Three's A Worry

According to Seekae percussionist, and now vocalist, Alex Cameron, London is a heavy town. “You can feel it; it’s vibrating over there,” he says. “There’s something heavy about it. I always feel like I can hear road works or something – that’s the vibe I get.”

“There were times when they’d naturally find grooves, and then after a minute of listening to them it’d be out of time"

It’s a setting you imagine would have worked in the band’s favour, however, helping them find inspiration for the layers of movement present across their third record. Birthed in the multicultural hub of Brixton, just down the road from the Academy, The Worry is an album that is undeniably alive, with instrumental and electronic sounds shuffling about the compositions like feet moving across pavement.

Ironically, for all the flutes, horns and percussive elements, Cameron calls The Worry a heavily “sequenced record”, with old drum machines and synthesisers forming the bedrock for most of the release.

“They have this weird lag,” he says of the vintage technology used. “There were times when they’d naturally find grooves, and then after a minute of listening to them it’d be out of time, but we’d take the middle section and keep it just because it sounded right, it felt right.”

With Cameron’s retro leanings balanced by the technological prowess of multi-instrumentalists George Nicholas and John Hassell, Seekae continue to mine their unique sound; live and electronic, and entirely their own.

“I’m much more of a hands-on kind of person, and I don’t know if that’s a positive or negative thing but that’s how we end up making music – I end up recording things out of the box, and John and George end up doing things in the box. That’s how we get our weird blend.”

The process of collecting sounds and melodies before stitching them together has driven the creation of every album from the Sydney-via-London act. For the three musicians – “I hesitate to use the word ‘producer’,” Cameron remarks at one point – there is rarely a calculated moment when songwriting, but because of this sessions can become “heavily opinionated”, with a two-from-three approval rating sometimes settled on just to push an idea through.

Although they haven’t gone global in a way The Presets or Cut Copy have, Seekae still stand as one of our most accomplished electronic acts. Their first two releases (2008’s The Sound Of Trees Falling On People and 2011’s +Dome) both arrived to critical acclaim, and The Worry will no doubt do the same. But the band are at home on the fringes of genres, and continue to run their own race, creatively speaking.

Although they haven’t gone global in a way The Presets or Cut Copy have, Seekae still stand as one of our most accomplished electronic acts.

“All of a sudden electronic music is all over the charts, and [that’s] great for artists who have huge levels of success – and to be honest, I count us as having a very large amount of success considering the style of music we [make]. [But] as much as we’d like to see where that style of music could go, we also want to do something completely different each time we record and make sure we’re constantly changing and not get complacent based on the fact that a type of music is successful.”

On The Worry, Cameron lends his vocals to a Seekae album for the very first time. Though he’s no stranger to the microphone – he recently dropped his debut solo record Jumping The Shark – what’s strange is that all three band members contributed lyrics to this third LP.

“When you have these poems that have been created by three people, it becomes a whole new beast,” he offers.

Instead of isolated and angular, however, this thematic mishmash comes across as beautiful “because it becomes this lovely set of words which represent something to us”. And with the emotional difference that comes from singing someone else’s verses, the immersive Seekae live experience is now a “whole new ball game”.

“I’m still figuring out the feeling of singing the songs, so it’s exciting,” Cameron finishes. “I might have sung the song a hundred times, and then on a particular night it all makes sense to me. Songs, and their content, are layered, and there are three minds in there so there’s a lot to figure out.”