Seekae
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Seekae

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After building upon their primitive chiptune-heavy infancy, Sydney three-piece Seekae emerged with their debut album The Sound Of Trees Falling On People, then going on to cement a reputation as a killer live act.

After building upon their primitive chiptune-heavy infancy, Sydney three-piece Seekae emerged with their debut album The Sound Of Trees Falling On People, then going on to cement a reputation as a killer live act. The outfit now look set to establish themselves as one of the nation’s premier electronic artists with the release of LP number two, +Dome. “It’s actually pronounced ‘plus dome’,” multi-instrumentalist Alex Cameron interjects after I fail to verbalise the prefixed symbol. “It’s starting to get confusing. With all our names and track titles we seem to always take the most complicated route, I don’t know why.”

 

Title pronunciation aside, +Dome marks a stunning leap of progression from the group’s well-received debut. This maturation has come along quite organically, Alex explains. “I think there’s a huge jump. With the first album, that was sort of a mixtape of songs we’d done over around two year period coming out of high school. Where with this one our goal was actually to make a record, and that’s what we’ve done,” he states.

 

We sort of started doing music together in high school, I guess you could say it was a naïve look at electronic music production, and we were just working on different rhythms and grooves and trying to find the right tempos for our music,” he recalls. “We just started to linger around some typical IDM tempos and some club rhythms. Over the past year and a half we’ve been sort of travelling the world finding different sounds we want to replicate and make our own. All our travels have culminated in the latest record, I guess,” Alex muses. “I’d say it’s just a mixture of performing live and trying to understand venue sound and what people want to hear live.”


The live setting is where Seekae are starting to garner considerable recognition and rise above their peers, with plum support slots with like-minded artists such as Mount Kimbie, PVT, and Midnight Juggernauts. “It’s just us three on stage, I play drums on about fifty percent of the stuff,” Alex states. “We all have laptops on stage, so we’ve all got the capability to sample and trigger stuff. We’re trying to keep it as continuous as possible, so it’s really a combination of a live set and a laptop set. In our travels through Europe and Asia, a lot of the live acts we found were just laptop musicians, and crowds were loving it. I think that’s yet to hit Sydney properly, so what we’re doing can sometimes be a bit confusing,” he contemplates. “We’re just focussing on the aural part of the show, making sure it’s sounding as good as it can be. Just making sure it’s an enjoyable 50 minutes, or hour or however long we’re on stage, just trying to keep people moving. Just each show is a step to getting to where we wanna be – we’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go, too.”


With the aural aspect of the performance achieving remarkable consolidation, the next logical step for Seekae is to begin exploring the visual aspects of the medium. “We’ve discussed visuals a lot, we’ve played with projections and George has done some visual art stuff. We’ve spoken to a few artists about doing something, so it’s all coming together,” he reveals. “We’re yet to have an official film clip either, so maybe something will come out of that.”

 

I think living in Sydney, musically, has been like a blessing almost,” Alex further explains. “We had time to build and grow, and we can remain confident in our own abilities and ideas without being too influenced by what’s happening in the world. But at the same time it’s good to get out and around and find out what’s happening,” he states. “There is the temptation (to move base to the UK), but there’ll be the right time for that. We’re going over to the UK later on in the year, but if we’re moving over there it would have to be for a purpose, like we have gigs or a chance to record somewhere. We’re going to just go over and see what’s happening in the UK and other parts of Europe, see if anything tickles our fancy.”

 

SEEKAE lauch +Dome at the Toff In Town on Monday April 25. See myspace.com/seekaemusic for further information.