An Oral History of The Presets' Beams Album

Ten years on, the Sydney duo tell us that the key to blowing up is doing everything wrong.

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The past is a foreign country. Back in 2005, EDM was known as 'dance music' and molly was just 'pills'. Meanwhile, Sydney's The Presets were making a name for themselves. They were classically trained and steeped in electronic music, but they also brought with them the abrasiveness (and the drum kit) of rock music.

Within a year, they found a place at the vanguard of Australian electronic music's global takeover. They had a song in the 2006 Commonwealth Games closing ceremony. They soundtracked zeitgeisty teen drama The O.C.

Here, the crew tells us the story of the debut full-length album that made this possible, Beams. It's a story that's unorthodox, irreverent and Australian as hell.

Julian Hamilton, vocals/keyboards: So we’d already been mates and making music together for ten years before Beams came out. We met at university, studying music, and we had another band back then called Prop.

Kim Moyes, drums/keyboards: There were a couple of bits of material that were floating around in the Prop rehearsals that we couldn’t quite make fit with the instrumentation or the aesthetic of Prop. We would jam out really simple fun synth and drum ideas.

Julian Hamilton: We sort of realised that there was a thing. There was an element of music that we enjoyed making. We tried to fit into the Prop hole and it wouldn’t really fit. But we didn’t want to not do it. So we started doing it on the side.

Kim Moyes: The other thing as well around that time is that we were of becoming session musos and guns for hire. And seeing what other people were doing was really inspiring for us to go and make our own version of that.

Julian Hamilton: I don’t think we ever really distinguished between high and low art. It wasn't like 'This is classical music and this is dance music and this is jazz and this is post-rock.' It was all band music.

I don’t think we were ever thinking like, 'Oh I’m sick of doing all this classical music all day long. Let’s go make something that rocks!' But I think, in our heads, it was all very inspiring and satisfying – all those different styles of music.

The Presets became the thing that we really wanted to do.

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Julian Hamilton: I remember it started in Kim's kitchen in Avondale. We’d just bought Pro Tools and a computer. I mean the whole idea for recording on a computer was very new to us. Beams was a process of learning, working it out.

Blow Up was definitely us blowing up, trying to… explode. Get it happening. Get things moving.

Jonathan Zawada, art director: I can’t remember exactly how we met. I think they were friends of friends and initially we vaguely knew each other from around the place. I got to know them better when I built a website for Prop

When it came time to release the Blow Up EP they asked if I’d like to have a go at designing the cover, after they’d had some unsuccessful attempts with some other designers.

I think I had preemptively written a defence and justification for the KISS logo font. Actually an early idea I had was to also put a photo of Annie Lennox on the cover. Suffice to say that wasn’t a particularly popular idea, but the fact that the guys didn’t need much convincing as to the merits of appropriating another band's logo was testament to the similarities of spirit that persist and made for ongoing happy collaboration.

Will Larnach-Jones, former manager: I met The Presets through my friend Jo Wilson, who has been the band’s publicist for over a decade. At the time I was between jobs: I’d just finished working with Bernadette Ryan Management in Melbourne on The Avalanches and New Buffalo – now Sally Seltmann – both of whom were signed to Modular. And Jo was publicist for both.

Through that connection I was hustling, writing press releases and grants for some acts – including The Presets. Jo mentioned they were on the lookout for management, so I flew up to Sydney and we met and took it from there. I liked them – they were funny from the get-go, and a nice mix of being unassuming but also very clear about their creative vision. I liked the fact that they were in their late-20s too. They’d been in bands before and had done a lot of session work, so they’d been around the block a bit.

I was hustling, broke as hell. I juggled days working on event management for a city council, bookkeeping for a fashion label and working in a clothes shop on the weekends. It wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that I was making enough to get by on solely from management.

Kim Moyes: We sent out two demos to two record labels and one of them was Modular. And Pav [Modular founder Steve Pavlovic] was really keen to sign us. So it was pretty easy.

The other label was Engine Room. They had The Vines and Holly Valance.

Julian Hamilton: They were doing big things. But they weren’t interested. This was before there was MySpace, before SoundCloud, before Facebook.

Kim Moyes: It was the last of the CD demos. Just after that it was just MySpace, and that’s how everyone got signed.

Julian Hamilton: We were touring overseas and then the Arctic Monkeys were doing their thing. Suddenly it was like record companies were over and it’s all about self-promotion and self-distribution. We're that last era of record companies, record contracts.

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Kim Moyes: Blow Up was really rocking and we had this testosterone-driven electro-rock. Which is definitely part of the personality. But we started to get a couple of bits of material that were a little bit more electro-pop and heartfelt.

And so we felt like that deserved its own EP [2004's Girl and the Sea.]. And I think from then on we’ve always tried to be doing a nice blend between the two.

Kim Moyes: We knew we needed to deliver an album and we were just trying to get it together. We had 'Girl and the Sea' already. We had 'Kitty in the Middle' already. There weren't many off-cuts really. There were like maybe three beat ideas that never got developed.

So everything else kind of made it onto the album. And I think we did a majority of the writing over a three-night period, when we were doing rehearsals for the Dissociatives. So we would be rehearsing all day, learning Dissociatives material, practising that.

And then we’d go to Julian’s studio in the afternoon and work ‘til midnight, and just jam out ideas. We go things like 'Are You the One?', 'Down Down Down', 'I Go Hard, I Go Home', 'Girl (You Chew My Mind Up)'. All that stuff kind of came out of that session.

And then there was a couple of other things like 'Steamworks', which we did at mine one day. I think I was waiting for Julian to arrive and I got a call. I was trying to find a cool sound and then that bassline came out and he came in and put strings on it. It was, like, literally that easy.

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Kim Moyes: There was just a lot of time spent with us doing other things. So, you know, we would just grab the time that was available until we felt like we had a decent enough body of work to take it to a studio and finish.

Julian Hamilton: We kind of jammed mostly at each other’s studios. And I say 'studios' loosely. Like, my studio was this little shitty shed at the back of a church hall in Crow’s Nest. And we only had it at night-time ‘cause you couldn’t park there in the day.

There was terrible soundproofing, but it was all industrial so you could make noise all night. Kim would rock up with his drum machine, play some synths, put some cowbell on it. It was all very DIY.

Kim Moyes: It was simple. The palate was kind of just defined by what we had. Which wasn’t much.

I remember when we did 'Down Down Down' we had a snare from a drumkit on an MPC, and Julian on a synth. We were just doing what we used to do in the kitchen, but with cooler sounds.

I think there’s a greedy part to this whole career where you just kind of want more and more and more and it’s kind of like an obsession. But at the same time I don’t think we cared. We had cool things and we knew they were cool.

Kim Moyes: We were just trying to make it as refined as possible. We were just trying to make really exciting, eccentric pop music. It's not like we invented the style of electro-pop. But it was more about the energy of it. When we would get up on stage and it would just be furious.

Julian Hamilton: Yeah, it was a party. And also when we were making music we would often try and ask each other, 'If this is cool, if this is a cool beat or cool synth part, what would be the last thing that you would think of to put in here?'

You know, 'Let’s fuck this up. Let’s put in a dog sound!'. On 'Down Down Down' there’s a dog going 'Woof! Woof, woof! Woof…!' So stupid, you know. And then there’s sort of samba hand claps. And, you know, a bit of cowbell or something. Like, what’s the dumbest thing we can put in here to ruin this?

We’d sort of make this something we’d never heard before and we really liked.

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Kim Moyes: Once we’d sort of done most of the tracking we started mixing stuff. We mixed the whole album, then at the end we hired a club sound system into the studio and then we remixed the album through the club system. ‘Cause we’re taking stuff down to Club 77 and listening to it, and it was all sounding a bit sub-par. Which it still does sound to this day! [Laughs.]

Julian Hamilton: It wasn’t really a typical dance record.

Kim Moyes: We knew the palate. We knew the world. But [the mixing process] was about getting it sounding super high-definition, highly produced, pushing the air the best way you can. We were more concerned with, like, 'Does this feel good?' And it generally does.

Julian Hamilton: [Mixer, engineer and producer] Scott Horscroft went to our studio and engineered it.

Kim Moyes: Scott, mostly, and this other guy Emerson Todd, who was another friend of ours. He did like an album of tracks here and then Scott sort of took the majority of the record. And we’d be there with them the whole time egging them on, directing them. Not knowing what to do scientifically, but knowing how bad we wanted it to sound. [Laughs.]

Any engineer or producer worth their salt knows that their job is flexible and they have to be there to collaborate and get the best result with the artist. Most of these guys are just there to help you realise your ideas.

Julian Hamilton: I think we learned over the years that we don’t need to be around while albums are getting mixed anymore. But back then we were there for every minute of it.

Jonathan Zawada: The Beams cover concept was actually an idea I had pitched for the cover of the Girl and the Sea EP, but it was kept aside because I think everyone felt it was too involved an effort for an EP – at least that's what they told me.

When it came time to actually work on the Beams cover, the only thing close to a brief that I remember is Kim saying he wanted the record to happily sit side-by-side on the shelf with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and not feel like it didn’t belong.

I had been looking at the photography of Jean-Paul Goude, the work of Hipgnosis and in general just immersing myself in the broader history of album covers. I was really into the idea of creating the suggestion of a greater world or universe in a single image, creating something that felt less like marketing and something more classic, while not being nostalgic in any way.

The initial inspiration for the whole idea was actually a photo they sent me from when they were touring, of them both wearing those transparent plastic face masks which I remember thinking was a brilliant way to approach a cover portrait.

Will Larnach-Jones: The album release was delayed for an extra six months, as Modular were in the process of moving their deal over from EMI to Universal. I remember the guys being quite frustrated with the delay at the time, but, as it turns out, it was kind of a blessing for the set-up.

Ultimately it allowed for more anticipation and momentum, and in that six-month delay the live show was really getting a lot of buzz around it. They toured like dogs both before and after the album’s release.

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Julian Hamilton: Early on in the piece our friends were getting booked for the Big Day Out, which was like God back then, you know. We weren’t getting booked for Big Day Out and Wolfmother were. And we were like 'Well fuck.'

And then we started getting booked for the Big Day Out and we were playing Homebake and playing all these festivals and we were getting big crowds for our sets at 1pm. So something was kind of changing, something was happening.

Kim Moyes: Then we went away to do the Ladytron support tour.

Julian Hamilton: Like four months of continually saying 'Yes' to opportunities. We were coming along ‘cause we were broke and it was expensive to tour the other side of the world.

I think we wanted to say no to the Rapture thing in the States because we were just exhausted. And then our booking agent turned around and said 'Guys, you really should do this.'

So we said 'Okay, we’ll do it.' And it was a really, really good idea! Really happy we did it. Because we became good friends and it was a big tour. I remember playing Vancouver with those guys and there were some pretty off-the-hook shows.

Julian Hamilton: It was hard, because we’re supporting some other band on a bus and we’re driving in a shitty van all day long, racing to get to sound check in bloody Minneapolis or whatever, and just getting there on time, setting it up and playing. Then driving a hundred miles that night to get a jump start on the next day. It’s hard work.

There’d be the two of us and one tour-manager-slash-t-shirt-sales-slash-everything.

Kim Moyes: One other really cool thing that happened with Beams, was that were a couple of people working for Modular in New York at that time. Like, the American chapter. And one of the people there was this girl Jen and she was really involved in music and her boyfriend runs a really good night and has for years.

And she's friends with the Rapture and stuff. And she was really good friends with [German house and techno DJ] DJ Hell. And she brought him down to one of our shows just at some little club there and, like, he really liked our show and I think he liked the record. So he licensed the record to International DeeJay Gigolo, which then opened up a whole other little avenue for us in Europe. And so going to Europe, we started playing festivals in Europe. And we made some really good friends in Berlin.

DJ Hell was a big thing in the early 2000s. He signed that Tiga 'Pleasure from the Bass' track, which was huge and sort of era-defining. And even Justice's 'We Are Your Friends'. I think he was the first one to put that out.

And then he’s licensed us and the whole world was starting to shift and change. And he was up the top of the electroclash world, and that was all sort of crumbling. And all of the sudden all these people started getting fired from Gigolo...

Kim Moyes: It was so… it was so fun, you know. And then through all that we kind of got to meet Pedro Winter and all the Ed Banger guys.

We got just sort of thrown in with the real cream of the crop. Which was great. And even that Soulwax tour was really eye-opening for us in terms of the live show that we were doing. ‘Cause we were doing such a ghetto version of it at that time.

We were running all the backing tracks off an iPod, where the beats were panned to left and the bass and the synth were panned to the right. And then just playing drums over the top.

Julian Hamilton: There was one week in particular. I think we played in Vancouver and then played in Berlin and then played a couple of shows in LA, then back to Berlin again in one week, because we got asked to do Christopher Street Day Parade, the biggest gay march in the world.

Kim Moyes: I remember landing and going straight to a full leather gay street party and dudes were being towed around with chains and stuff on their dicks. It was like 'What a great fucking life we live!'

And we got asked to go back. And it was nice to go back and appreciate it without, you know, half our brains missing.

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Julian Hamilton: We were nominated for Beams [at the 2006 ARIAs]. Yeah, we lost that year to TV Rock. But, looking back, maybe it was the better dance record.

Kim Moyes: Flaunt It. It’s actually pretty good.

Will Larnach-Jones: I remember there was a strange Lenny Kravitz vodka collaboration where the guys remixed a track and played at the party. That literally covered the cost of getting the band overseas the following day. When you’re in the moment it can feel like a big deal, but so much of that stuff gets forgotten about as soon as it passes.

The guys were really lucky with Beams. There were quite a few syncs [music licencing deals] for cool shows at the time, like The O.C., CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. People forget how little bands, even successful ones, make through the traditional album deal structure. Syncs makes a big difference.

In 2005 there was probably more of a general debate about music placements and whether they were cool or not; in 2015 everyone wants them – it’s good money and people see it as a big component to becoming better known to a wider audience.

Julian Hamilton: You’d be amazed how many times we’d do shows and the sound guy would be all pissed off at the beginning of the night. 'Fucking electronic music,' you know.

And then, always, at the end of the night they’d be your best mate. Like, 'Mate! I don’t like dance music but I love you guys!'

Kim Moyes: We were surprised that people thought The Presets were fun. You just expect that you’re going to be dismissed. You know. So many people were doing stuff. So to actually be something which people respond to was a blessing.

Julian Hamilton: I’ve worked with Flume and all those [contemporary] guys. They’re all lovely guys, but I don’t think we have a particular influence on them any more than anything does. They’ve come along in a whole different era to the era we’ve come from. You know, they’ve had SoundCloud, all the social media stuff. It’s so different.

And people will say that we might have been a band that made people realise that they like dance music; I think Flume’s made people realise that they can make it.

Jonathan Zawada: I don’t remember the first time I heard the entire album completed. I had heard some demos and some of the earlier tracks like 'Girl and the Sea' earlier, as well as some bits of work in progress when I would visit the guys. In particular I remember going to visit them in the studio one day and hearing 'Worms' and absolutely loving it!

Will Larnach-Jones: I certainly remember when my box of finished CDs came – and they were perfect. It was like Beams was its own kooky little world, a little ahead of the curve, looking and sounding as fresh as hell. Obviously by the time the next album came around the world had caught up and things went gangbusters – with all the blessings and challenges that come with commercial success.

Julian Hamilton: Doing old music live is like flicking through a photo album. It really does feel like us at a certain period. You hope that it does feel and sound like what you were at the time. Otherwise what’s the point?

But that being said, we’re both pretty different people from the people we were when we made Beams. So it's like putting on an old pair of shoes.

Kim Moyes: You make an album, you learn a bunch of stuff, get something off your chest. It’s a tool. And then you need to do something else. And you need to satisfy something else, you know? I can’t wait ‘til we’re doing this about Pacifica.

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