The Midnight Juggernauts just released their fantastic album Dystopia here in the states after it had already been released in their homeland of Australia.
I had a nice chat with lead singer and keyboardist Vin Vendetta while he was here in New York this week to DJ a massive party at Webster Hall featuring Crookers and Danger, but secretly to take a break from touring and be a tourist.
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Midnight Juggernauts - Ending of an Era [More music below]
Vin discussed his visit and the perils of Coney Island, but mainly stuck to the music: “Building up a mood in each song,” his favorite remix his band has done and how they collaborate on remixes, a produced song being “like a child which has gone off into the world,” their serious benefit derived from (and lack of seriousness in) DJing, favorite new artists, and, of course, the effect of the Internet on music and on his band’s success.
TheMusic.FM: How’d it go at Webster Hall Saturday night?
Vin Vendetta (Midnight Juggernauts): Yeah, it was fun. It was just also an excuse for me to come back to New York, because I love coming here. I just always have a good time in this town. But yeah it was a fun night. I hadn’t seen Crookers play before, either. It was good.
There’s been a major shift in your name recognition over the past year. When you first played New York with Justice last Fall, much of the crowd may have only known your track “Shadows” from the Justice mixes, but you guys seemed to grab the attention of the venue. Any memories of that introduction to New York?
That trip supporting Justice was a really good introduction for us to North America, because we hadn’t played here before, and Justice were playing all these big rooms in front of big crowds. Yeah, I have good memories from the New York show. It’s difficult when you’re playing to a lot of people who may not have known who you are, but we got a lot of good responses. After that, we knew we had to come back and spend a little more time in North America.
As the band’s lead vocalist, do you write all the lyrics?
I write the lyrics, yeah. But it’s weird, sometimes I listen back to the songs and I don’t know where the lyrics came from. It’s like once you write them and record them they take on a life of their own. It’s strange.
A lot of electronic music with lyrics can be more direct, maybe about partying. Yours seems a little more existential than most, while not totally overt. Do you have any sort of inspiration for the topics that you cover or how you cover them?
I kind of like having themes on the album that are very dream-like. We don’t really write lyrics that are about directly going into a club and picking up a girl. More about moods and atmosphere. More like broad emotions. Sometimes we’ll bring in imagery like space or mysterious twilight landscapes and it’s just about building up a mood in each song and taking you to another place. Rather than listening to a track in your living room, it’s nice to imagine yourself just floating far away. So we have lyrics to kind of take you there… hopefully.
You were saying you wanted an excuse to come to New York. What else have you been up to while here?
Yeah, on the last few trips we were busy doing promo and playing shows and you don’t always get a lot of time to breathe when you’re touring. But on this trip I just wanted to see more of Manhattan so I’ve been traveling around Central Park and been having picnics on lawns and I went to Coney Island yesterday and rode the Cyclone and almost broke my arm and it was—it’s fun just doing the tourist thing.
How did you nearly break your arm on the Cyclone?
I think it might have been on the first hill. It goes so fast and it’s actually the turns which are very sharp and I must have just banged my arm. I was just like jolted from side to side for the whole ride and when I looked at my arm afterwards it was all black at the bottom.
And the person who was riding in the carriage with me bumped her ear and lost her hearing temporarily! Haha. We were all completely battered and bruised! And thought, “wow, I think we enjoyed it but can’t tell.” We were just in shock. It’s just such an old rollercoaster. When you’re at the top of that first hill, and you look at the framework and you can see the rust, and like the termites have been eating through the planks of wood which were put in place like a hundred years ago, and then you like drop down that first drop, you’re thinking “oh, have I made a mistake?”
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Midnight Juggernauts - Into The Galaxy
I know you’re going right back on the road after you leave New York and you mentioned your busy touring schedule. What’s that been like, traveling constantly?
Well it’s pretty intense right now. I moved out of my house in Melbourne, Australia three months ago, and since then we’ve just been touring non-stop so I’ve just been living in airports and hotels the last three months, just living out of a suitcase with nowhere to call home. It’s often a new country or new continent every night. And right now it’s the summer festival season so we’re just circling Europe, North America, Japan for the next five months or so.
So, it’s interesting days. We’re loving it. And it is an adventure and you get to have so many experiences, and its fun exploring new countries and cities, but it just takes a while to adapt to that constant touring lifestyle. I’m enjoying it though.
I’ve read that you and your band-mates have significant differences in musical influences, and the influence of many genres shows up in your music. Growing up, what music was most influential for you?
Probably the first music I was into was a lot of film music. So I could probably even say John Williams who did all the classic films from the 80s from E.T. to Jaws, et cetera. And I suppose from that same era I was into a lot of bad cheese and pop music as well from Van Halen to the B-52s. I do have pretty diverse tastes from experimental and soundtracks and what have you, but I do enjoy a good pop song with a good hook at the same time. So somehow we just bring all of those influences together.
How did you make the evolution into electronic music and DJing?
We’ve always liked music which moves people, whether it moves you physically on the dance floor or moves your head to another place.
We’ve always played with lots of synthesizers, as well. We liked how a lot of those electronic instruments had less barriers on the sounds they could create, so there’s a lot of electronic music which is rather innovative with the worlds and sounds they produce. So we use them probably more so than a lot of guitar acts, but our background is a traditional guitar band.
When we were teenagers in High School that’s all we played, just rock music. Then, once we started playing with synths, other toys like vocoders and equipment like that we just found this whole other world where we could create new sounds that conjure up the visions which are in our heads.
Any new artists or albums that you’re into lately?
Right now, anything from Battles to Holy Fuck to Animal Collective. I think my favorite album this year, though, is Portishead’s new one. I thought that was pretty amazing. It’s been good to see them live a few times at different festivals in the last few weeks. That’s a pretty strong album for me.
[Something about “The Rip” being especially phenomenal.]
For sure. They’re really good songwriters and they’re definitely taking you to another place.
Speaking of other new artists, many of them are remixing your tracks, and you’ve done a lot of remixes yourself. Have you created anything that stands out as a favorite, or are they all like your “babies…?”
Um. It’s hard. Oh they’re all like our babies! But I guess we like the Sebastian Tellier remix which we did because when people ask for a remix they normally want something upbeat and for the dance floor, but I don’t think it has to be that way.
But with that remix it was good being able to just make something which wasn’t necessarily going to be used by DJs in clubs. They let us do another down-beat slow-tempo song, which we enjoyed.
That’s what we like about remixing. It’s exciting to be able to see someone else’s interpretation about an original track. And it’s nice when people remix our music and seeing another life that track may have led in someone else’s hands.
How do you guys collaborate on remixes?
We’ll normally do things separately. It’s different for different tracks. Like I suppose Andy will often do dancey ones, and I’ll do slower ones, but it’s – we’re not sure how it comes to be. They all have their own story. But sometimes it’s weird like, as I was saying, we’ll look at these finished tracks and we’ll forget how they came to be, and its like a child which has gone off into the world and it’s like living its own life now. It’s funny, the connection we have with our music.
What do you like about live DJing and what equipment do you like to use?
We’ll normally just do it on CDs or vinyl and sometimes we’ve done it on an Ableton set. Often when we DJ it’s good because we’ll be working on stuff in the studio and we might have a new riff or a new song we’ll be working on. We’ll throw it somewhere into our DJ sets just to see what kind of response it gets and how its sounding through different PAs. So that’s another reason why DJing is important for us.
First and foremost, the band is our priority, and when we DJ it’s usually just an excuse to go out and have fun and just like jump around and make fools of ourselves. We don’t take it as seriously as other DJ purists out there, I suppose.
Did you drop anything new on Saturday in New York?
I think I dropped some old songs which scared everyone away and cleared the dance floor! I think I played some Big Audio Dynamite in there at some point and people were like “Whoa, what is this?” But anyway, no, just some of my old favorite songs which sometimes, when I really want to hear them, I just play.
I know you’ve done a lot of press as this point. Have you had any bad experiences or unusual experiences with interviewing?
It’s difficult sometimes when you do interviews with people from other countries where it’s to be translated. That’s really bad for me because sometimes I’ll make lots of bad jokes and I’ll say really stupid things which aren’t supposed to be taken seriously, but they’re taken seriously when they’re translated and I just come across looking so stupid or so crazy.
There was an interview in this French newspaper last month which came out and everyone is saying, “What the hell is wrong with you? I can’t believe you said these things!” They were like translating back to me. And I was like, “I didn’t say that! If I said that, it was not intended to be taken on that level.”
Same with some of our Japanese interviews. We were in Japan last month and we had a long day of promo. And you’d always have a translator there. So we’d be asked a question, and the translator would translate it into English, and then we’d respond with a dumb response that’s supposed to be a joke, and they’d translate it back into Japanese, and the interviewer just wouldn’t laugh or smile. They’d just nod their heads and write it down in their pads and we’re just thinking, “oh, it’s going to be really bad if that gets out there as a serious answer.”
Have you had any surprises or learned anything interesting in getting to know the music industry?
It’s an amazing time right now. There are so many pros and cons. As everyone knows, it’s just being driven by the Internet at the moment. But it’s totally worked in our favor. A band like us coming from Australia—it traditionally would have been hard for us to get exposure for our music. Living so far away you’re not really able to tour and keep yourself in people’s minds on the other side of the world, but thanks to Myspace and all those other Internet avenues, there’s now a more level playing field and it’s much easier for people to discover us online. So that’s been pretty powerful for us and lots of other bands from our region.
But it’s all about wondering how record companies fit in to the picture these days. It’s a lot more difficult for them and they really have to discover new ways of working and new ways of putting the music out there, and it threw the whole industry into chaos. But it’s been really good for bands like us, though, where it’s been an amazing tool for exposure.
I think it’s also encouraged a lot of younger people to start creating music, as well, because they realize anyone can put music out there. Like write a track in their bedroom and put it up on their Myspace page and it’s just easier for people to discover it. And, who knows, maybe they’ll get a deal out of it. It’s interesting times.
Vin also stopped by East Village Radio this week and played the following songs:
Midnight Juggernauts - Shadow (Rubato remix)
Big Audio Dynamite - Rush
Cut Copy - Hearts On Fire (Midnight Juggernauts remix)
Nirvana - Breed
Holy Ghost - Hold On
Dallax - G-Friend
Midnight Juggernauts - Twenty Thousand Leagues
More info:
Midnight Juggernauts’ full mostly-European summer festival tour schedule, Myspace.
More media:
Midnight Juggernauts Brand new remix of CSS’ “Left Behind”
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CSS - Left Behind (Midnight Juggernauts remix)
Music video for “Shadows”
