This week, PVT kick off a quick run of dates in celebration of their tenth anniversary.
The milestone specifically relates to the band’s debut LP, Make Me Love You. However, while the album is ten years old, brothers Richard and Laurence Pike founded PVT (originally Pivot) around the turn of the millennium. With a fluctuating cast of collaborators, the pair spent a handful of years developing the band’s sound, culminating in that breakthrough release.
“We were kind of a jam band and everyone had other projects,” says multi-instrumentalist, electronics operator and vocalist Richard. “But personally I wanted to get more serious about songwriting and production and I really was heavily into computers at the time, when laptops weren’t as common. So I got a second-hand Apple beige G3 with probably one gigabyte memory on it and I started recording and learning how to do that. I made it a mission to figure out how to record and was very interested in mixing live performance and electronics and how to pull them all together.”
A completely instrumental album, Make Me Love You contains a lot of textural elements without ever being excessive. Multi-tracks of live drums, guitar and bass meet up with glitch electronics, keys and various other effects. There are sections of rhythmic insistence and masterful instrumental interplay, as well as plenty of gentler, reflective moments.
“I think when you make a record, things form before you,” says Richard. “Say you have a handful of tracks that you think are strong enough to make the record, they kind of inform you of which direction to take the rest of it. When you have one track that gives you this or that mood, you kind of want the next track you write to contrast that or to follow on from that. [Make Me Love You] had this intuitive process of, ‘These sound great. What else does the album need?’ It took a really nice shape in that regard. I think it feels like it’s got a nice flow to it.”
These days PVT consists of the Pike brothers and electronic musician Dave Miller, who joined just after the release of Make Me Love You. The three members are scattered around various parts of the world and work separately, experimenting with different ways of generating songs and sending ideas back and forth via email. Interestingly, while the band all lived in Sydney during the construction of Make Me Love You,the process wasn’t much different.
“It was bits and pieces,” Richard explains. “We’re still pretty much going by the same process, which is giving each other files and then pulling things together and jamming a bit and getting the bits we like from that and then eventually getting together and playing it in the same room with the electronics. There’s an idealised way that a band writes something and then gets in a room and plays it, but that hasn’t really happened that much since the ’60s when everyone was multi-tracking. If you read about The Rolling Stones making Exile On Main St, they went to a villa in the south of France and jammed for six months while partying, and then eventually cut it all up into a record. I feel like, because we work with electronics, that’s pretty much how we operate too. Maybe with less drugs and wild parties.”
Despite birthing songs through an isolated file sharing process, there is a wonderful looseness to each of PVT’s four albums. While they are finely manicured, there’s also an impulsive character.
“It’s hard to do with electronics. The grid dictates what you’re supposed to do a lot, and you want to chop everything up and put it in a loop and put it on a grid, and I find it exciting when people use electronics less on the grid. It’s a constant question – how do you use computers and how do you make it more human? That’s something we pride ourselves on. An album like Church With No Magic, what that record was about for us was taking the brakes off and doing something really live-sounding. We just kind of let it go where it wanted to go and it ended up going to this pretty noir-ish place. But I have a lot of pride in that record because it’s hard to tell what’s live and what’s electronic.”
PVT’s second album O Soundtrack My Heart was already a notable progression from Make Me Love You, movinginto darker, more forceful territory.2010’s Church With No Magic marked the first appearance of vocals on a PVT release, which continued on 2013’s Homosapien, perhaps their most accessible release to date. But despite the diversity, they’ll draw songs from each of their releases on the upcoming tour.
“It’s really nice to have four records to choose from, and we’re also going to play some new material,” says Richard. “It makes it easier to get a set together – when you’re a young band and you’ve only got one album, well you have no choice but to play that album and that album dictates the shape of your live set. But when you’ve got more to choose from, you can shape it into some kind of bigger thing. Having said that, we can’t exactly play heaps from Make Me Love You, but there will be a few.”
PVT playNewtown Social Club, with Gold Class, onThursday November 5.
