“We all live relatively close to each other and we’re all with the same management,” he says. “We all send demos to each other and give feedback, so it’s really good to have those second opinions they offer when writing stuff. You get really insular when you’re writing and that might end up being bad for it. So it’s good to have someone to pull you out of your headspace and give you a second thought on a track.”
Along with their strong ties to Wave Racer and Basenji, Cosmo’s Midnight’s connection to Flume goes deeper than geography. A couple of years back, the pair remixed Flume’s Sleepless,which took out an official Beatport competition. Subsequently, Cosmo’s Midnight were picked up by savvy Sydney agency Astral People and released their debut EP Surge in late 2013. At this point, original productions are the duo’s chief focus, but they’re not leaving the remix caper behind.
“We are more known for remixing than original stuff,” says Liney. “We’re getting remix offers every other week, but we’re not taking them on right now because we’re trying to put together a really strong compilation of what we’re writing. I think once that’s done, we’re cool to take on remixes again. I definitely love remixing, so I don’t want to stop anytime soon.
“[Last year] we did two pretty high profile remixes,” he adds. “That really boosted our name, which was great. The Aluna George one we did with Lido was way bigger than I thought it would be, which was awesome. Also the Destiny’s Child remix did really well.”
Seizing the momentum generated by Surge and these remixes, 2014 was a big year for Cosmo’s Midnight. They jumped on board a national tour with Nina Las Vegas, appeared at major festivals such as Splendour in the Grass and picked up stacks of fans along the way. On the originals front, however, things were fairly dry.
“We didn’t want to be hasty with anything,” Liney says. “We took our time making sure we knew what we wanted to write. It was great doing [the remixes] before we did any more singles because it turned more eyes onto us.”
Indeed, when the gestation period ended and Cosmo’s Midnight’s new single Snare dropped in November, they received a raptreception and immediately gained maximum triple j exposure. Featuring vocals from the UK’s Wild Eyed Boy, Snare is a cushiony exhalation of melodious R&B. “It’s actually a track that I wrote a while ago that I revisited,” Liney says. “I kept wanting to finish it off and my friend in London, he was in Australia at the time, so we did a session with him and recorded the track. I’m super happy with how it turned it out.”
They might’ve taken their time getting Snare ready, but the wait for the next Cosmo’s Midnight release won’t be so prolonged. Liney reveals a new EP is close to completion: “It’s a pretty long EP, I think it’s [about] six tracks,” he says. “There’s a few collabs and then a couple of solo instrumentals. It’s a big undertaking, which is why it’s taken us so long to get to this point.
“We’ve got a track with Lido,” he continues. “When he was in Sydney last year for his tour, we’d written a track and were finishing it off, making sure it sounds really good. We’d been doing it by correspondence, which is really time consuming because you have to send the whole project file back and forth and make sure we all have the same plug-ins and samples. So [having him here] was cool. We’re working with Kero Kero Bonito at the moment, which is a really cool UK band I like. They do J-pop/ left-field pop. Really nice singing – the vocalist’s amazing. Then also, it’s known now that we’ve got a track with Wave Racer.”
It should be pointed out that Liney’s partner in crime, Cosmo, is in fact his brother. No matter how strong the creative synergy, working alongside a sibling can be tricky business. However, the Liney brothers have figured out a pretty productive system.
“I don’t think we ever start stuff together,” Liney says. “The creative process doesn’t work like that for us. It’s usually that one of us will start an idea and then bring it to the other and then we’ll write it together. It’s good because it means we sort of double the ideas we can come up with that way.
“Cosmo’s really good at coming up with melodic ideas and he does more left-field stuff. I’m more technical and I make sure the production is really clean and schmick. You don’t want to sound like something’s overworked, so it’s really good to have Cos tell me when something is done and leave it there when it’s fresh still.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
