How Pond And Methel Ethyl Delayed The New Hamjam Release

The new album from Perth-based electro-pop duo, the enigmatically titled a/s/l?, has been a long, long time coming. Firstly, one-half of the duo, Hamish 'Ham' Rahm went through an extremely painful and rare illness during the writing process. Fully recovered now, Rahm is more than happy to speak candidly and good-naturedly about a very tough time in his life.

"We started recording and I got this thing called Pilonidal Sinus," he recalls, "which really fucked me up for a good six months. Basically, I had an open wound in my back for about three months. It was just a really crook situation and it just took up a whole lot of time.

"Basically, it was fucked, to put it mildly."

Secondly, musical opportunities came a-knocking for both Rahm and his partner in Hamjam, James 'Jam' Ireland at the same time. "By the time I was ready to start working on stuff again and chomping at the bit to get at it, James had accepted the gig to start playing drums for Pond, and I had accepted an offer to play guitar and synth in (Methel) Ethyl," he says.

Lastly, but by no means least, the duo had actually done their own independent release of the album quite some time ago, but they received an offer from a prestigious indie record label to give a/s/l? a more formal and higher profile release. "It's already been out in the world, and then it got taken down from the world, and now it's coming back out again!

"We just put it up on the internet, probably a year ago," he explains, "we sent it to Joe from Bedroom Suck (Records), and he said 'can you take that down, I want to put it out'. So then we were like 'hell yeah, that's one of our favourite labels'."

August 11^th is the date the album finally sees the light of day in an official capacity, and this is bringing much relief to Rahm and Ireland. He feels that it had stood the test of the time that it has taken. "I'm excited now, we've had a long time to look back at it," he says, "I listened to it the other day, it came on my iTunes after a mix that I'd been listening to, and I was like 'wow, this sounds good!' I was stoked."

Despite the fact that both members of Hamjam are in other high profile bands, and the fact that this duo is unlikely to take their sounds on the road with them for the foreseeable future, Rahm confirms that Hamjam is very much an ongoing concern and that they have big plans for it as they move beyond the delays and into the future.

"We never stop," he states definitively, "we did an EP before this, now we're working on kinda splitting the sound of the band in two. We've got Hamjam, which is the poppier stuff, and there's Xamjam, which is the more Krauty, long form jam element of it. More like electronica I suppose."