65daysofstaticWhen we supported The Cure it was as its own self contained thing, and I think the Metallica thing was from a festival that we did in Japan once. We weren't really anywhere near them, I don't think anyone really gets to be anywhere near them,” Wolinski says, discussing just a few of the choice supports they've recently enjoyed. That gives you an idea of 65daysofstatic (65dos herein)'s current position. With so much music churning out of the quartet it's easy to see how stories get spun into legends. Especially when you're categorised as 'post-rock', a term usually referencing Battles or Aphex Twin that Wolinski himself isn't even clear on what it means.
“Do you know what? I have no idea anymore. Once upon a time it was shorthand for bands who were very quiet and very loud, and who had lots of delay pedals. These days, when we tour Europe it's the same kind of thing, but in England it's a shortcut for describing bands who want to sound like Mogwai but aren't quite as good as them. It's become a little bit meaningless.” Fans of 65dos will tell you that the band has changed a lot in their eleven years together. Sometimes electronic, sometimes drum'n'bass, sometimes less post and just rock. The boys are chameleons from release to release.
“We had quite a history, before we started releasing records,” Wolinski continues. “Before we had a live drummer it was a lot more electronic and dancey and noisy. We actually got a drummer when we wrote The Fall Of Math, and it immediately opened up a lot more possibilities. We were really still learning how to do what we do up until that point. That's when it started to feel more like 65dos as it is now. On the last record we were bringing back electronics; to be honest, we wrote that record live and it helped us to make all the electronic things a lot more interactive than they had been before.”
The new album, the work still in progress, is both evolution and reiteration of all the electronic and interactive things that are 65dos. “I suspect that 65 fans will definitely recognise it as us,” Wolinski says. “I think we're just trying to continue to be better at songwriting and making sounds. When you start writing music, when you're young you have that wonderful naivety like anything can work and as you get older you're more aware that's out of your grasp. You know too much about it to make those mistakes so instead you have to work a lot harder. We're hearing something occasionally that we can't quite capture so that's why we've been working on it for a year.”
Don't expect too many sneak peeks of the new material when the lads are out here for Peats Ridge Festival and other headline shows, though. There's eleven years worth of material to get through, all of which is being reissued and released in Australia to coincide with the tour. “Those albums came out every year as we made them they came out with singles and B-sides and EPs and whatever, so a lot of that stuff is superfluous when you're releasing a back catalogue, so it makes a lot more sense to release them as full packages. It's crazy when we look back at how much music there is involved with each record.”
“Heavy Sky came out with We Were Exploding Anyway which is in recent memory, but there were many B-sides and giveaway tracks that we did with The Fall Of Math and One Time For All Time. It's really interesting to revisit those; there's a lot of stuff that we don't really play very often or listen to very often so it's nice for us as well to be reminded,” reminisces Shrewsbury. “It just makes sense to give anyone that's buying it in Australia the full cannon. You can see the little slices of time that we were writing and things are in context to each other rather than being dribbled up.”
And let's not forget the soundtrack work they've recently started to add to their repertoire, a direction they've taken off their own bat according to Wolinski. “We got invited to do a live score for a film festival in Glasgow at the beginning of 2011, and we chose the sci-fi film Silent Running – it seemed really well suited to us. We thought we were going to use existing music, but we ended up writing an entire new score, and it went so much better than we thought it was going to. It ended up being a tour, and we put it out as an album in the end last year.
“It was really cool because we've wanted to get into soundtracking for a while, but because nobody really wanted to we did this instead, just to prove that we could do it. It was great, we've got a taste for it now, we've done some other bits and pieces, some computer game soudtracking stuff, and there are a couple of other possibilities in the pipeline. It's a nice outlet for all of the other music that we write. Especially the stuff that might not work quite as well in the live set, it gives us the chance to still make it and keep that discipline separate from making records that are 65 standalone records.”
“The stuff that we're writing that is perhaps less urgent or more subtle, and that in the past we might have just mercilessly thrown away” elaborates Shrewsbury. “We're coming to realise that it's not that it's bad music, it just might not necessarily fit the 65 master plan. It's quite nice to be able to put it in a different direction and into something that it's suitable for. It'll hopefully also mean that we won't accidentally allow 65 albums to become complacent, because we'll keep the really crystal stuff for that and the stuff that doesn't stand alone quite as well can go elsewhere. I don't mean that our weaker stuff will become soundtracks, but we've learnt that there's different rules that apply for soundtracks.”
Knowing what is and isn't part of your band's sound while still pushing boundaries is one of the advantages to maturing together as a band. There's also advantages to waiting eleven years before seeing a band, and although Wolinksi seems genuinely frustrated that it has taken them so long to hit Australia, he reveals our crowds can expect to see the best of the best. “We've been trying to get there for a long time now. Especially [with] the last couple of releases, we really have thought that we'd get over there and it never quite happened. So it's great that Bird's Robe have picked it all up and are putting it all out and helping us get over there.
“We're interested in putting on a show these days, more than we used to be. Well, more than we used to be aware of what it took to do that. We're going to try and visit as much of the music as possible, but also make sure that it flows. We are big fans of being loud and trying to get the best out of the audience, to be as energetic as possible. We're still pretty into it, so it'll be bordering on physical.”
65daysofstatic will be playing the following dates:
Sunday 30 December - Peats Ridge Festival, Glenworth Valley NSW
Wednesday 2 January - The Hi-Fi, Sydney NSW
Thursday 3 January - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD
Friday 4 January - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 5 January - The Bakery, Perth WA
