Andras Fox

It’s a fitting moniker, then, for the electronic exploits of Melbourne’s Andy Wilson. You might know Wilson from his collaborations with fellow Melburnian innovators Oscar Key Sung (as Andras & Oscar) and Becky Sui Zhen (under the similarly straightforward nom de plume Fox + Sui). However, over the past five years, Wilson has predominantly focused on his solo project. The latest Andras release, Vibrate On Silent, exemplifies his knack for utilising vintage drum machines and synthesisers to create simply textured, somewhat dated-sounding tracks that have an addictive, alien vibration.

Wilson is renowned as a prolific creator, but he’s spent the majority of 2015 on the road. After touring nationally behind Andras & Oscar’s debut LP, Café Romantica, he embarked on a three-and-a-half-month European tour. Kicking off in June, the first couple of months were also devoted to Andras & Oscar, before Wilson continued with a series of solo DJ gigs. His experience with solo live performance is actually fairly limited at this stage, but at this month’s At First Sight festival, he’ll be trialling a new live set.

“[I’ll mainly play] stuff that I’ve been working on the last year,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll really do much of the old stuff. I’m moving towards a thing where I just want to improvise the whole thing. I’ve been writing some demos but I wanted to just try and remember parts of them and program the drums and stuff. Everything’s kind of blank, so I just make drum patterns and make loops and just see where it goes.”

Gear-wise, Wilson has experimented with a range of different set-ups over the past few years, and the improvised performance approach demands another modification. “There’s a really good loop pedal that I bought just before the tour called a Boomerang, which is a really good name for a looper,” he says. “It lets me make loops and then turn them off. You can build up a track quite easily just using that.”

The plan is to sync the loop pedal with a couple of drum machines and a synth. Like a lot of people in his field, Wilson is on a seemingly endless search for the ultimate synth. He thinks he may recently have tracked it down.

“I’m always looking for a small enough synth that I can travel with in a suitcase, and I think I finally found my dream one in Italy about two months ago. An Italian muso showed me his in Paris. It was like a Danoz Direct ad – he was like, ‘But wait, there’s more!’ It’s kind of like a Casio and it has nice preset sounds and it’s very familiar in that respect, but it’s just set up in a way that’s really playable and it’s really small – it’s only two-and-a-half octaves. It’s built for performance. It’s called an OMB 5, and the OMB stands for One Man Band, so it’s obviously perfectly tailored to doing what I need to do with it.”

Not only did the synth satisfy his desires, but it also came at a ludicrously cheap price. “It was about a hundred bucks. I bought it on the equivalent of Gumtree in Italy – the Italian postal service is notoriously bad so I arranged for it to be sent to the promoter who I was going to be playing for in about two weeks’ time. So, via Google Translate and stuff, I paid for the synth and got it shipped to the gig and when I arrived at the gig in Reggio Emilia I picked up the synth.”

However, dreams don’t become reality quite so smoothly, and Wilson faced some challenges getting his new synth to cooperate. “I was really happy and took it back to the hotel and plugged it in and went to reach for a cable and turned around and the room was full of smoke, as if someone had been using the smoke machine for ten minutes. Some very large section of the synth had fried and caught fire and melted. If I left Italy with the synth I wouldn’t be able to get it repaired, because it’s a peculiar Italian one and I figured only people in Italy would know how to fix it.

“So my friend took it with her back to Turin and she and this old strange man fixed it for me. Then I made a really on-a-whim decision just before I came home to book a really expensive flight to Milan and then take a bus for three hours to Turin in the middle of the night, basically just to pick up a synth that was worth a hundred dollars.”

It sounds like an ordeal, alright, but the synth is now in prime working order and ready to blitz Sydney audiences. “It sounds like a fridge – it’s got all these fans inside when you turn it on and it whirrs up to speed. It’s functional and clunky and probably has cost me like eight times as much as the actual synth was worth. So hopefully the new set will be this clunky but small synth and one or two drum machines and a little looper and a little mixer.”