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CS + Kreme interview – “Melbourne’s a good place to develop your thing, as no-one is really watching.”

The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise? We find out why… and more

Australian duo Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel, aka CS + Kreme, have just released their new albumThe Butterfly Drinks the Tears of the Tortoise for The Trilogy Tapes and we’re big fans of its tender, lysergic future folk and plaintive electronica.

The pair combine prismatic sound design and synthetic atmospherics with baroque strings, fractured rhythms and host striking guest appearances from Kyoto avant-cellist Yuki Nakagawa from KAKUHAN, and Teguh Permana from Indonesian ritualists Tarawangsawelas.

We tracked down Conrad Standish from CS + Kreme to answer a few questions, not least, where that lovely title came from…

Hi and thanks for your time….  First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having…  Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?

Hi 🙂 

I’ve just come home from work – my day job is in conservation so I’ve been in the bush all day. Just took the dog out and he immediately chased a deer out of our back garden. Thankfully he came back pretty quickly. I’m just chilling now, doing this, and then I’ll cook dinner a bit later. Having a perfectly reasonable day, thankyou for asking.

Tell us a bit about your formative musical experiences… Early musical memories from siblings, parents, schoolmates… First record bought, first band/performances, and how you feel in love with the music you make now?

Like most people my age, it was a steady diet of Michael Jackson and Prince when I was really young. I had older sisters with record collections, so I heard stuff from them as well. Nothing particularly crazy.  My mum liked Leonard Cohen but if she was playing him in the house it was probably a bad sign.  My dad was quite musical, liked jazz – he liked bop-era Miles Davis a lot. I remember getting him Bitches Brew on CD for his birthday when I was about 13, completely down to the fact that I thought the cover was sick. When we both listened to it later that day it was clear though that he didn’t really care for psychedelic Miles haha.

Early teens I was completely engulfed by hip-hop and graffiti, it was an amazing time for that – late 80s, early 90s. Then it was all just swapping tapes with kids I knew. EPMD, Eric B & Rakim, Ultramagnetic MC’s, Schoolly D, BDP… All that stuff is super super formative for me.

I got thrown into a band when I was about 18 and I started playing bass like that. I’ve done a lot of different sorts of things since then and now I just enjoy going as far down the rabbit hole as I can. Sam and I seem to keep expanding our capabilities and yeah, I’m very lucky to feel in love with the music I make with CS + Kreme. Hopefully Sam and I have created something of our own…

Give us a brief precis of what you’ve released to date and any other notable career landmarks…

Initially we released our first two EP’s through LA label Total Stasis and these were pretty well received, this is around 2016/2017, then shortly after that we had an offer from Will Bankhead at Trilogy Tapes to do a 12″, and we’ve stuck with him since. We’ve done three full length LP’s and a couple of 12″s and a tape with TTT. As far as career landmarks go, I don’t really like to think in those terms. We are really lucky to do this and we get to visit amazing places around the world and share music with incredible people. The whole thing is a landmark.

You’re based in Melbourne… How has the place and its musicians shaped your sound (or not)?  It’s considered to be quite different from a lot of Australia…

That’s a tough one. I definitely feel like I’ve been shaped by Melbourne to a degree, just from having grown up here, but it’s also a Melbourne that doesn’t exist anymore. Melbournians will tell you that it’s the most ‘European’ of the capital cities in Australia but that’s probably just because the weather is shit 😉

What’s the scene like in general there?

We don’t feel super ‘in it’, but I think it’s probably quite healthy. It’s a good place to develop your thing, as no-one is really watching. There’s lots of different sub-sections of scenes and they overlap a lot, which is nice. Everyone knows each other. There’s really super people here and a strong community. Sadly though there’s less and less places to play these days. Also, outside of Melbourne I think it’s pretty slim pickings. Not easy to be making ‘niche music’ here – hence the long tradition of Australians decamping to Europe.

What’s the division of labour in the duo?  How do tracks usually get started and develop?

We both do everything.

The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise – phew, that’s quite a title…  What was the inspiration behind it?

It was something I saw on a nature documentary several years ago and filed away for later use. This record was the right time.

You’ve collaborated with a few people in the past, but not, from the sound of it, restricted to Australian musicians.  Talk us through the guest input on this album please.

Firstly, Yuki Nakagawa of KAKUHAN, an amazing Japanese duo whose stuff destroys me. Yuki really elevated our track ‘Master Of Disguise’ with his cello work. I think we are going to collab with them a little more in Osaka soon. And our other collaborator is Teguh Permana of Indonesian group Tarawangsawelas, who played a Sundanese West Javan traditional stringed instrument called the tarawangsa on the final track of our album, ‘COTU’.  Teguh really brought an indefinable, semi-mournful quality to the track with his playing. We are really lucky to have a deep pool of collaborators to draw from, it’s one of my favourite aspects of making music. 

You seem to enjoy the friction, or perhaps interplay, between organic and synthetic sounds in your sound – is that fair?

Yes that’s totally fair, we generally never want anything to be too one dimensional. 

And what else are you up to musically at the moment?  What are you hearing that’s inspiring you?  Any more live or release action we should know about? 

So much amazing music out at the moment. Been loving the recent Another Timbre releases; the new Klara Lewis on Mego; Gerald Cleaver; a great new Peruvian comp on Honest Jons; the Akira Umeda tape on Lugar Alto, new Rian Treanor thing is mental, A LARGE SHEET OF MUSCLE on TTT.. lots of stuff!

As far as live stuff goes, we just got back from a few weeks in Europe, and are heading to Japan very soon for some dates in November 🙂

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