EXCLUSIVE: Harts Breaks Down His Role As Mentor To Australia's First Virtual Band
The group will serve as a demonstration of the National Broadband Network's capabilities
It's been a busy day for Darren Hart.
The preternaturally talented guitarist and Oz-music prodigy — best-known to most by his mononym, Harts — is in the midst of a perfect storm of announcements, having just unveiled a sizeable national tour in honour of his new album, Smoke Fire Hope Desire, this coming February and March, along with landing a deal with US label and publisher Razor & Tie, assuring that he'll be squarely on our radars for the next several months.
When The Music touches base with the ubiquitous performer, it's technically during said storm's eye, in a rare moment of quietude and downtime between tours before the one-man music-machine kicks back into gear.
However, in typical fashion, he's currently got his mind focused on another pursuit of innovation: He's landed himself a role as mentor to Australia's first-ever wholly virtual band, as part of an initiative highlighting the capabilities of the National Broadband Network (nbn).
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The project sees Harts join forces with musicians located all around Australia — Melbourne songstress Rowena Wise, Wollongong singer-songwriter Lily Mills, aka Leo, and Bunbury-based producer Jayden Rando — to collaborate on writing a song entirely over the nbn, utilising video-conferencing and other digital communication channels to build the composition from scratch without ever setting foot in the same room.
"It is a unique set-up that we've worked out ... they're going to be working through conference calling and video feeds and things like that to try and figure out a way to write a song without actually being in the room together," Harts told The Music of the new project.
"That concept was pitched to me by the NBN, and I thought it was a really interesting concept ... So that's my involvement in it, and we've had one meeting with them so far. I got to introduce myself to them and we got started talking about the concept and things like that. So they're working directly with each other now, and I'll be checking in with them in a few weeks to see how everything's travelling."
Although taking a seat at the head of the table, Harts wasn't involved in the selection process for the actual band members themselves; however, he's been wholly impressed with the individuals the nbn's team selected to take part in the initiative, leaving him with minimal qualms about the chances of succeeding in such uncharted waters.
"When I was pitched it, the nbn had already chosen the musicians, and they sent me through some stuff, and I had a listen to their solo work, and they were all really good," Harts explained. "They all really had their style down, they really had their genre really down-pat, and they had their own unique flavour on what they were doing.
"The power of reaching a lot of people and finding your way to cut through all the competition of musicians to reach new audiences is something that's completely necessary today."
"The only kind of question mark from here is how it's going to blend together each unique style — so one's a very folk-driven acoustic singer-songwriter; one's another singer-songwriter that kind of leans more on the band side of things, and more on the rock than folk side; and one's a really electronic producer that does a lot of beats and a lot of electronic dance music and things like that as well. So, between the three of them, they have to figure out how they're going to collaborate, what their strengths are and things like that, to really make a song out of it, and that's what I spoke to them about."
As far as the project's wider implications in terms of reaching their creative potential, Harts believes that artists will — and must — increasingly turn to these avenues to ensure they're tapping into the breadth of resources waiting to be capitalised upon out there. In short, he says, it's essential that artists are keeping up, lest they get left behind.
"I think [the Virtual Band] will really showcase the power of the internet in a musician's role today," Harts said. "Personally, I was discovered by Prince over the internet, so things like that is something you can never take lightly. The power of reaching a lot of people and finding your way to cut through all the competition of musicians to reach new audiences is something that's completely necessary today. You really need to know how to work things like that, and I've done a lot of collaborations, be it with… most recently I collaborated on the official song for the Olympic Games, and that was all done via the internet. Everybody recorded their parts in their studios and were just sending tracks back-and-forth through the internet and having calls and things like that.
"It's a new world in that regard, and now with internet speeds in Australia, with the nbn really being fast, reliable and powerful internet to not only cities but rural areas and small cities … some of these musicians, I mean, one's from Wollongong, one's from Bunbury, in WA — so they're not real well-established areas, but it's kind of going to showcase that you don't really need to be to be able to collaborate on something that needs a lot of internet and bandwidth and things like that — constantly sending files back-and-forth with each other, talking through video calls, jamming through video calls and things like that.
"I think it's really important that that message is spread, that musicians can collaborate and artists can collaborate on a global scale not really even being in the same location as each other, and it's something that I've done in the past, and something that, I think, the message needs to be spread a lot more."
Despite the relative infancy of the concept, from the sounds of things, the early stages of the Virtual Band have been relatively smooth, and — although Harts hasn't popped his head in lately — the disparate sounds and styles of the musicians making up the Oz-first outfit appear to be gelling nicely across their digital collaborative space.
"They're never going to meet each other, I'm not meeting them in person … it is a genuine experiment."
"Without spoiling too much, I gave them a little bit of direction, and I just wanna see how it turns out," Harts said. "I think it really will turn out really great and, as I said, it's a unique concept, and with things like this, they can either, you know, work incredibly well, or work not-so-well, so it's going to be interesting to see how it all goes.
"But it is all completely genuine — they're never going to meet each other, I'm not meeting them in person, they're only collaborating through the nbn network and the internet, so it is a genuine experiment."
Not only that, but it's the exact sort of thing that seems right up Harts' alley as a musician. Indeed, he's making a bit of a habit of activities such as this: around this time last year, Harts was involved with a cool little promotional project for Subaru, which saw him use a modified WRX accelerator as a wah pedal.
Only time will tell what the Virtual Band project yields; as for Harts, even with a full plate ahead for the next few months, he's finding it difficult to stop the creative momentum he's currently enjoying; then again, why would he want to?
"It's always good to get the positivity and encouragement that I do when I drop a new album and things like that, because people seem to really appreciate and love what I do," he says, "so that kinda gives me fuel and encouragement to continue.
"And, while my creative juices are flowing and I have the motivation, I want to make more material and keep that going."
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