When this year’s MoVement Sydney festival was announced there was a surprise on the lineup.
Right there at the top of the bill sat the debut performance from a group called Mind Gamers, a three-headed dance music beast consisting of Sébastien Tellier, John Kirby of Blood Orange fame, and Midnight Juggernauts’ Daniel Stricker. Though the trio is new, its story goes all the way back to the early days of Sydney’s legendary Goodgod Small Club, where two of those three heads first met.
Stricker remembers Goodgod when it was just a club night that took place in a lurid Spanish restaurant where he used to put on shows. “You had to run up the street and buy booze from the pub on the corner and set up your own PA,” he recalls. “And there’d be crazy Spanish music playing in the room next door – so loud.
“I remember I used to put on nights there once every couple weeks and just have friends’ bands playing. I’d been touring a lot with the Midnight Juggernauts around the world and we’d just come back and had a bit of downtime, so I was looking for a place to do some fun stuff while we were writing a new record. I was putting on this night and every now and then me and a bunch of friends would play in this improvised band that we called SLRL.”
That band featured Jono Ma, later of Jagwar Ma, and Kirin J Callinan. It was at one of its shows Stricker first met John Kirby, a musician who just so happened to be in need of some backing players. Kirby was playing keyboard for Sébastien Tellier at the time and was helping him search for a drummer for an Australian tour: his shortlist consisted of Stricker and Jay Watson from Tame Impala.
Stricker got the gig, and though he became friends with Tellier and Kirby as they travelled around Australia together, he believed that the end of the tour would also represent the end of the trio’s creative endeavours. But then,18 months ago, the pair reached out and said they had another project they wanted Stricker to be involved in.
“‘We wanna do a record that’s kind of like jazz,’ they’d said,” Stricker reveals. “‘Not jazz in the sense that it sounds like a jazz record, but in its spirit – free-form. Pop but with a jazz spirit.’ I said, ‘Definitely, I’d love to work on that with you guys.’ That was the genesis of this project.”
Stricker is quick to explain that even though that selfsame “jazz spirit” plays a large part in the record’s inspiration, when we see Mind Gamers at MoVement – or hear their debut album later this year – it’s not going to involve a squeaking saxophone, dark sunglasses and beat poetry delivered over bongo drums. “It’s not gonna be like this super indulgent improvised thing,” he says. “It’ll be something that people can really get off on rather than it being about us, even though we love it and enjoy it.”
While velvet jackets and cigarette holders won’t be required, Stricker says there will be an element of smoothness in the music, largely because that has long been Tellier’s modus operandi. “A lot of the time with Sébastien’s songwriting style, it’s pretty sensual,” Stricker says. “It’s pretty smooth: he’s a pretty romantic guy. There’s that feeling of romance definitely, but the sounds that we use aren’t what you’d traditionally find in a romantic song.”
Stricker has a lot of good things to say about Tellier, who he talks about like a fan as much as a collaborator. “I don’t think you find people that sound like that so much any more,” Stricker says. “I don’t know anyone really in this country that can do that and maybe that’s a very French thing. When you go to France, or Paris specifically, it’s entrenched in this ‘old world culture’, for better or for worse. That’s a beautiful thing when you can tap that and distil that and put that in a modern context, but it still has that flavour or that feeling. It’s like updating something that’s really classical – I love that.”
Though debonair French lothario Tellier is the chief songwriter of the group, its roles aren’t set in stone. “He has this classical way of looking at music, in a way Serge Gainsbourg or other classic French modern composers would have,” Stricker says.
“Also I think Kirby is an incredible player, an incredible keyboard player, and I do a lot of production and rhythm and work on a lot of sound design. I think those are our main roles, but in the end when we get into a room together everyone’s just kind of doing everything and we’re vibing off each other. I think that’s what makes this special, rather than the sum of its parts.”
Though the band’s debut album isn’t complete, the trio has been working on it for a while, recording in different parts of the world whenever schedules make it possible for the three of them to be in the same country at the same time. Stricker says that the most productive period of all their time spent together was when they visited the Greek island of Hydra.
“That was amazing,” he says. “It was a really inspirational place to work on the music. I think the record has been informed by all the places we come from: a lot of it’s a love story to California, but then we went to this Greek island and that had a large influence on the record. I think all of us are influenced by imagery and going to different places in the world brings that to the table in a big way.”
For the group playing the new material live is tantamount, and Stricker reveals that the songs may well be reworked after the trio has had a chance to play some of their music to crowds and see how it works in that context. “When you take a song outside of a studio, it’s a completely different beast,” he says, “and it’s good to get that perspective on it too I think.”
Given that Stricker has nothing but good things to say about the trio’s working habits, it’s perhaps unsurprising that all three members want to carry on and release more than just a single record. Mind Gamers isn’t some dalliance: it’s the start of something long-term, and Stricker speaks of the group less as though its’ a supergroup shoved to the side and more as though it has become one of his primary concerns as a creator.
“We’ve talked about ideas for the second record and yet we haven’t played a show,” Stricker laughs. “[Mind Gamers] is definitely something we will keep doing. It’s not just a way of putting out music: we want it to be something where we can produce and conceptualise or collaborate with other artists.”
Mind Gamers play, as part of V MoVement Sydney, Oxford Art Factory on Friday October 21.
