Doing It For Themselves

The Phoncurves are a new act. That's partly why they're so exciting. Their sound isn't fully-formed. With only acoustic guitars and voices, it stretches across blues, folk, pop, soul and countless other genres without coalescing into any specific sub-genre or sound. Still, they're progressing at a remarkable rate. Already their songwriting is stellar and their live show has proven sufficiently compelling as to support a number of exciting Australian acts.

“We've only been together for about a year now – which is really just crazy,” singer-songwriter Abbie Roberts says. “We've known each other for about three years. We met at university on orientation but it wasn't until we got to the end of our degree that we actually started playing together. We both realised we really wanted to be in a band but there was just no-one – so we just teamed up and did it ourselves.”

There's a certain streak of independence and rebelliousness that runs through even their sweeter tunes. Their self-titled EP, for example, was recorded and produced entirely by Roberts and fellow Phoncurve Naomi Burrell. As part of the Bachelor of Popular Music degree, which brought the pair together, they studied recording and production techniques and refused to cede control of their debut work to anyone outside the band.

“Production was the main part of our degree. It took up most of the whole three-year degree,” Roberts explains. “We ended up doing all of the engineering, recording, mixing, mastering and producing ourselves – which was actually really great. It's a bit scary but we're happy with how everything went. We're confident about it. We recorded it over a year ago and we're still really proud of it.

“We did kind of do things in a backwards way,” the singer-songwriter laughs. “Instead of getting together and playing live first, we kind of recorded all our songs first. I think our development of what we wanted to be happened in recording. It kind of happened straight away, which is really awesome. I think we just want to try and be innovative and try new things and always coming up with new ideas and songs.”

The upcoming EP launch provides some perspective into both the band's independence and their rapid growth. In addition to launching an entirely self-produced EP, the pair will also be expanding their line-up to include bass and drums. From this point, their sound and careers could feasibly veer off in any number of directions – from further producing, to stripped-back songwriting to becoming an outright pop band.

“Naomi's much better at the production side of things than I am. She really enjoys it, too. She just bought a massive 32-channel mixing desk. I know she wants to get more into that side of thing in future,” Roberts says. “But I think we're both artists first. I think that's how we've always looked at it. There's a really cool vibe that comes out of being to do it all by yourself, though. At the moment, we're just really enjoying doing it by ourselves.

“I think our only plan at the moment is to play lots of shows. We might start looking at recording an EP at the beginning of next year – which should be great,” she laughs. “I mean, we recorded this EP nearly a year ago now. Really, I'm just looking forward to the launch and working on some new songs.”

The Phoncurves will be playing the following shows:

Friday 5 October - X&Y Bar, Brisbane QLD