas there. Then we came back to Australia and there was also an element of simplifying the songs as they developed and refining what was there.”

Video art has always played a large role in the bigger concept of the Midnight Juggernauts. When they needed to follow up the brilliant video for The Ballad Of The War Machine, they took a very interesting approach, especially in the modern age of online video and 'content creation'.

“We wanted to make a video that wasn't a normal clip,” he explains. “We wanted the content of the video to be interesting in its own right. We had the idea of making this hybrid video that was like an informative, pseudo-doco. We're always interested in that world and the genesis of different technologies. I was reading this book called Moving Innovations which is about the early history of computer animation, and then started researching more of these programmers and the corporations and universities that had computer labs and geniuses making these trials. A lot of the trials really weren't that well known so we really wanted to make a visual history of that period. It was just something we did out of our own interest really.”

While recording Uncanny Valley at their usual leisurely pace has obviously taken up a lot of the band's last three years, they still had time for a collaborative project that no one could have seen coming. After some speculation in the media following some public sightings of the band hanging out with none other than the de-facto queen of R&B Beyoncé's equally (more?) talented younger sister Solange Knowles, the group confirmed they had indeed been working with the singer on some new material.

“We haven't finished it yet,” he says when asked if anything from the sessions has surfaced yet. “We started off doing that in 2010, but that was also the year when we were quite intensely touring so I wasn't able to continue on it for a while. It's hard to get the schedules in synch. There's still a lot there that we will finish off at some time, but we need our schedules to align. She's well and truly in tour mode now.”

What may become of the recordings resulting from this unlikely collaboration is still undecided at this stage. “It was kind of open and we wanted to keep it open because we really weren't sure about it. We still need to work out what it is exactly [laughs]. She's a really cool artist and she's been through some interesting stuff.”

Ever since their first record, the band have released everything through their own label, Siberia Records. Vendetta says the name for the label came from this idea of Russia being a kind of bizarre Australia, separate and isolated in its own, quite different, way. The label has given them the freedom to work at their own pace without interference. It also provides them with an opportunity to release music from other artists, and one in particular who is proving to become a bit of a star in his own, very distinctive, way. Having collaborated with the group previously under Stricker's management, former Mercy Arms/Lost Valentinos member Kirin J Callinan's critically acclaimed debut album Embracism was also released this year. Callinan's work blurs the line between performance art and music to such an extent that it's hard for anyone to really get a grasp on what he is up to. It's no surprise that Midnight Juggernauts identify so heavily with Callinan's work and want to see it reach a wider audience: “We've known him for many years,” Vendetta says. “He's even jumped on board to play guitar for us a couple of times before. Dan from our band also manages him so he's been pretty involved with all of Kirin's activities over the past few years. They just got back from some European trek last week so Dan's pretty busy with that whole side of things as well. Kirin's a really interesting artist and I just love watching people see him for the first time. We had him open for us once at a show we did at The Forum [Melbourne] and initially people were so confused, and then there were people who were maybe even angry about it,” he laughs, “but by the end everyone loved it. There's something about watching him do his thing and win a crowd over. I'm definitely into watching artists challenge their audience.”