No Such Thing As Too Much Repetition: An Interview with My Disco

For a band that deals in different shades of brutal minimalism, My Disco have somehow overhauled their sound completely in the five years they took to craft their new album Severe. Its Steve Albini-produced predecessor Little Joy is sprawling, cathartic, dry, and scorching. Severe is just as heavy a listen, but it’s cavernous and humid, and it’s foreboding in a way Little Joy never was. Though there’s one thing in common between Severe and Little Joy, and it’s an elusive and seemingly superficial but actually very telling detail: the two albums’ covers are pictures of rocks. There’s something geologically heavy about My Disco’s approach to rock music: the building tension of heavy objects coming into contact, the organic repetition of natural phenomena, jagged fault lines slowly approaching a cataclysm. Like imagining the Earth on a geologic time scale, listening to Severe is an experience filled with awe and suspense (and this is a 38-minute record).

Severe isn’t an album designed for scrutiny. It’s hard to unpack a boulder. But there’s something fascinating about the Melbourne trio’s ever-evolving dedication to such a pared-down but explosive sound. The brothers Liam and Ben Andrews and Rohan Rebeiro have been making music together since 2003, and they’re continuing to let new sources of inspiration recast their power trio setup in different lights. They recorded Severe with film composer Cornel Wilczek, and the result sometimes conjures an alternate reality where Swans got contracted to help score Robocop. But it’s a dark world unto itself, the kind of album that, once you let it wash over you, opens up to reveal its core like the rock on the cover. Over email, I talked to bassist Ben Andrews about Melbourne, the intuition of extreme repetition, and the stylistic and personal challenges the band faced putting Severe together.

Emmerich Anklam: Given the five-year gap since ‘Little Joy,’ what kicked off the process for writing ‘Severe?’
Ben Andrews: We started writing for Severe in April last year. We were done with it by June, I guess. It was a swift process. We had a fair amount of material that we recorded and didn’t use for the album. We wanted to have a concise record this time, something dark and direct, to the absolute point. Recording wise, principal tracking began in December and maybe was wrapped up in February or March. There were some gaps of course — the holidays, some injuries, and the like. All in all I think the tracking and mixing were less than three weeks in total. Any more than that and I think people tend to lose focus and tire.

How did the sequencing of the album fall together? I remember reading something months ago about ‘Severe’ being a double album. If that was a possibility at one point, what made you decide to make the album more concise?
We really did have enough material mixed and ready for a double LP for sure. Upon culling, however, we decided less is more, and the tracks that now make up Severe have the most impact and fluidness about them. We are not precious at all about scrapping songs or parts as long as something positive comes out of it.

Compared to ‘Little Joy,’ ‘Severe’ feels slower but also denser and tighter. How did you approach the pacing of this album as a whole?
We are always interested in doing something completely different from our previous output. We actively try to write in ways that we haven’t done before: exploring different guitar sounds, putting reverb on the bass guitar, utilizing some pretty extreme effects on the vocals — all of these things make for a more interesting creative process for us. We also never look to the past for ideas, so we never thought about Little Joy during the process of making Severe. Good music is about forever moving forward.

The level of tension you generate through repetition is astounding. How do you decide to call a song quits, or how do you sense you’re about to play a line too many times? To what degree does in-the-moment intuition shape the pacing of the individual songs?
It’s mainly about intuition. We know each other really well. We have been playing together for 15 years or so, so a simple gesture or eyebrow movement or glance is enough for a repetitive sequence of a song to end, or begin. There is also a fair amount of improvisation within our music, as rigid and strict as it may sound. There is usually no such thing as playing a line too many times.

How did film soundtracks become an influence on the music you wrote for this album? If you could compose for film, what would you want that film to be like?
I think as we naturally have been listening to darker, more ambient music (for lack of a better phrase), our tastes wandered into film scores. Also, our engineer is a soundtrack composer by trade, so his knowledge of sounds and effects was vital during the recording and mixing process. I personally would not want to write music for film. I have seen how hard and tedious it is! We have been asked to experiment with some documentary film making lately, in which case I think we will improvise something super minimal, heavy, and rather downer sounding.

“1991” and “Named” sound like siblings — same key, similar speed, similar rhythmic thrust. How intentional was that? Is there some sort of thematic resonance, or am I reading into the music too much? How much — or how little — did thematic cohesion matter to you for ‘Severe?’
Thematic cohesion for sure is something we were aware of. We wanted the overall sound of the record to be bleak, to have an aura of subdued brutality I guess. We wanted it to sound extremely heavy. And it does, so I’m happy. Those songs were written at very different timelines for the record. I love how they have a similar context and key/tempo, as you say. But to me, they are very different songs and have turned out far different from our initial formation of them during the writing process. Cornel is a genius and taking some of our ideas and making them extreme versions of themselves, which is why he was the perfect and perhaps only choice for making this album.

How have your interactions been with Melbourne artists like New War or Standish/Carlyon or HTRK? How has your time in Melbourne shaped your sound? Is there anything unique about Melbourne as a city that’s influenced the aesthetics or politics of the music scenes you’ve been around?
We know those bands well, yes. HTRK in fact formed from a similar era and scene as we did. Playing in back yards, on street corners, house parties, and record stores. But all the while wanting to create something that was bigger than just the Melbourne music scene. There is an abundance of talent and a very nurturing creative scene in this city. It can be overwhelming to some people who live in other cities in this country. Melbourne has always had an eclectic and much documented, active music scene, with many artists going on to global recognition, and many artists continuing to play week in week out in the many venues, clubs and pubs this town has to offer. Melbourne is unique in that people, young and old, are extremely passionate about independent music and its rich history here, and that will never die, despite the gentrification of the inner city and the high cost of living in it. You should check out Cale Sexton, POWER, Faceless Burial, Regional Curse, Friendships, Lucy Cliche, & Half High for some interesting outsider music from Melbourne.

Since ‘Little Joy,’ how have your transcontinental travels influenced your approach to your music? What musical discoveries have you made when you’ve gone on tour?
We tour a lot when an album comes out, or whenever we get the chance, really. Travel is one of my main loves in this world, and we work very hard to create an environment where that is possible for us. Touring gives you instant access to a multitude of bands and artists from all over the world; we have played with homemade electronic artists in Bandung, Indonesia, Germanic dark folk acts, live techno and a plethora of hardcore and post-punk bands, some of which we have made life long friends out of.

What felt like the biggest challenge you faced as you made the album? Any high or low points in the process?
Liam had surgery on his heart during the initial tracking of Severe. That counts as both the biggest challenge faced and the lowest point in the record making process. Severe.

[Header photo is by Liam Andrews.]