Making Music Organically, On Stage And In The Studio

Flyying Colours may well have recorded the indie-psych rock album of the year. Their debut LP Mindfulness is full of nostalgic guitar melodies and dual vocal harmonies that come together to create something that is utterly gentle and beautiful. "I think you would be hard-pressed to find a few artists that can say they are 100 percent happy with something they put out, or maybe not," considers vocalist Brodie J Brummer. "I'm happy that we finished and I'm happy with how it sounds. I think it's one of those things where you've got to have a point at which you stop you know?" says Brummer, admitting to maybe three or four things from the mixing end that he would go back and alter. "With that said, if I made those changes I probably still wouldn't want them to be there, you know what I mean? It's just a few of the tracks, some really small things where a few of the snares were half a decibel too loud."

"It's actually kind of scary because we don't really practise, so it was really interesting to walk out and be like, 'Okay we're going to play a shitload of new stuff."

For someone whose methods are so precise, Brummer's entry point on the record was extremely broad. "The pool that I was referencing from was rather large and kind of diverse, so it didn't come out sounding exactly like anything. The idea was for it to be an organic record, and sound a lot just like our band and us four as players, which is what I think it sounds like so I was really stoked on that... It's just nice to have inspiration there and to listen to something and get your head back in the game in terms of where you might want a certain sound like a drum sound to go or what you might want to do with the guitar and where you want it to sit."

Flyying Colours recently had the chance to road-test the results at mini-fest Wintersteady in Adelaide. "It's actually kind of scary because we don't really practise, so it was really interesting to walk out and be like, 'Okay we're going to play a shitload of new stuff. Do we actually know how to play the new stuff, or not?' It's fun to see if we do or we don't in real time. There's a comfortability where we feel it out and we always manage to do it. I'm in a band with some super talented musicians so if anyone's going to fuck up it's probably going to be me. We always know and we always feel a section where we know we can do whatever we want and get back to the main part of the song. There's a few tunes where we haven't gone 'yeah this part will go for that long' and that's the best part about seeing a band live rather than listening to the album, it doesn't have all those exact same changes the entire way through the set; there's things that are the same but there's things that are different as well.