Prussia: Break Beat It.

Prussia play Use It Or Loose It at the Pink Palace on Friday.

Local Brisbane boys Prussia have just emerged from the underbelly of the Brisbane breaks/hip-hop scene with a rather fresh approach to live performance. They’re starring at the Pink Palace’s Use It Or Lose It party this Friday night, and hence I had a brief chat to Kieran Ruffles (one half of Prussia with Roni Sarai) about the music.

So how long have you two been performing together now?

“Two, three years or so now. I think it’s been that long. Roni just brought his computer around to my house one day and sat me down with a tracker program, and it’s basically just gone from there. He showed me the basic operations, and then seven or eight hours later I was sitting there with something vaguely resembling music on my hands.”

It’s a bit of an odd name. Where did you get Prussia from?

“It’s just a stupid name. We got about three months into the project and decided it was time. It was one of the first things that came into my head, and it’s just like Russia, only a bit different.”

Is it all original material when you perform?

“Yeah, for sure. Though recently we’ve been doing it a little differently, using this mate Mark who’s a really great drum and bass DJ, and using vague mixes into different tracks to cover the gaps instead of just playing off CD. Most of the time we play with our own tracks but recently we’ve been finding it’s far more dance friendly if we stick a bit of music in between our tracks. We just MC over the top of our own tracks, and leave room for Mark to play a bit vocal as well. It feels a lot less like a covers band than normal for a DJ set, at least three quarters is original. And Mark is leaving the country so we thought we’d do some music with him before he’s gone.”

What would you class yourself as musically?

“Probably break-beat. That’s the easiest description without being over the top with genres.”

Many gigs in future?

“The Pink Palace for this weekend, and then hopefully the Esky and if we are really lucky Market Day. Apart from that the hungry public is just going to have to keep their ear to the ground.”