Next week, Sydney band Artefact will play their very first gig at Leichhardt Town Hall. The live debut comes seven months after the album No Safe Place introduced Artefact to the world. It might be just a six-track release, but the record contains 40 minutes of deftly textured post-pop, the culmination of a multi-year incubation period.
“I like texture, so I certainly put a lot of work into the particular textures of all the six tracks,” says bandleader and songwriter Jim Flanagan. “In all honesty, some tracks took a full nine months to structurally get right. I tried 25 or 26 different structural things, none of which I was happy with … It’s always a balance. You need to know when to call it and walk away.”
Artefact’s debut LP is credited to Jim and another Flanagan, Chrissy. While Chrissy’s backing vocals are a key feature of the finished product, No Safe Place was truly Jim’s brainchild.
“To make the demo took a full two years, by myself, just me in my bedroom basically,” he says. “I originally scraped a living as a composer and sound designer in Sydney for three or four years back in the late ’90s and early noughties. I was composing lots of electronic music and strings and kind of weird jazz ensembles. Then I went and lived in Europe and the UK and didn’t write a note for nine years. And then came back three years ago and had a massive itch I wanted to scratch and [started] doing this.”
After detailing the demo recordings to the point of insanity, Flanagan sought out Sydney composer and jazz pianist Stu Hunter to produce the album. A respected member of the local jazz scene, Hunter’s electronic trio Moniker will also be debuting at Artefact’s launch show next week. While Flanagan has dabbled with jazz composition in the past, that’s not what led him to Hunter.
“It was just fortuitous running into Stu,” he says. “A friend of a friend of a friend knew Stu, so I flicked the demo to him and he just liked it and offered to produce it.”
Hunter’s presence helped prevent the record’s textural intricacies from sounding congested or overly abstract. The band has named artists like Talk Talk, Spiritualized and The Beach Boys as influences. Earnest attempts to replicate artists of this ilk usually wind up sounding rather tiresome, but Flanagan wasn’t particularly interested in emulation.
“I certainly wanted to do something that stood on its own feet and didn’t sound too much like other people,” he says. “But they are certainly people and artists that I like a lot. I certainly have a lot of time for Mark Hollis. There’s a lot of polyphonic vocal arrangements on the record, and I’ve been a long-term fan of Brian Wilson and the kind of three-minute pocket symphony approach to songwriting.
“In its own way it’s a very complicated textural sound, but I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult listen. A lot of my favourite music is music that didn’t necessarily reveal itself immediately. We live in a world of instant gratification, where people are less interested in music and films and plays and things that kind of serve that purpose. So I didn’t want it to be difficult, but I wanted it to be something that possibly revealed its secrets very slowly.”
You don’t need to be a musicologist to realise that presenting No Safe Place in a live setting will be challenging. To achieve it, Artefact have expanded into a six-piece collective of multi-instrumentalists. Although the live show has been nearly a year in the making, Flanagan has refrained from being overly precious about the original recordings.
“We have tried to develop the sound of the record into something that is clearly still the record but works differently live,” he says. “To me they’re two quite different things. It’s the same music but presented to the audience in very different ways. I always think that’s bad, when someone slavishly tries to reproduce a record on a stage. Live music should be live and it should be dirtier and rough around the edges, regardless of the type of music.”
Artefact’s live debut will also be a highly visual experience. Featuring staging by theatre director Michael Pigott and projection mapping from local multimedia artist Laura Taylor, Artefact are trying to give Sydney’s Vivid Light spectacular a run for its money.
“We’re trying to do something a little bit fun with the staging,” Flanagan says. “Projection mapping is becoming prevalent in all different kinds of arts media – people like Amon Tobin and Flying Lotus have been using elements of projection mapping in their live shows. It’s custom-made three-dimensional footage, textured for the surface that we’ve designed for the show. A series of objects are basically hung from the ceiling, so we have in effect a three-dimensional space. Projection mapping is a process by which whatever footage you’ve designed is projected onto those three-dimensional surfaces.
“We’re performing [No Safe Place] as one continuous track,” he continues. “All of the tracks bleed into each other. We have a break in the middle. Those two sets are very particular in length and Laura has basically designed the footage to work off the precise dramatic changes of the music as we play. It’s almost like a film or a theatre experience.”
No Safe Place Is out now independently, and Artefact playLeichhardt Town Hall onFriday June 5 withStu Hunter.
