The Oddness Releases his Debut Album – Interview & Exclusive Track

Continuing on our quest to bring fresh, unique music straight to your ear holes from the land down under, I am joined this time around by The Oddness. A relatively new project, The Oddness has been creating a bit of a buzz around Melbourne with appearances at some of the premier events and festivals the town has to offer. Including but not limited to Let Them Eat Cake Festival, Babylon Festival, and the mighty Rainbow Serpent Festival. He has just signed to griff’s label, Corymbia Recordings, for the release of his debut album, entitled ‘Culmination’. We had a chat on the eve of the release. Be sure to stream the LostinSound.org Exclusive track “Tiger Eyes” below while you dive in.

[LIS] For those that don’t know you, tell us a bit about yourself.

[The Oddness] I’m just a simple man really, whose sole purpose is to bring fat-ass, chugging bass lines to the masses. I live in Melbourne, and I love it. I’ve just realized that talking about yourself is quite difficult and I don’t trust people who hate disco.

Well, I think we can all agree that you should never trust anybody who doesn’t like disco. Walk us through what a set from The Oddness looks like?

I’ve been playing live as The Oddness for close to a year now, and it’s constantly evolving. I try to bring as much improvisation to each set as I can. I’ll load up a heap of different instruments in Ableton and use the Push to just jam and try out new things on the fly. I also use a Moog Sub 37 to layer over the top, and depending on the set, can either add a rough edge to it or put lush sheen over everything. I have a Nord drum pad as well with a heap of sounds on it that I can bash away on. It’s really important to me that I’m challenging myself and enjoying the process of playing live.

That’s great, it’s so much better to watch someone jammin’ away on stage than spinning tunes. Is this a similar process to how you write your music, or do you have a more calculated approach?

A bit of both really. I do have a process where I’ll work on 3 or 4 tunes at the same time and switch between working on them pretty quickly, usually only spending an hour on each one at a time. That’s partly to keep my short attention span under control, but to also keep fresh ears on everything I’m working on and not to get bogged down by the little things. Each tune will usually start by just pressing record and jamming out ideas, then I’ll go back over it and look for those bits that grab me. I love the first 99% of the process of making music and work pretty quickly, but there’s something about finalizing a tune, listening to it and saying “That’s it, it’s finished.” that I find quite difficult a lot of the time.

 

PROMO EDIT 3

 

This is the producer’s predicament. For me ‘I’m done’ is just whatever stage it happens to be on the day that the label needs it. That’s a really good tip though for keeping your ears fresh. Is this the first project you have gone public with or was there life before The Oddness?

I first started out making Jackin/Chicago style house as Fergus and had quite a few releases and was getting played by DJs like Mark Farina and Derrick Carter, but after a while, I wasn’t really enjoying it anymore, the music I was making was becoming a bit formulaic. I then joined up with my mate Craig Pringle and formed a live Funky Tech House act called Oddphonic. We put a few EPs out and played some great gigs, but because of changing situations we stopped doing that last year. I was kind of in a lost place with music after that, and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to do something that had some originality, I really wanted to love making music again, And The Oddness is the lovechild of a broad range of influences, experimentation, and pretty much making music that I love to listen to and I hope has a point of difference.

Nice one mate, I’m a firm advocate of anything unique in the sub 110bpm realms but its generally not the first thing people are drawn to making. Having said that, we are lucky enough to live in a city that is a melting pot for unique takes on familiar styles. As most of our readers are far, far away from us, are there any other local artists doing something cool you think might be worth a mention?

I love making music at slower tempos. There’s so much more room to move and there’s also the challenge of injecting drive and energy into the production.

On the more downtempo tip, Moontide is making some great music with a beautiful organic vibe. Soda Klop is another Melbourne producer with a really individual sound and there’s no one like PlanetJumper, Those guys have this driving, twisted funk sound that’s all their own. griff’s new album ‘Arial One’ is absolutely next level as well.

So tell us a bit about the album.

A good mate of mine Corey (Kodiak Kid) sent griff some of my tunes to check out. He loved them and contacted me about doing an album. I am a huge fan of his, so this absolutely blew me away!  I had enough music either finished or close to, but when this opportunity came up I took a couple of months to really think about presenting it as an album. It was really important to me that it wasn’t just a collection of tunes. I wanted it to be cohesive and to make sense as a listening experience from start to finish. It’s my first full-length album so it’s a big deal for me, and I hope people enjoy it.

You can stream the album for yourself by clicking play below.

Stay Connected:

Facebook

Soundcloud

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

-->