Park Life

The San Francisco post-disco band PillowTalk have hipsters swirling around them even before they've dropped an album, their first single, Love Makes Parks, out on the cult Detroit label Visionquest in late 2010. This November the trio – Sammy Doyle (vocals), Ryan Williams (keys, guitar) and Michael Tello (keys, effects and beats) – will transport their California cool to Melbourne Music Week. They'll play the opening night at the mystery flagship pop-up venue Where?House. “To be honest, I don't know much about the music scene in Australia, but I'm really excited to go,” says Doyle. “My family was gonna move us all down to Newcastle from Anchorage, Alaska in 1984, so I was going to grow up in Australia. They went down there for a few months, getting visas and a house, and they brought back tonnes of pictures. I was really excited to live there. [But] it never happened. So I've always had this childhood fascination with visiting and going there one day.”

Doyle wound up in SF, where he's long been active in the dance music underground, DJing and, with friends, promoting the infamous [Kontrol] parties, which ended in June after seven years. In the '90s SF became the epicentre of the West Coast house movement, which peaked with the emergence of Naked Music (remember Miguel Migs?). “I wasn't totally into it, but there were definitely some songs I would DJ out from that crew,” Doyle recollects. [Kontrol] pre-empted the swing to (minimal) techno.

PillowTalk fell together in SF's Lower Haight district. “We had all been in the same circle of friends and we would always hang out at afterparties and go to events together – and we would always end up jamming somewhere or playing records at someone's house.” Doyle and Tello met Williams through his brother, the siblings sharing a duplex. They'd jam around the baby grand piano in the Williams' kitchen. Soon, the three were in a studio – and a band crystallised. “We all bring different elements,” Doyle says. “Mikey's a really, really, really awesome engineer. He drives the computer. Ryan's a really, really talented keyboard player – and a guitarist. Then I've been a vocalist and a DJ for so long – and I grew up in choir. I'm really good at hearing chords and writing melodies… Then me and Mikey tend to work on the beats and the drums. Mikey's really talented at putting together drums.” PillowTalk debuted on Visionquest (the label of Seth Troxler's crew), following with music on Italy's Life And Death and New York's Wolf + Lamb. Doyle speculates that the outfit might yet start “something new” in SF's scene, their influences encompassing classic soul, R&B, disco, house, techno and even psychedelia. 

And PillowTalk are plotting an album. “We have a black-out period in December,” the frontman says. “We're gonna be in Portland, Oregon, at a friend's studio here and we're just gonna buckle down. We have a bunch of material that we have either written down or saved – lyrics, we've got melodies on our iPhones, we're always recording ideas… So we have enough material to sit down and put together an album – and that's our plan, to knock one out here in December.” Fans may hear album tracks in their show out here, he affirms. “There are two or three songs we've been putting in our set that are possibly gonna be on the album. We have a lot of stuff to choose from. We're gonna kinda feel it out and see what direction we wanna go in. But we have been trying out some new ideas.” In the meantime, PillowTalk have been collaborating. They cut The Outcast with DJ Tennis for Kompakt and Real Love with the Wolf + Lamb bosses. They've also remixed a Crazy P record. “The whole intro is like psychedelic rock,” Doyle enthuses, “it's like guitars and it sounds like Pink Floyd!”