The Phoenix Foundation

Interviewing some bands is like drawing blood from a stone. Not so The Phoenix Foundation. Luke Buda has told me stories about half of the band's songs while we wait for co-leader Sam Scott to arrive to start the interview. Such vigour and enthusiasm makes Wellington's Phoenix Foundation a pleasure to speak to, and typifies their approach to their music and recording.

To describe dual vocalists/guitarists/keyboardists Buda and Scott as animated characters is an understatement. On their recent Big Day Out excursion, Buda wore a Las Vegas plastic visor and huge grandmother glasses. Scott's attire included a cowboy hat and a dress, prompting startled locals in every North Island small town to inquire where they were from. This desire to be different – to try something out of the ordinary, is an approach that surfaces loud and clear on 'Horse Power', their debut long player due out this month.

The six-piece combo has been kicking around in some form or another since 1994, when Buda, Scott and fellow PF founder Conrad Wedde got together and started playing.

The Phoenix Foundation proper began in 1997, with several line-up changes since. The sound has also evolved, from what was originally a heavier feel into what is now a combination of whatever influences or styles the band feel like playing. Buda and Scott themselves struggle to define it, preferring to explain the styles of the different songs rather than the album as a whole.

"We keep changing our sound, it's an ever evolving thing," Scott justifies.
"It will never stop changing as we always get bored playing the same thing," Buda chimes in.

This eclectic bent has seen them installed as firm compilation favourites, appearing on a host of discs from the likes of Radio Active, capitalrecordings and various magazines. Radio and internet sites have also been quick to recognise their talents, with extensive b.net play and achievements including tracks winning the b.net 'Best Unreleased Song' and finishing number two on the national alternative radio charts for the year.

The Phoenix Foundation have spent considerable periods of the past seven months recording 'Horse Power', the full length follow-up to 2001's 'China Cove' EP. Recorded at The Surgery with Lee Prebble (who runs the studio with members of TrinityRoots and The Black Seeds), work started in July last year, the band going in for a few days every week or two right up until January.
"This recording has been a huge part of our lives, especially for me, Luke and Conrad," says Scott.

"The idea was to have a really live sounding band take album, 'cause there's a lot of us," Buda continues. "We wanted to play fresh tracks that excited us to keep things interesting, but because they were new we weren't that happy with the arrangements, so spent the next seven months mucking round with it."

'Interesting' and 'exciting' are key words for PF. They aren't content or comfortable with standard instrumentation and arrangements. They take great delight and pride in searching for weird or unusual sounds that leave the listener guessing.

Scott expands: "In July we had the blueprint for the songs – the threads and structure. Then we took them completely apart and spent seven months putting them back together. If something didn't engage us, we reworked it. We wanted to make something different and new. The new Flaming Lips album is brilliant because it's so different. We wanted to make the same impression."

"It was also about keeping ourselves interested in what we were doing," Buda adds. "If a song sounded like it was recorded in a toilet with a $3 mic, that was cool as long as it was engaging and excited us."

With Prebble adding his creative vision to the band's, it seems little wasn't thought of. "There are songs recorded with a mic in a bucket of water, another recorded from inside an oven, lots of weird noises," Buda enthuses. Apart from This Charming Van (so named when Scott made a list of silliest song titles), an older recording they used untouched, every track was played with, sometimes to the point where it became almost unrecognisable.

Bruiser was a punkish song that worked really well live, but when we recorded it none of us really enjoyed listening to it," Buda begins before Scott picks the story up: "So we decided to take it to its final conclusion. We added extremely inappropriate keyboards and it became a recording experiment where the song took a back seat to us fucking around with it. A few friends who really liked the song are not happy it's now so unrecognisable."

The finished product is one of the most genuinely original songs you will hear. Let Me Die A Woman was originally recorded in Buda's bedroom. Once in the studio all band members had a go with it, Scott and Buda doing the 'song' stuff, and the others adding drums, forward and backward loops, and the like. Sister Risk is a little excerpt from a selection of songs the band circulated a couple of years ago which has been pulled around and made into a new full song of its own. Lambs Scott describes as "... the only political song I've ever written. I was really pissed off with things going on in the world at the time, but the song came out really optimistic!"