Recovering The Night

Ghost Notes aren't your conventional Brisbane band. Their brand of instrumental rock isn't an easy sell, particularly when the negative connotations of “post-rock” rear their ugly heads. Nevertheless, they've gleaned critical acclaim for their sinuous jazz-inflected compositions, which culminated in their debut album By Cover Of Night last year. Twelve months on, Ghost Notes are revisiting the album, re-issuing it in vinyl form, something that drummer Cameron Smith and guitarist Owen Dengate both admit almost happened in the first place.

“When we first did the album, everyone was keen to have it on vinyl, but when we realised we'd have to split it up because it was too long for a single vinyl, there were some misgivings,” Smith concedes. “Then three months later a lot of people came up to us saying, 'You really should do this on vinyl'. We realised that we could split the album three ways, which would work well, but had to think of another way to fill a fourth side of a record. We were conscious of the negatives of releasing the exact same album on vinyl, because it would feel like we were short-changing the people who'd supported us early on. We settled on a bonus side of live material.”

Whilst the launch of the vinyl is exciting, fans hankering for new material won't have to wait long at all.

“We have two albums in the wings, which we've been recording concurrently with the planning of the By Cover Of Night re-launch,” Dengate explains. “The new stuff is much more collaborative now. Whereas before Jamie [Curran – piano] or I would write something and bring it in, the writing happens in the room. A lot of it's fairly spontaneous, where I'll play a riff and people will start to latch on. If no one can think of anything to add to it, it gets left behind.

“It's great because there's something happening with the band now,” Smith continues. “We've been quiet in a live aspect this year, but we should have a lot of momentum when we release these albums. The writing process has been healthy, people are bringing in a riff or an idea, it's very bare bones, and we write from there. Although it sounds freeform, in the past things have been fairly planned out with defined parts. Now there's no structural process – the song is complete when it feels right. We can look back at our iPhone demo and it might be eight-minutes long or two minutes long. We often change how a song is structured sometimes months after we have finished it, when a new idea presents itself.”

When asked to define the Ghost Notes sound, Smith and Dengate find their amorphous aesthetic hard to pin down.

“I think there's a lot of diverse ground that we cover,” Smith starts. “We try to take music from other formats and approximate to our style, with trumpets and weird out-of-time pattering drums. There is the post-rock thing, although we tend to not do that in the way most other bands do. When I think of the bands that influence us, it's not Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky; it's the Dirty Three, Tortoise, Talk Talk. There is a bit of a jazz thing going on, although we aren't jazz, I think jazz musicians would be offended if we said we were. There's a big Ennio Morricone influence. We rip off Bluebottle Kiss a lot too...”

“There's a lot of that great indie Australian rock sound from the '90s that really appeals to us, definitely,” Dengate concurs. “I find most instrumental music tends to be pretty limiting. We never sit still; we're always changing.”