Minuit Break the Mould

Minuit are not entirely comfortable about being grouped under the ubiquitous Breaks banner. This despite performing regularly at breaks events and having contributed a track to Kog Transmissions' recent breaks compilation 'Return of the Booom Shwack'.

The formerly Nelson-based trio of vocalist Ruth Carr and producers Paul Dodge and Ryan Beehre will shortly release their debut album 'The 88' through the Kog-affiliated Tardus Music.

"The breaks genre is coming out at the moment and we really like the sound that it has," explains Dodge. "It's quite tough and live sounding. We've taken elements of that so some of our tracks may be classed as breaks but there's also some songs that are the same speed as what Tricky or Massive Attack do, which is not exactly breaks.

"When we first started out in Nelson, Minuit, for all three of us, came out of a love for Prodigy, Unkle and Tricky. And I love (former Tricky foil) Martina Topley Bird's vocals. That's cool music to me. It's classy. It's not someone trying to be a diva. It's just people making music. That's something that we've always respected and admired. We wanted that kind of dirty and gritty, more soulful sound to come out of Minuit."

The fact that Minuit deal in traditional verse/chorus-based song structures and have in Carr, who Dodge describes as "a front person who is part of the band and not just a guest vocalist", means that the band can just as easily play rock pubs like Auckland's Kings Arms as clubs like Fu.

"A lot of the breaks stuff is made by producers collaborating with each other but Minuit is a band," says Dodge. "That's something that we wanted to emphasise on the album as well. It's not a compilation of tracks. It's an artist album so we've thought about how the whole thing should be put together. That's an old thing that has been lost with the compilation generation."

Minuit have also toured with Arch Hill Records bands Fang and Pine, whose line up includes Beehre's brother Aaron. "We can pull off a gig at (Christchurch's) The Dux", says Dodge. "We're perfect for that. Minuit is just songs. It's people, it's music, it's rock 'n' roll."

Like many other New Zealand electronic acts, Minuit first concentrated on live performances and released a couple of limited run, burnt EPs before moving towards producing an album.

"As we've progressed, the studio and the gear that we use to make music has also progressed," says Beehre. "We'll mix a track a 100 times and I might learn something new to make it sound better or get it to sound like we want it to. Not actually having an album release date has been like another chance to make it sound better. So we'll add new bits or re-arrange it a little bit. Make the vocals sound a bit different because that's how we wanted them to sound and now we have the capability to do it like that."

"We still use samplers now but we don't sample other people's stuff," adds Dodge. "It's not like we go through a whole load of old funk records looking for samples. We basically make our own thing by playing the music into the computer, chopping it up and then sampling it back into the machine."