Hardly Working

With the release of their latest EP, All That Good Work/Blue, Melbourne production duo Naysayer & Gilsun, aka Luke Neher and Sam Gill, are hitting the road on a national tour that will see them returning to Perth for the third time. “We've always had a ball in Perth because people really party in a different way,” says Gill. “It's always fortunate for us to come out and it's just always been a uniquely great time.”

While known for their audio-visual live shows, Gill says the Perth show this time round will solely be about the music. “Last time we came, we tried to do the audio-visual show and the promoters went to a huge amount of effort to try and make it work. We came to the conclusion that it doesn't necessarily work in a club environment because it can be a bit too attention-demanding for people who are just there to switch off and drink and enjoy themselves. So this time around we're just going to DJ and that allows us a bit more time to go with the flow and enjoy ourselves.”

Gill says the basic ideas for the EP came from he and Neher working individually and then bringing ideas together in the studio. “We work a lot faster and produce things at a rate that's not possible when we're both behind the controls. With electronic music, when you're writing it and programming simultaneously, there's a real flow to it and when you work with other people it can be a bit slower no matter how well you mesh stylistically.”

The EP builds on the band's focus on combining organic and digital sounds. For Gill, this meant combining software sounds with his old Korg Prophecy synthesiser “A lot of the time we write lines on basic software synthesisers and experiment by taking certain melodies and applying them to different synth patches we've created or trying them out on the Prophet. It's got a lot of sounds like on Radiohead's Kid A and you can tap into those Boards Of Canada-style emulations of John Carpenter super-scary, super-eerie atmosphere.”

While Gill says there's no plan musically for the rest of the year, nothing's set in stone. “I have to remain very reactive this year and play it by ear. We have some other shows that are kind of in the works for later on this year and we have sort of a bundle of tracks that are very, very slowly starting to assemble an album. So I think we're going to have to find some time to just sit down and really look into what we really want. It's all kind up in the air right now but that in its own way is pretty exciting.”