Hyperactive

our albums and ten years in the making, New South Wales-based hip hop/electronica outfit Hermitude have taken another new vector in manifesting their musical diversity with their latest LP, HyperParadise. Having already accrued the Australian Independent Records Association Award for Best Independent Dance/Electronica Album and the 2011 J Award for Music Video of the Year for the smash single, Speak Of The Devil, HyperParadise has more energy than its three precursors and has ventured out into new genre territory encompassing glitch and dubstep influences, a change in tone that Dubs attributes in part to a move to Sydney. “We've always been pretty chilled-out beat-making guys but with this one we decided to inject a little more fire, not more uptempo, just more fire and energy all round,” Dubs explains.

He and cohort Angus Stuart (aka Elgusto) have collaborated in bands since their formative teenage years spent in the Blue Mountains with Elgusto's dad owning Sound Heaven, a recording studio now known as a hip hop haven, having been the home of Urthboy and The Herd recordings along with every Hermitude album except for HyperParadise. Since the start of last year the pair have been bunkered away in a purpose-built studio in the heart of Sydney's CBD on Parramatta Road but Dubs fondly remembers their formative years in the mountains, explaining the name they chose for the outfit. “We started out sneaking in and using John's studio at night as we could obviously only get in there then after it had been finished being used and we'd do dusk until dawn sessions,” Dubs remembers.

“We would get in there around 10 or 11pm and stumble out around 7am when the sun was coming up. At the time we were on a property that had these massive pine trees on the edge of a cliff and we'd watch the sun come up from the edge and we just kind of felt like we were the only people around – now there's planes going over our heads and we are deep in the middle of Sydney, which is why HyperParadise sounds a bit different.

“We've been slowly accumulated gear over the past ten years or so and we've finally got a place to stash it all. Now we write during the day and basically treat it like a day job. We get here at 10am and leave whenever we finish at 6 or 8 or 10pm or 3am if something is going on. And that's how we made HyperParadise. The idea was always just to write heaps of music everyday and then just pick the best tunes so HyperParadise was part of a bigger bulk of work; it was just those tunes that were stronger and there were others that just never made it.”

Jam-packed with futuristic beats and weird, trippy sounds while still remaining accessible, the LP is genre-defying to say the least, a fact that Dubs says relates to a love of breaking rules, along with an early schooling in all things jazz going back to the duo's first band incarnation – Funk Injections. “The sound that we make these days has moved on from really jazz-influenced to electronic glitz hop and wonky beats, future beats and dubstep – there are so many new genres coming through in electronic music that it's hard to keep up so we just listen to as much music as we can and I guess, draw influence.

“A lot of massive hip hop tunes were based on jazz samples though, so that was how I discovered and gained a love for hip hop personally, I was brought up on jazz by my dad and hearing jazz that I'd recognised in a hip hop format really kind of made me excited. The hip hip and trip hop that came about in the late '90s was a bit jazzy in the sense that it was using jazz samples and was experimental and I guess there weren't really any rules about what you could and couldn't do. So over the years we've always taken an experimental approach in the sense that we're always searching for different sorts of sounds or programming different sorts of beats and being a little bit left field.”

Accounting for their musical diversity, both Dubs and Elgusto started out on the road to being accomplished instrumentalists in their teens, with Dubs studying classical piano for six years before going on to study jazz at university level, while Elgusto studied percussion in Cuba as a youngster. “And on his way back he stopped by Hawaii and picked up turntables. I'd known Gus for a few years by then and this is when we started jamming – I brought some keyboards over and he had the turntables,” Dubs remembers.

“My dad was a professional trumpet player and was friends with the famous jazz composer Bruce Cale. I'd expressed interest in learning piano and so dad called up his mate and asked who he would recommend as a teacher. He put us onto a classical teacher in the Blue Mountains. She was this crazy Ukrainian women – an amazing teacher, but she was obsessed with cats. She had pictures of cats on every available bit of wall space and she even used to draw her lipstick on with two cat ears, so that her top lip had these two little lumps, which I presume were cats ears – it's the only explanation I can come up with!”

Hermitude are currently touring the fourth single from HyperParadise's, The Villain, which, like Speak Of The Devil, sports another well-crafted hip hop dance-inspired video directed by Kess Broekman-Dattner. Add to their recent J Award nomination for Album Of The Year for said record, and a busy New Year's period – one gets the feeling Hermitude is a name we'll only continue hearing more and more of in the future.

Hermitude will be playing the following dates:

Monday 31 December - Insert To Play NYE 2013, Supreme Court Gardens, Perth WA
Saturday 26 January - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Sunday 27 January - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 31 January - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Friday 1 February - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 2 February - Jive Bar, Adelaide SA