Matthew Levinson

Down the line to Dave Miller

Published on 01/09/05
by matt

I first came across Dave in late 2003 at the This Is Not Art festival, Australia. He was playing an early set at the weekend’s finale, filling the large Newcastle Panthers ballroom with heavy dub soundscapes, syncopated minimal house rhythms and layers and layers of glitch.

Jump forward almost two years and Dave has finally released a debut album, Mitchell’s Racolta. Its feel is set from the first track. And even though it moves around dramatically, it is extremely cohesive. It’s been more than two years since his first EPs, but he’s back on the musical wagon. He’s finished albums with fellow West Australian Fiam (to be released on UK label Expanding), another with Laurence Pike (Triosk/Pivot) and Phil Slater (Band of Five Names); and he’s moved to London for a while – so if you’re interested in catching him in Europe, do. Here’s Dave answering a few bounced email questions.

What are you up to in London now?

Just making a penny, and making some music as well. Enjoying the wealth of live music here, and the four weeks of summer before the 11 months of winter kicks in, hah. I just needed a change of scenery for a while, I don’t know how long it will last, we’ll see. It’s also handy in regards to live shows – if people want to book me for a show in Europe now they can anytime they want, rather than me having to organize a tour around certain dates.

What sort of music inspires you to make music?

Music that inspires my music? Er, well I guess most things I buy have some sort of influence. You can’t deny that – even if it’s on a subconscious level, it still does to some degree. I listen to a reasonably broad range of music – ambient, hip-hop, house, dub, folk-esque things, electronica, instrumental rock stuff, jazz, noise, dancehall, pop, and all the sub-genres that meld that stuff.

As far as the most inspiring things goes, I think that can be split into two for me – live shows and records. At the moment the live shows that I have dug the most have been those that are dynamic that you can see and hear flow throughout the set/song. Acts that I have seen over the past year like The Necks, Battles, Radian, Jamie Lidell and Greg Davis have all done this really well. Inspiring albums for me I think are harder to pin down, I guess I would say they are the ones that I feel are the most innovative and emotive – that is the combination that always makes me go ‘wow’.

You’re not musically trained, are you? How do you navigate your way through the kind of sounds you record?

No, not musically trained at all. It’s all sample-based music, so it’s just a matter of relying on your ear. I make a bunch of sounds that a feel work together, and work on them for a while. Sometimes it happens, sometimes they get trashed…

How do you find working with people like Laurence Pike?

You mean working with people who play acoustic instruments really well? It’s great. It makes sense to me as most of my source sounds through some way or another came from acoustic instruments. Whenever I have worked with instrumentalists it’s been in an improvised manner, so we kind of just feed off each other in a musical sense to try to create something fresh and cohesive. I also tend to include as much live sampling of their instruments as I can as well – I find that really exciting to digitally mess with live acoustics.

Your press release bills Mitchell’s Racolta as ‘minimal broken beat’. Is that how you see the album?

For some tracks, yeh, I think it uses similar rhythms that broken-beat music is known for. And the fact that it is essentially minimal music people can put the terms together, it makes sense. And yes, I did create it with that aim – I was really getting tired of the minimal house-tempo four-to-the-floor stuff, so I wanted to challenge myself into creating different rhythm structures. I think it worked reasonably well – I got a few drummers tell me they dug it, so that’s a compliment. There was also a number of ‘I only listen to minimal dance music’ people who were so used to hearing just straight-ahead-beats that found it difficult to understand.

Do you feel that the minimal thing has lost steam?

In some ways, yes. The number of house-tempo minimal dancefloor records has dropped significantly, so I guess that’s a pretty good sign that things have ‘lost steam’. That said, the faster, more techno-orientated records seem to have had a resurgence. For me, I am digging a lot of minimal beatless records that have come out over the past year more than anything.

How important has the broken beat scene been to you musically, do you listen to much of the West London stuff (Domu, Bugz, IG, etc)? There’s not much of a scene for broken beat in Australia, as far as I know, how did you come across it?

In Perth, broken beat stuff doesn’t get played out much by DJs – they are too scared people will stop dancing. People buy it, they might play it on radio or in bars, but never to a dancefloor. I don’t really buy much of the stuff – even though I dig the beats, I have found that so many these days have vocals/lyrics that I don’t feel, hence wrecking the track for me.

I was mainly introduced to the sound by friends and radio. At the time, Perth was getting all of that stuff into the import record store there so you could hear/buy pretty fresh stuff which was cool – we may have at the other side of the world from the scene that was developing, but at least we could hear/buy the output.

What’s it like making music like you do in Australia, especially in the most isolated city there (and anywhere)?

It has its pros and cons. It good in that you don’t get influenced by the new hype genre that comes and goes from big cities in a matter of months. The fact that we don’t get a great deal of good live music there also means that you spend more time making your own beats as opposed to listening to others. This has a bit of a downside as well because you don’t get to see a broad range of acts perform, which of course is a bummer.

Is that why you ended up with an overseas label?

There really weren’t any labels that were into the music that I was making at the time, so I was forced to go overseas. Not a great deal of Australian labels have very good European distribution, so it would have been silly of me to put it on a label that doesn’t reach the audience that seems to appreciate it the most.

That said, I am releasing a EP later in 2005 on a very promising label out of Perth – Meupe. It features 4 remixes by Perth producers of tracks from Mitchells Raccolta. I am very happy with the way the artists have freaked with the sounds. It’s a limited edition thing, so it’s a bit of a collectable.

Have you found a receptive audience in Australia?

A small, but receptive audience, yes.

Track down new releases, streams and downloads from Meupe, Expanding and Background. For more information, check out Dave’s site the Bodyraft for streams, gig details and so on. Read my review of Mitchell’s Racolta at Stylusmagazine.com.

Dave Miller – Live at Dachkantine in Zurich, May 2005 (Streamed by Anti-Matter Plant).

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