From Beautiful To Crazy

Beats Antique began in 2007 when dancer/producer Zoe Jakes heard that the manager of her dance company, Miles Copeland (brother of Stewart Copeland from The Police), was looking for a young band that were doing fusion and electronic music. Realising that she knew people who could do that, she quickly put the band together and they put an album out later that year. Over five years and seven releases, the band have lived up to the idea of their name, placing traditional analogue instruments and melodies within an electronic beat framework.

Both David Satori and Tommy Cappel come from traditional musical backgrounds. Satori has a degree in music performance and composition and Cappel in studio drumming. It's a foundation that has served them well in the creative process.

“We both grew up playing live band music,” Cappel says. “Whether it's rock music or jazz, or Afro-beat or funk music, I think as a musician, for Beats Antique, it's been kind of necessary. We have training with orchestras, we have training with creating horn parts, with drum ensemble stuff that I've done in the past, which does lend itself to be able to create more sophisticated melodic and harmonic structures within electronic music, which I think is special.

“David, for instance, his band previous to this was an Afro-roots band [Aphrodesia], and one of the newest songs we've written has an Afro-beat undertone to it, and this North African 12/8 feel. But it's also got a slide guitar kind of feel, so it sort of has a bunch of different things going on that might not go together in some people's music. But in ours, it's a mainstay. We always have something in there that surprises.”

There's two live versions of Beats Antique, the first of which involves Zoe Jakes doing live dance performances with the music. The second, which is the version Australian audiences will see, is the stripped-back version, with just the musicians. They create quite different experiences for both the audience and the band, as Cappel explains: “I think when [Zoe's performance] is there, people get really excited about it. I feel like when we just do the music, it turns into a different style of show. There's a lot more dancing from the audience, because they're not watching something. We'll go off a little bit more musically – on tangents – when Zoe's not there, so it's still really exciting. When she is there it's all very strict – choreographed. So when she's not there we can open it up and be more a band.”

Originally intended as a studio-only project, Cappel and Satori have had to experiment over the years as they moved into the live arena, figuring out what allows them to reproduce their songs and still a fun performance.

“I think that's the challenge of performing with pre-recorded music,” Satori offers, “creating it fresh. We usually just take the parts that we perform. Like I'll take out the banjo parts or the violin parts and Tommy will take out the live drum parts or some of the electronic drums and we can improvise around the form of the song. So that's one of the ways we keep it fresh, just leaving room for improvisation with those instruments. And then there are techniques of being able to loop sections and trigger the samples, which we experiment with as well. It can become pretty infinite on how you want to do it. And we've found that when you try to do too much, you can actually just lose the audience and lose the element of performing, whereas if you stick to just playing your instrument over it, that can actually be the most enjoyable experience live.”

“It's one of those things I think we're always striving for,” Cappel expands, “to figure out how to keep it fun, to keep it good, to keep it exciting for us while playing the same song over a few years. It'll go through a bunch of remixes and different things so that we're not always just playing the same song. And with electronic music, it's really fun to actually make new versions of a song for a specific set.”

Seven releases over five years is a prodigious output by anyone's measure, even more so when the band maintain a hectic tour schedule. So what is it that drives Beats Antique to keep creating at such a rate?

“I think it's been our fans,” Cappel muses. “Just their support has inspired us to keep making music and touring and, as we tour, we want to have more music out there and so we've just been amassing music and fans and that's been our focus for the last few years. We just finished a two-month tour of North America, so going to Australia for a couple of weeks is partially gaining fans in Australia and exposing them to our new music, but also it's going to somewhere really beautiful that's not where you live and it's sort of like having a work vacation.”

“I think we just love making music,” Satori chips in. “It's easy to make music. I mean it's what we love to do. That's really part of it too; it just comes out very easily for us. I just don't know what I'd do if I wasn't doing that, you know.”

Playing the Eclipse Festival in Australia, after a similar event earlier this year in America as well as major festivals like Bonnaroo and Electric Forest, has given the guys a great overview of the state of modern dance music. So how do they view the current state of the scene, and where do they see it going next?

“I think EDM is just blowing up in the past four years,” Satori says. “Especially in the US, it's just gotten exponentially bigger and the crowds and the kids are really loving it. I feel like it's gotten really saturated though, so I feel like there's going to be a minimal backlash. The music's really complex and really heavy and big so I feel like minimal music will come back a little, you know, beats with sparseness in it.”

“Yeah, I think it always goes back and forth between pretty atmospheric stuff and heavy, raging stuff,” Cappel agrees. “And I think it just keeps going back and forth. I mean there's ambient drum'n'bass and then that ambient drum'n'bass turns into really heavy D&B. Same thing with dubstep – it came from dub more and then it turned into this heavy interpretation of that tempo. And again with house music. I think that always, it starts off with a subtle change and that catches on and turns into something really crazy and the next person comes around and they're, like, 'Well how about this?' trying something really peaceful. It goes from that into something really crazy and it's kind of [fun for] us to keep going from beautiful to crazy and then we'll see where the pendulum swings next.”

Beats Antique will be playing the following shows:

Friday 16 November – The Standard, Sydney NSW
Saturday 17 November – Coniston Lane, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 22 November – Melbourne Music Week VIC