Ladies and Gentlemen, Be Uprising for Concord Dawn
Author: Stephen Jewell
Although rock and hip-hop dominated the recent 2003 b.Net Music Awards, a drum 'n bass track took out two of the most prestigious trophies.
Morning Light by Concord Dawn was not only voted by the student network's listeners as the year's Best Song, it also received the Most b.Net Radio Play award.
Long one of New Zealand's top electronic acts and certainly our pre-eminent drum 'n bass combo, Concord Dawn - aka Matt Harvey (right above) and Evan Short - have a lot more to thank Morning Light for than the matching pair of red b's on their studio mantelpiece.
Evan Short recalls the moment that he and his partner in Concord Dawn, Matt Harvey, first sold their breakthrough track to Steve Carr, aka DJ Digital of leading British drum 'n bass label Timeless Recordings, with some fondness.
In fact, Short has even saved the original text message that Carr sent him for posterity. He shows it to me on his cellphone when I visit him and Harvey at their Auckland studio to talk about their just-released third album, 'Uprising'.
Short and Harvey first met Carr when the English DJ toured this country almost two years ago.
"Digital came over to our place a couple of days after the new year's before last," remembers Short. "He wanted to hang out because he knew one of our flatmates and that we were watching the cricket, so he came over. We didn't really talk to him too much but I gave him a CD of our stuff because one of our flatmates was saying, 'You gotta give him a CD'.
"I was like, 'Nah, it's not really his sound', but I gave him a CD with the tracks Aurora and Morning Light on it. The CD was a blank and didn't even have 'Concord Dawn' written on it so he said, 'Do you want to put some contact info on that?'
"Then about three weeks later when he actually listened to the CD, he sent me a this text from the UK. It says, 'Hi there, this is Digital. Your tunes are great. I'd love to hear some more from you. How long have you been producing? What are you doing with Aurora and Morning Light?'
"That was the first interest we had in Morning Light. We also gave it to Bailey and Digital gave it to Klute and the three of them (all leading drum'n'bass DJs) were all playing it around from then on, then Dom (from Dom & Roland) and Doc Scott wanted it."
"Those guys were all like, 'What's that tune you played?" adds Harvey. "It spread like a virus around the world from DJ to DJ. We just gave it to a couple of people and they spread it for us."
Harvey and Short have certainly come a long way from the time when I first met them in 2000, immediately prior to the release of their self-titled debut album on Kog Transmissions.
The pair originally met at intermediate school but had parted ways, only to reunite later at Tai Poutini (MAINZ) audio engineering school. Harvey had spent time playing in "hip-hoppy, ambient acid jazz groups" while, until recently Short played guitar in hardcore metallers Day One.
"At school, we were both into Skid Row and the big glam stuff," Short told me then. "That was what got me into playing guitar and probably what got Matt into playing drums. Obviously, you progress musically as you get older but we've always been into heavy rock."
Harvey says he first heard drum'n'bass at outdoor rave Hara. "Evan and I both used to go to outdoor parties and warehouse parties, where trance was the main dance music you heard, particularly if you were young and went to all-ages parties," he recalls. "That's where we got our first taste of going out and listening to loud bass."
"That's one of the reasons why our stuff sounds a bit techier or trancier than the rest of the world," continues Short. "New Zealand is so isolated from things like jungle and all the things that were happening in the early '90s that you wouldn't hear enough to be able to focus solely on that. We'd be into jungle and then The Prodigy record would come out and we'd be into that. There was like a huge plethora of influences. It wasn't like you'd meet one guy and he'd really be into jungle music so he'd give you loads of jungle tapes and next thing you know, you're really into it. It took a while for a whole lot of dance genres to get there in New Zealand."
Concord Dawn's second album, 'Disturbance' brought the act to crossroads when it was released in winter 2001. Short departed on a six month OE to London, the birthplace of drum 'n bass, just as it hit the shops. While in London he got to immerse himself in the city's thriving dance culture and he returned to New Zealand later that year reinvigorated, writing Morning Light almost by chance one day.
"We were in this very room on a Friday night," Short told me last year when we talked at Kog Transmissions' Kingsland headquarters. "We had a rough idea of what was going to go on the track. We were a bit drunk and Matt goes, 'You should sing', and I thought 'That'll be a laugh'.
"So I picked up that crap microphone over there, plugged it into the computer, sung something quite drunk into it and then went, Nah, I'm going to record that again. I thought Iíd come in the next day when I was sober, get a good mic with a decent amp and record it properly. But it just didn't have the right vibe so we kept the original that I did that night when I was pissed.
"When we finished the tune I didn't think it was anything all that amazing. I really liked it but didn't really think anyone would pick up on it and now people are pooing their pants all around the world! It's pretty freaky, everyone wants another vocal tune. People keep asking me to sing some vocals for them so they can use them in their tunes."
Timeless, which shouldn't be confused with drum'n'bass icon Goldie's seminal album of the same name, released Morning Light in mid 2002. The vinyl-only single sold nearly 5000 copies in its first week of release in the UK, reaching no. 106 in the British charts, a position that would have been considerably higher if the majority of their sales which were in non-chart aligned, independent dance stores had been included. Morning Light has since gone on to sell over 13,000 units and, according to Harvey, it still sells around 100 copies a week a year and a half after its initial release, making it one of Timeless' best ever selling singles.
Concord Dawn have since released more singles on fellow high profile drum 'n bass label Renegade Hardware than on Timeless and have now sold over 50,000 records worldwide, making them one of New Zealand's highest selling musical exports of recent times outside of The D4, The Datsuns and Hayley Westenra.
"Our 12 inches sell around 4-6000 copies each, so it's been good," says Harvey. "Though we're not at the level of (major drum'n'bass artists) Andy C or Ed Rush & Optical, where every single thing sells 10,000 copies.
"There's so many drum'n'bass labels around at the moment that it's getting harder and harder to make any impact at all. Most releases are doing 1500-2000 copies so it's great just to get our neck above that, to be able to see where we're going from there."
Their third album 'Uprising' is the first release on Harvey and Short's new label Uprising Records, following their recent departure from the rapidly dismantling Kog Transmissions. 'Uprising' will still be distributed in New Zealand through Kog's distributor Universal Music and Concord Dawn have employed the services of former Kog label manager, Mark Kneebone's newly-formed independent promotions company Isaac Promotions.
"We've learnt a lot over the last four years of being on Kog and seeing how things work. No disrespect to anybody there because it's not like we had a problem with anybody, but we can do this by ourselves. We wanted to have our own label that we can take in our own direction, that we have complete control over."
The move from Kog to their own label meant that Harvey and Short had to pay all the production costs of 'Uprising' out of their own pockets. Recording the album in the pair's new studio, located in the spare room in Harvey's Grey Lynn house, meant that expenses were kept to a minimum.
"Before we were here, we were set up in my old house, basically on a coffee table in the lounge," says Harvey, although tracks like Morning Light were recorded at Kog Transmissions. "And because we've been writing the album at the same time as producing it, it's a very different process to a band. If we'd spent the whole time that we wrote and produced the album in a studio like York Street, we'd be owing something like $500,000 by now."
New Zealand has not so much been an inspiration for writing but more an environment that is conducive to being able to write music in. - Evan Short |
Short and Harvey recorded 'Uprising' a little differently to its predecessors.
"This was the first album that we used Fruity Loops on," reveals Short. "Before that we were using a sampler and a desk, which is a more traditional way of writing electronic music, with synth effects units and more outboard gear. But this album is written exclusively on Fruity Loops, which makes a big difference to the quality of the sound. It's clearer and more refined."
'Uprising' was mastered by Richard Huntington at Auckland's Uptown Studios and produced mostly by Concord Dawn themselves.
"There are two people on the album who helped with production and engineering," notes Short. "The first is Ed Holmes, who is Optiv from (British drum'n'bass act) Cause 4 Concern. He co-wrote and engineered Zulu. We basically wrote 90% of it with him in the studio over here and then he had to go back to the UK so we finished off the last 10%, sent it over to him and he liked it."
Tiki Taane from Salmonella Dub is the other person with track production input. Taane, who has mixed many of his own group's tracks in a drum 'n bass style under his DJ Jagwah alias, co-produced and supplies the vocal to the crossover friendly Don't Tell Me.
"With Don't Tell Me we gave Tiki a CD with a rough idea of what the tune was, in that the intro was there and a little bit afterwards. He took it, threw it on his computer and recorded his vocals himself, which sounded amazing. He also reconstructed the end of the tune to fit what he'd done vocally so when he sent it back, we got a Logic session with all the vocals laid up. We chopped it up a little bit, threw it into our session of Fruity Loops, messed around with it a bit more and came up with it. So Tiki had a big part in engineering the vocals and producing the tune."
Don't Tell Me will be released as a single by Timeless and is already attracting international attention. The second collaboration track Get Ready, has recent singles chart topper Scribe name checking other local acts in a Stand Up style.
"With Scribe, we just hit record and he went 'blah, blah, blah' and then we made something out of that," explains Harvey. "It's not like we cut up each word and made a new song. It's got whole verses and a chorus. I think people will pick up on it overseas but, without being cynical, it's more designed for the New Zealand market than overseas."
Meanwhile, Let It Go is based around a three word vocal refrain from Fondue Set vocalist, Caitlin Smith, better known for her jazz interpretations. "That was bloody easy," declares Harvey. "There was this phrase Evan was singing which was really high for a man. We got in another girl but it was too high for her as well. But she was getting singing lessons from Caitlin and we'd heard she'd worked with Joost (Langeveld from Subware) in the past. Caitlin came in and did it in about three and a half minutes! There was already a phrase there, words, a melody and a rhythm so she just had to mimic it."
"It seriously took about three to four minutes," adds Short. "She turned up at the front door. We made her a cup of tea, played it to her a couple of times, gave her a microphone, put one tape down and hit record. First take, with no sort of warm up and not too much coughing and spluttering."
Harvey and Short also drafted in Joel Facon from hardcore punk band, Subtract, to play a guitar solo on Raining Blood, which is a tribute of sorts to the Slayer song of the same name.
"A lot of people think the guitar on Raining Blood is sampled but it's actually me playing the guitar and Joel playing the solo," says Short. "We came up with Raining Blood in the studio one day. We had some drums and a bassline and we both thought why not play some guitar over it? 'See if we can find something interesting, rocky and metally to put over the top.'
"I played and fiddled around for ages and then I came up with this riff. It wasn't like, 'Let's try and rip off Slayer!' It just came out of my fingers and I knew straight away that it sounded like a Slayer tune. We did it with Joel, it fitted perfectly and then I did that melodic guitar line as well. I listened to Slayer's Raining Blood a month later and it was completely different."
With 'Uprising' now in our shops and soon to be released in Australia, America and Europe, Harvey and Short will soon be embarking upon separate world tours to promote the record.
"We don't play live, we DJ," says Short. "We use the analogue turntable of the vinyl-stylus variety and we also use the digital CD turntable of the CDJ1000 variety. It just works out better playing separately for promoters who want to get us to different parts of the world. I'm going to the States and Puerto Rico in November. If we were both to go, it would cost twice as much for the international fare for all the promoters who go flight share on it, twice as much to fly internally and maybe twice as much for the hotel room. It also means that we have to be in the same place at the same time whereas if Matt goes to Europe at the same time that I go to the States, it means that we're covering twice the amount of territories than if we were together."
While they will continue to embark on regular international DJ tours, at present Short and Harvey have no plans to leave New Zealand permanently. They say they have no desire to live in Britain, but have thought of basing themselves in a European city like Vienna.
"Living in New Zealand is a stress free environment," says Short. "We've actually managed to write albums here whereas if we lived in a big city, we'd still be trying to keep our heads above the water. New Zealand has not so much been an inspiration for writing but more an environment that is conducive to being able to write music in."
"If we were living somewhere like London, we'd be a lot more tempted to put tunes out just to pay the rent," adds Harvey.
"Also over there, you'd be a lot more 'I'd better bring this tune out so I can give it to the DJs to play.' You can be a bit more choosy here, which may or may not be a good thing. And if you want to rent a studio in London, it'd cost shitloads. A lot of people like Klute have to turn the music down really low in his studio when he's writing at night so that his neighbours can't hear it. We're lucky to live in a country where the houses are a bit further apart and everyone's got lawns and stuff."
