CUT COPY
Over a 40-year career, German film director Werner Herzog has become a legend of the silver screen; he’s crafted masterpieces, won multiple awards, and inspired a generation of film-makers. But with the release of Cut Copy’s third album, Zonoscope, the breadth of his influence on the art world has grown wider still.
“Dan (Whitford, vocalist) and I were both watching this film Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog,” explains guitarist Tim Hoey. “That scene when they’re pulling the steam boat over the mountain in the Amazon – we thought it was such an amazing scene that we projected it on the wall and composed music for [it]. A lot of the sessions from that actually became the interludes [between songs] on the record. We were capturing the rhythm and sensuousness of the jungle [...] and that kinda spilled over into a lot of the songs.”
It’s perhaps no surprise that the Cut Copy boys took an experimental approach to recording after the hectic nature of recent years, which saw previous album In Ghost Colours debut at the top of the ARIA chart and find favour with a global audience.
“We were in Santiago [Chile] for New Year’s Eve, and we had no idea we even had an audience there,” Tim marvels. “It was crazy to see so many people turn up to our show – some of our biggest shows have happened in places like that.”
Back in Melbourne, the band constructed a make-shift studio in a disused warehouse, and let the creative juices flow. They drew on a variety of inspirations, exploring the rhythmic elements of African music, developing an obsession with the Fairlight synthesizer/sampler – as well as with artists like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush who had used it – and mixing traditional percussion with more synthetic and unorthodox percussive sounds.
“We would just pick something up and if it made a sound then we’d find a way to get it on the record,” laughs Tim. “We used a ladder that we connected to a contact mic and a tape machine. We’re going to need a ladder tech on tour!”
The band then chose Ben Allen in Atlanta to mix the record, drawing on his hip hop pedigree and recent employment with Deerhunter, Animal Collective and Gnarls Barkley to bring one last creative twist to the album.
What emerges is a mesmerizing record trading in tribal beats, hypnotic loops and grooves, and conceived, according to the band, “in the comedown of In Ghost Colours.” Layers of psychedelic texture are punctured by spry vocal melodies in songs like Where I’m Going and Alisa, and the album’s eleven tracks are bound together by the aforementioned interludes.
With the album completed, Cut Copy head overseas next for tour dates in Europe and the US (including Coachella). Hoey promises that Australian shows will follow soon, along with a new stage show that far surpasses the usual indie-electro fare. Whether German arthouse cinema will be involved, however, remains to be seen…
Zonoscope is out now.
By Rob Cannon for Pagesdigital.com
