On The Waterfront

I’VE ALWAYS HAD THIS ISSUE WITH THE TWO-MINUTE MARK.”

As Angus Andrew prepares to play Liars’ first Australian shows in four years, he’s also promoting the last recorded evidence of the band as a duo. Before multi-instrumentalist Aaron Hemphill amicably exited in 2017, the pair soundtracked the indie fi lm 1/1, starring Lindsey Shaw and Judd Nelson. In typical Liars fashion, the soundtrack is tough to pin down, spanning delicate melodies, channel-surfing experimentation, and body-moving electronics.

“It was the last time we actually holed up together,” says Andrew over Skype, reflecting on their time in Denmark cutting the soundtrack. “It’s nice that it’s mostly instrumental, because I think we both would like to have done more music like that.”

Since Hemphill left Liars, he has returned to Berlin – where the band recorded 2006’s Drums Not Dead – and started his own project, Nonpareils. Andrew, who started Liars with Hemphill around the turn of the millennium, emerged last year with TFCF, a Liars album made entirely on his own. Having lived in New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles since the age of 17, Andrew made TFCF after returning to his native Australia. He’s based in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park north of Sydney, in a spot so isolated that it can only be reached by boat.

MY STUDIO IS RIGHT ON THE WATER, WHICH IS A WHOLE NEW WORLD FOR ME.”

“My studio is right on the water,” he says, “which is a whole new world for me. The tides became this big factor, because my boat would get beached. Also, the water would come up through the bottom of the studio. It’s a different environment than I’ve ever been in before. It made things that much more isolated, but more connected to the natural elements.”

If the 1/1 soundtrack accommodates everything from the floaty, folky ‘Helsingor Lane’ to the dance-driven instrumental ‘Liquorice’, TFCF is no less volatile.

There’s a dank hip-hop edge to ‘Staring At Zero’ that reflects Andrew’s growing interest in sampling, while ‘No Help Pamphlet’ recalls the home-recorded ruminations of early Sebadoh and Guided by Voices. For all its DIY feel, though, it’s a lovely record, balanced between glistening melodies and weird, wavering layers.

“It’s a balance I walk a lot,” Andrew admits. “It’s interesting to me where the line is between writing something just for the sound of it, or writing something that can connect with people on a more practical, song-like [level]. That’s why making that soundtrack was so fun – it was more of a sound project. The challenge is to try to do that but also engage [people].”

Beyond that central balance, there was the nagging fact that he was making the eighth Liars album as the band’s sole remaining member. “I was so aware that it would be seen as a kind of explanation of where I was at,” he says of TFCF. “I certainly took more into account how people would read it.”

Having just submitted a batch of leftover songs for an upcoming deluxe edition of the album, he’s glad to be airing those outlying ideas. “A lot of things were edited out that didn’t fi t the pretty tight brief that I was going for,” he says.

Of course, Liars have always evolved quite drastically from album to album, changing members and countries while embracing starkly different genres. Their 2001 debut, They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top, got lumped in with New York’s millennial dance-punk scene, only for the band to respond with 2004’s arty, divisive They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Later albums such as 2007’s selftitled LP and 2012’s WIXIW often played like creative rebirths, with 2014’s Mess standing out for its focus on dance music.

Now Andrew is starting all over again with the live show, tapping PVT’s Lawrence Pike and a friend of Pike’s to play the upcoming gigs with him. “It was fun for me to have access to real musicians,” he says, after working alone on the last record. The plan for the shows is to include at least one song from each Liars album, “because I’d like to do a retrospective at this point.” As for the idea of performing live by himself, he quips: “I tried to convince some people once that I should do that, and they convinced me that I shouldn’t.”

Now working on a split 7” single with the Drones offshoot Tropical Fuck Storm, Andrew is wondering whether to use all seven minutes of his side of the single or stick to something shorter, like many of the tracks from 1/1 and the bonus material from TFCF. “I’ve always had this issue with the two-minute mark,” he admits, “[where] either it’s going to do something else or it’s going to stop.”

And while TFCF hints at a more traditional sound for Liars in some places, Andrew still can’t bring himself to sit down with an acoustic guitar and write a song that way. His method is more like reverse engineering, starting from dislodged sounds and samples until he’s built his way back to a “proper” song.

“What’s it like to be a person who writes a song with an acoustic guitar and then makes it into a full song?” he muses. “Where is the beginning? I just look for any kind of sound that can start me off. It can be the sound of rain, or one droning note.”

Where: Oxford Art Factory With: Party Dozen, Buzz Kull When: Saturday September 29 Also: Liars will perform at Wollongong’s Yours & Owls on Sunday September 30 And: 1/1is out now through Mute / [PIAS]