Re:enactment

It’s late by the time local-band The Rational Academy launch proceedings tonight. Outside’s cold, and sharp; the dark alleyway leading to Woodland’s cloistered entrance whistling with a biting wind, and the thumps of some bricked-up dancefloor. Inside’s a warm pocket of golden light, sparsely populated by rugged-up patrons whose hipster garb’s cosily hidden by a piebald spattering of hoodies and track-pants. Despite the safe-haven allure of the place, this is still a rather meek gathering.
They’ve no bassist, The Rational Academy. Three leads and a drummer command the stage, shooting a sludgey drone around the room, as vocalist Amelia Golding takes to the mic. Deep, paint-peeling swathes of melodic fuzz seem to swallow the empty floor, as the band’s noise-pop translates more in the yawning space as something on the errings of post-metal. Whistling pillars of noise screech out from the barren four-piece; feedback right to the precipice of being unbearable, quickly reined-in by blissy, rolling clouds of underlying sweetness. They ostensibly seem lacking without the punch of a lower register, but hold it together (albeit nebulously) nonetheless.
As tri-piece No Art shift into their set, people at last begin to file in. The steady swing of the door shoots a fresh chill through We Who’ve Already Secured Our Spots, though that’s soon forgotten as the music begins. There’s a rigidity to the small band’s delivery, all apathy and posturing, but it plays as a convincing affectation. There’s a palpable irony to their aesthetic; monochromatic emoting, and a melding of otherwise incongruous sounds. They’re defiantly shoegaze, but spatter the corners of their sound with a post-rock structuralism, and dirgey, sludge influence. Warped, salt-flat singing shrills atop wailing, tortured guitars, as the band conclude their set with a thronging bang.
Launching their cryingly long-awaited album Sport, Re:Enactment tonight bring a ringing respite to a mountain of odds. One of our city’s most fascinating, and inventive live acts, these guys are truly worth
the wait. Their sound, as best it can be described, is a kind of electro-dada. Think Bob Dylan meets Animal Collective, meets Orgy, if the latter were any good. Fronted by a presence, as much as a man, in the wirey Jacob Hicks – dude feels his music – the band port us straight into their throbbing neon headspace. Bomb’ d showcases their penchant for unique lyrical propulsion; a fluid spouting consciousness, shimmering with a thumping disco-scattered beat. Scraps sees the band at their most intergalactic, a seething molten rave of 80s nostalgia wrapped up in the sparkles and sharp-corners of modern production. Following that trippy and dense Let It Go globs into the puzzle-piece melancholia of Nintendogs, before they close on the giddy, jungle-beat space-epic, Tronic.
SAM HOBSON - Time-Off

Re:Enactment has been thrilling audiences for the last four years, but talk to Shane Rudken and you may get a slightly different version of the story.

“To be honest I don't even know how long the band has been together,” Rudken says with a laugh. “I think it's like two or three years or something, but I don't know. The other guys in the band will probably kill me because I get my information wrong all the time.”

With an illustrious history on the Brisbane circuit, Rudken is best known for his keytaring days with Regurgitator. However, following a house fire, his much-loved keytar is out of action.
“My house burnt down just before we finished tracking on our new album,” he explains.
But it would seem he knew just the thing to salvage from the scalded building.
“I managed to keep my keytar from the fire. All the white keys have melted together and it's all bent out of shape, but it looks awesome. Now I've got it hanging in my room.”

After a string of EPs, Re:Enactment - also consisting of Jacob Hicks, James Grundy and Sam Mitchell - has signed off on its latest offering, debut album 'Sport'.
“It's not totally annoying,” Rudken says. “We all see the album differently, but for me, it's like the feeling you get from that dance when you put your jumper over your hands; you know the one?
“You put a little hole in the jumper and look down. You're dancing and you're happy about it, but you're thinking about something else and then you want to throw yourself up against a wall and then lie down on your bed and go some place else.”

Luckily, music is purely subjective.
“People always experience these things in totally different ways. The same sort of feelings that one person might get from a critically acclaimed band, another person might get from John Farnham's 'You're the Voice'.”

Mixed by super producer Burke Reid (PVT, Seekae, The Drones) and local maestro Magoo, 'Sport' captures “the wired, weird and wonderful”, in true Re:Enactment fashion.
“We're just trying to write some songs and if people like them, then that's a major plus. The fun that we have is from doing things together and the result is what keeps it interesting,” he says.
RE:ENACTMENT LAUNCH ‘SPORT’ AT WOODLAND ON SATURDAY MAY 14
- Scene Mag

DENIS SEMCHENKO meets one half of RE:ENACTMENT – bassist/electronics operator JAMES GRUNDY and drummer/vocalist SAM MITCHELL – for a chat about the acclaimed Brisbane electro-rockers’ debut album Sport.

Over the last couple years, Re:Enactment have amassed a serious live reputation around town and honed their studio sound on a series of EPs. This month sees their much-awaited first LP proper – the punchy, muscular beats-laden Sport – and the not-to-be-missed launch gig. Considering the band members’ jovial personalities, one can assume that the recording process was...
“Chaotic – it spanned oceans and decades,” James quips as we sip on our beers at a cosy inner-west bar.
“It took over a year,” Sam adds.
“We started over a year ago with a different idea of what we would do,” James continues. “We’ve been recording constantly for about a year now and the tracks we’ve ended up with were the tracks we were writing during the recording – we left off about seven tracks. When we started, we were probably more of a rock band and about halfway through, something snapped – we got dance-y.”
“We kind of changed as a band – because we don’t have much money or time, it takes forever and you can feel either excited or really crap and stressed at times,” Sam muses. “The last couple weeks, we were super-rushed because it took us too long to do it, but we rushed and we compromised,” he laughs.
“It’s like that time at uni when you don’t do anything during the semester and then it’s the exams,” James sums up.
Mixed by Magoo at his Applewood Studios and Burke Reid at BJB in Sydney, the aptly-titled Tronic is a clutch of concise, energetic, eminently danceable tracks.
“Burke is the person we’ve actually spent the most time in the studio with, whereas we weren’t really as hands-on with Magoo,” James says. “He lives in the countryside, so we didn’t really spend too much time with him – we were mostly passing emails back and forth.”
“We’d say, ‘Magoo, we’ve got these tracks and we need you to mix one every day’ – he lives out in Fernvale, at a beautiful old church – but because we’re all working, we’d drive out, drop off the files, have a quick chat about what we’d think the song was and go ‘see you!’ and go back to Brisbane to work,” Sam chuckles. “One day, none of us could get the files out, so a mate drove them out for us. It was really weird how the mixing went with Magoo – very hands-off. He would do it and we’d give him feedback; there’d be three to four mixes of each song to-and-fro via email and that was it – there was no us in the studio going ‘yeah, man! Do this or that!’”
“With Burke at BJB, a few of us flew down to Sydney and spent a few days there with him,” James recalls. “That was a completely different experience watching him work and being in the room.”
“The album probably sounds a lot clearer than the EPs, but it’s hard to know because when we recorded with Stephen Bartlett, we haven’t recorded with him before either,” Sam sums up. “It’s hard to know whether that was Steve, Burke, Magoo or all of the above. We’ve got a lot more... hi-fi.”
RE:ENACTMENT launch their new album at Woodland on Saturday May 14 (supported by No Art, The Rational Academy and Toy Balloon DJs). SPORT is out now. Check out www.re-e.net for more info. - Rave

Re:Enactment THE NEXT ACT

RE:ENACTMENT have been tinkering away at their debut album for nearly three years. MATT O’NEILL speaks to vocalist JACOB HICKS about the Brisbane electro-punks’ long-awaited Sport.

For a long time, Re:Enactment’s better qualities were a secret understood only by their peers within the Brisbane independent music scene. Formed in 2007, the band’s crudely recorded early EPs (Kittens and Regicide – both released in 2008) were a mess of seemingly-impenetrable stylistic collages. Leftfield electronic processing rubbed shoulders with bass-heavy noise-rock while, somewhere within the cacophony, savvy pop sensibilities did their best to lend form to the chaos.
“I’m still really proud of those EPs,” vocalist and guitarist Jacob Hicks reflects of the band’s origins. “I think we accomplished exactly what we wanted to with those recordings. They were kind of everywhere stylistically – but that’s cool. The thing I like most about bands I enjoy is when they do something completely left-of-centre that really surprises me and I’m reasonably sure the rest of the band feel the same way.”
Gradually, though, the band have evolved into a more recognisably brilliant incarnation. Always an electrifying prospect in the live arena, the band have spent the past three years sculpting their unpredictable sound palette into something vaguely approaching a recognisable formula – razor-sharp, post-punk aggression grafted to a backdrop of throbbing electro rhythms punctuated by swirling atmospherics and the occasional leftfield flourish.
“There’s not as much guitar in these songs,” Hicks muses. “It’s been really weird because that’s kind of what really filled up our sound until this point. I think we wanted to explore a less dense sound and have a bit more melody. We’ve noticed when we play live now that the gigs aren’t really like rock shows any more. All the gigs we’ve played in Sydney and Melbourne have been more like late night club shows – and we found that we really own those club shows when do them.”
Sport is the arguable culmination of the transformation. The band’s long-gestating debut album will finally be released this month after nearly three years of writing and recording and showcases a markedly different band from the vicious eclectists responsible for Kittens and Regicide. Mixed by Australian heavyweights Burke Reid (PVT, The Drones) and Magoo (Regurgitator), Sport is adventurous and unpredictable – but also precise, polished and contained.
“I want people to listen to the album from start-to-finish and I don’t want any filler in there at all. It has to be bam-bam-bam, rewind,” Hicks laughs. “You know, there were heaps of songs that could have been on the album but we really wanted to make sure it was a really well-framed kind of project. I think our greatest weakness before was that we didn’t have a real solid identity in regards to our sound and we kind of wanted to prove to ourselves that we could do it with this album.”
Still, Hicks is quick to emphasise that Sport does not represent any kind of permanent shift for Re:Enactment. Comprising a jazz/funk drummer (Sam Mitchell), former Regurgitator member (keyboardist Shane Rudken), leftfield electronic producer (bassist Jim Grundy) and a drummer turned reluctant frontman (Hicks), Re:Enactment’s entire career has been defined by the juggling of four wildly differing perspectives on music. Hicks is actually unsure of most aspects of Re:Enactment’s future.
“I’ve got no fucking clue, man. At all,” the vocalist admits with a laugh. “I think that’s the way it’s always been and I hope it continues in that vein. The good thing about music is it’s like the weather – you can try to control it but, ultimately, things just happen and you just have to deal with it. It can be frustrating – it can give you a fucking aneurysm – but, when it all comes together and something happens that you didn’t expect to, I know I feel a lot better about pretty much everything in my life.” - Time Off