Interview & words by Andy Kovacic //

We checked in with the EDM juggernauts in Sydney.

PNAU members Peter Mayes and Sam Littlemore (Sam La More) settle into the boardroom of TMRW Music with a marked casualness. They take time to catch-up with each other, exchanging smooth-as-butter banter that only spreads so well along a long-lived mateship. Peter comments on Sam’s new hairdo, he’s sporting some freshly burnished locks. They both reach the conclusion that it’s a tad orange.

Weirdly, no one else seems captivated by the tabletop we’ve been seated around, which is made up of at least a hundred Rubik’s Cubes. This decor is fitting, PNAU also works like a puzzle in the way they somehow produce unending musical combinations. But their genius will never be fully deciphered, after all – they have an innate ability to envision chimerical dreamlands and then take us there through art and music.

We’re also joined by American songwriter Ollie Gabriel, the newest addition to PNAU’s impressive vocalist catalogue and who is featured in their recent single ‘All of Us’. Ollie’s outfit is worthy of a mention, it’s quite a mesmerising number. He wears a silky black and gold shirt paired with houndstooth pants. His wrists are cluttered with gold bangles. It’s all very disco lovin’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DQ4covPEyE

He’s another vibrant personality to collaborate with Australia’s prismatic electronic group that’s had the Nation dancing for years. This collaboration also appears just in time for PNAU’s double ARIA Award nominations for their track ‘Solid Gold’, as well as their Australian festival tour. Lucky festivalgoers will be able to dance with the full PNAU family at Falls Festival and Field Day, being served up soon.

I’ve also received an update on an absent Nick Littlemore, the creative wild child of the PNAU trio. “Nick is good, he’s in India at a special health retreat doing healthy things,” Peter reveals. Hopefully, Nick will be well enough to perform at PNAU’s upcoming festival tours, we wish him the best.

Read on to hear more from the “studio-nerd” duo of PNAU and the bright-eyed musician Ollie Gabriel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIfTD2i50s8

What is a typical day in the life of Peter, Ollie and Sam?

Peter: Ohhh, it’s so boring. Well, I have a 6-month-old son so I wake up at 6 o-clock and hang with him for a few hours, and when the Nanny arrives I go to the studio and work on whatever I’m working on and try very hard not to eat cheeseburgers for lunch.

Ollie: I wake up at about 6:30am.

Peter: Wowww and you don’t even have a kid.

Ollie: No, I have a dog [laughing] but she’s sleeping when I get up. I go to the gym early at about 7am. I kind of like to get a lot of stuff done by 10am. It makes me feel good. What do I do after that? Take a little catnap usually cause I’m exhausted. After that, I just spend my day making music.

Peter: How long do you nap for?

Ollie: Just like 45 minutes.

Peter: Do you ever do the Coffee Nap? You take a shot of coffee and then go to sleep for 20 minutes, because it takes that long for the caffeine to start working. Then, when you wake up, you’ll be more reenergised than you’d usually be.

Ollie: Shit! That sounds good.

[Peter then let’s us all know he hasn’t actually tried the “Coffee Nap”]

Sam: Mine’s the same, always up early but at the moment I’m building my studio home so it’s straight outdoors, hammer in hand, measuring, stuffing things up and then doing it again and starting over.

Peter: Such a dude.

Sam: [Laughs] It’s actually my year off making music. So, I’m a stay at home Dad now, building a studio by hand.

It’s been 12 years since your self-titled album, “PNAU”, was released, how do you think you’ve changed as producers since then?

Peter: I’d like to think that we’re better [laughs]. I mean we get on the radio a bit more. I think we have more support. But I don’t know, I guess we’re faster even though it does take us a long time to make a record. I’d still like to think we’re quicker. I think we’re still definitely drawing on the influences of our late teenage years, the times when we went out a lot and partied; those formative years, going to raves and all that. I think those things you never really forget.

A lot of people end up listening to music from their youth, and I’m not saying we do that, but in terms of drawing inspiration…you always reach back to those memories and those experiences that you had. Especially with electronic music, it’s an environment where that works. But yeah, how have we grown?

Sam: I think we are definitely a bit more sentimental now, things change.

Peter: There are a lot more vocals. And that’s got a lot to do with working with people like Ollie who are accomplished songwriters, we’re more focused on the production side of things. We don’t just sit down with a guitar and write songs. Ollie, on the other hand, is sort of like a “musician’s musician” so he comes at it from a different angle, which is a good collaborative marriage.

You guys have lived and worked in Europe and the United States; how does it compare to here? Does Australia have some work to do in the music scene or are we doing pretty well?

Peter: I think the Australian music scene is great and from a creative standpoint it’s so healthy. Compared to when we started in the 90s, there is so much happening here now. There is so much competition, just great talented people in all genres and especially in electronic music. Even overseas, there is an “Australian sound” that people talk about and it has emerged in certain ways. In terms of the actual music business, I think the independent side of things is really interesting.

I do think it’s a bit of a shame that there aren’t that many venues to play at, that’s the biggest disappointment, even in places like Melbourne where there is meant to be a thriving night-scene. But we’re largely a festival-band, that’s really our bread and butter.

I want to talk about art. Who is the brainchild behind the artistic personality of PNAU?

Peter: I think the visual side is Sam and Nick and it always has been. It’s been a family affair; those guys have grown up doing visual arts and are very well-qualified.

Sam: We’ve never really questioned it; we’ve always known if there was an opportunity to make PNAU visually even more fucked up we would always take that pathway. We were never going to necessarily express ourselves perfectly through music, but we can sure as hell do it through imagery as it’s so much easier when you’re working with a still-image.

The regeneration of PNAU really started with this imagery from a visionary artist in Peru, a guy called Juan Carlos Taminchi. I saw this amazing sculpture he did and got in touch with him and asked can we used this as a springboard for our new direction. We just had ‘Chameleon’ taking shape and this painted sculpture represented the chameleon so well. We ended up adapting it into Kira Divine’s costumes and also in the music video. That sort of proved to us that we really are going to stand for something more than just kickdrums. Art gives validity to the song.

Peter: Electronic music is greatly enhanced by visual content. It’s always been really important for PNAU to have this visual identity; it’s evolved over the years, but it’s always been…cheeky [chuckles].

Sam: Yeah, and I think it lives on its own – the visual aspect. You could see it as its own beast that PNAU can hijack occasionally. Something like ‘Solid Gold’ is very visually exciting and Nick really pushed us and said, “We can make this even more fucked up”. So, we went back into the edit suite and did all the visuals where Kira collapses into fractal mayhem. We keep trying to push and push and push it but, of course, we run out of time and money.

Peter: We always run out of time and money [laughs].

Sam: If we had the budget and time, we would make something pretty messed up, I think.

‘Solid Gold’ has been nominated for two ARIA Awards: Best Video and Best Dance Release. But you’ve already won three ARIA Awards and have been nominated multiple times, so do awards like these still excite you?

Peter: Yeah of course, of course, you have to get excited about these things. I mean it’s just so nice that people notice, and the industry notices and they’ve always been very supportive of us from day one. We were twenty when we won the first one. It’s great.

Let’s talk more about PNAU’s collaboration with Ollie Gabriel on the new single “All of Us”, can anybody share how they interpreted the track?

Ollie: ‘All of Us’ is a song about everyone being connected to the bigger cosmos. It’s talking about how everyone in the world is striving towards something, everyone is trying to do something, but we are all connected in a bigger way through our shared essence. I think it’s a really deep song. It’s funny because the meaning of it didn’t hit me until after it was recorded, and we were really starting to listen to it. It wasn’t until then that I realised…this actually makes sense.

Has PNAU inspired you to try new things with your own music?

Ollie: [Fiercely] Oh, totally.

Peter: Very unlikely.

Ollie: [Laughing] No, it’s been totally inspiring. I was a fan before I knew about PNAU; I was a fan of Empire of the Sun and I say this all the time, that’s why I’ve liked working together because for me it’s been one of those confirmations. But I’ve been super inspired to think more outside of the box, especially in the way we recorded the songs and the way we wrote songs together.

You guys have a new album coming out with Ollie, how is that coming?

Peter: We’re so close to being finished.

I’ve heard that before though…

Peter: [Laughing] Yeah, we’re always so close to being finished but this time we really are! We’re just finishing up, basically, but it’s nearly done. There’s a lot of Ollie, he’s on like four or five songs.

Ollie: [Excited] They’re great.

Peter: Yeah, so there is a new album coming. We don’t know what it’s called…

You haven’t named the new album?

Peter: No…that’s normally something that happens the day before it gets released.

Sam: [Loudly] That’s something that can change on the day.

Peter: It can definitely change on the day.

Sam: There’s a funny story with the previous album. It was called ‘Into the Sky’, I think. Everyone else was asleep in bed, and I got a call saying we should change the name of the album to ‘Changa’ and I went [slaps table] “Let’s do it!”. And I thought, god…this is risky, but I think it’s right.

Peter: Is that what happened? I didn’t even know.

[Explosive laughter]

Sam: That’s what happened, yeah! We had this moment where we realised the album is all about Changa, let’s just do it. I thought yeahh, fantastic. It’s more of a mystery.

Peter: And yet, the album cover is clouds with the eye. It looks like what the title was.

Sam: It does, yeah, so that’s one of the weird random things that happens occasionally and the whole thing can be upended because of a toss of the coin. That’s history.

How difficult is it to recreate what you do in the studio on the stage?

Peter: Electronic music is really hard to perform live, it’s such a studio-based style or genre. It’s like how do you make it fun and engaging for the audience if there is a guy up there on his laptop who looks like he is checking his email? That is NOT FUN, that is purely not exciting. That’s where the artistic side comes in, we’ve always done video, as soon as we could afford it, we’ve done it. We very early on also incorporated a drummer, because I think that is the most exciting instrument to watch, it is so high energy and visually entertaining.

It’s also nice that we have a bunch of people on stage, which again – if there is a party on stage, hopefully, they’ll be a party in the audience. But it’s a difficult thing to do, to bring the studio on stage. If you saw the number of instruments we have in the studio…it’s almost impossible. In the early days, we sort of did that, when we were playing little gigs, but it was very difficult – this is before all of the computers we have now. I mean I used to have notes for every song and would have to restore the mixer manually. It was tricky. It was fun, but it was fun in the sense that you could really fuck up.

Sam: And you did.

Peter: We did, all the time!

There have been concerns over the future of music festivals in NSW given the increase in regulations and costs on promoters. Do you have any thoughts on the issue?

Peter: It’s absolutely essential for live music to survive, how can you have a world without it? Live music is bigger than ever and as an artist, it is still the best way to get publicity. We are here, in Australia, we’ve come from LA to do a show. I think it’s really sad. It’s also really sad that people are getting hurt at festivals, but education is the key, just taking an isolated incident and blaming the entire industry for it is unfair. Hundreds of thousands of people go to festivals in Australia every year.

Could you imagine not being able to go and see live music? It would really harm the industry; it would be so weird. I think they need to sort it out. It’s getting really difficult for promoters to have festivals. It’s a huge problem.

You have Falls Festival and Field Day coming up. Can fans expect to hear some new songs?

Everyone: Yes!

Peter: You’ll definitely hear some new songs! And we’re always, with the visual side, trying to step it up. I can’t say too much about it. It’s a challenge because we overhauled the show about 18 months ago and that was for a tour we based around Splendour in the Grass. Now we’ve had to look at it again, but you know, adding a new personality is always exciting and it changes the show. Ollie is someone who seems born to perform.

Ollie: I came out of the womb ready! [Everyone laughing]

I’ll pass over to Ollie for the last question, tell us what’s next for the man ‘born to perform’?

Ollie: I have a new EP dropping at the top of the New Year called ‘The Good Fight’. It’s going to be my first official release worldwide. I’m super excited about it. The project is very socially conscious. It’s a very feel-good project that’s really about bringing awareness to a lot of issues in society right now.

Catch PNAU preforming at Fall Festival tickets and info here