Zen Robotic On Breaking Free From Ableton

Melbourne-based electronic outfit Zen Robotic's founder Thom O'Leary began life playing in heavy rock and metal bands. "Going into hard rock was straight after high school with friends who were playing that type of music," he laughs. "I suppose it was around 2012/13 I made a conscious decision to change the style of music that I was writing." After beating around town as a solo artist, O'Leary found bassist and keys player Sienna Armstrong; the duo adding drummer Greg Drinkwater as late as January this year ahead of the release of their debut record.

"There's a lot more potential to ad-lib and be spontaneous when you have a drummer."

Stewing over the band's name, O'Leary wanted to choose something that reflected their organic approach to electronic music. "I wanted a name that didn't necessarily say that we're really dark — for example, if you've got a name like Nine Inch Nails, you can't really go out and make a nicer record. I've written a lot of different types of songs about relationships, some are a bit more spiritual, some do go through a darker place but there's some that are uplifting too. I wanted a name that encompassed everything."

O'Leary, drawn to creating a "fuller band sound" on stage as opposed to a "DJ electronic act", is excited about their future prospects, with their first performance as a three-piece going down just last week. Prior to Drinkwater, O'Leary was running Ableton on stage through his laptop. "We started life [as a band] really as a slave to the computer at times," he laughs. "There's a difference between playing to a backing track and playing to a live drummer. There's a lot more potential to ad-lib and be spontaneous when you have a drummer, because the backing track isn't going to change so you're pretty much locked in to what ever that's doing."

O'Leary created the Facebook group Non DJ Electronic Musicians Of Melbourne — a Sydney sister page newly minted — to link up with like-minded musicians. "When we started playing gigs... We were playing with rock bands and basically I was trying to find out where the similar artists to us were. A lot of similar Facebook groups had DJs in the groups, and the only problem with that is — I like DJs — but they get gigs in nightclubs, and nightclubs don't like to book electronic bands so much. When you listen to things like Soundcloud it's really hard to figure out who's a DJ and who's an actual electronic act that uses instruments. Like for example M83 — I used to think they were DJs, and then I was like, 'Shit, they're actually an electronic band!'" he laughs. "When I started the group I didn't expect much but now we've got about 600 people in the group." He started a showcase "around last August" that he thought would be a twice-annually occurrence, which has grown "so popular that now we're doing it every month," he laughs.