Duel Native

'Always Imperfect' feels like both a statement and a philosophy. What does that phrase mean to you personally, and how did it guide the making of this EP?

I've had to make it a philosophy in a way. One of my biggest resistances has been about trying to make something perfect when actually it just needs to be good enough. You have to come back to what your original intent was. The original intent has always been to live an artistic life. That becomes impossible if the end outcome, the products of that artistic life, becomes the focus. "Artistic" is an active word. It's about being, not about producing. It's about the sense of being okay with being totally rubbish sometimes. In fact, being okay with being bad is actually the thing that really has allowed me to experiment more. I think the biggest barrier to experimentation is the fear of it not being good enough, even before you start. And so Always Imperfect is an invitation to myself to make things, purely because I love making them, and because that exploration is what is meaningful to me. Always Imperfect is that invitation for me to free myself from a final product, and be part of the process. The product itself is just a recording of that experience, and that's what guided me to make this EP.

These live recordings carry a sense of spontaneity and risk. How did recording the EP live in Naarm (Melbourne) influence the performances and the final sound?

The first track we recorded was called "One Street Back," which is essentially a protest song. We never actually intended on recording it to release it. We were in the studio rehearsing, and we literally plugged my laptop into the mixer output. And that is the final recording. It was spontaneous, but at the time it didn't feel risky because we weren't planning on doing anything with it. There were a lot of really strong responses to that rehearsal video, so we ended up releasing it in its exact format. That recording is a bit like a protest: it's messy, spontaneous, and yes, risky. The act of protest is very similar in the sense that you don't really know the outcome. You have an intention, but are you going to get arrested? Is this going to be safe?

Following that, for the remaining songs, we decided to literally just go in and do one take. We went from our three-piece doing a song we knew really well ['Where I Was Last Found'] to 'Biophilicall,' where we got a number of friends in and just showed them the song an hour before, and they provided the rhythm section with stamping and clapping, and they're singing the chorus. What was fun about that is that it was such a communal experience. The idea that not everyone knew what the song was what made it powerful because everyone is on an equally bad footing to start with! The biggest risk really was that we were paying a lot of money for the studio and paying people to be there to record it, and it may not be usable. But that is a risk worth taking sometimes.

You’ve described the EP as an antidote to the algorithm. What does that idea look like in practice, and how do you navigate the tension between creativity and technology as an artist today?

The EP is an antidote to the algorithm in the sense that everything about it will not be 'successful' from an algorithmic perspective, in that: a lot of DSPs don't actually have editorial playlists for live tracks, it's very hard to even determine the genre of these songs. We had no metronome. We had a lot of variation, both in sound and timing. That's what it looks like in practice when you are not thinking about what works with some future algorithm pushing music out!

The songs themselves were not written to work as "backdrop" to people's lives. I see a lot of artists today who are writing lyrics that would suit a TikTok video or they're writing music that is ideal as a background to someone else's TikTok video. But for me, that's already thinking about the end-user before creating the song, and I find that really difficult because, as a songwriter, I want to explore my own self, I want to express my own feelings, and often I don't even know what these songs are that are coming out of me. For me, that is the opposite of thinking in algorithmic terms.

All technologies generally are tools and how we use those tools is up to us. We can use those tools in a way that augments our ability to express ourselves — or we can use those tools in a way that the tools end up having the artistic experience and we miss out on it, and I think there's a fine line to draw there. I imagine in maybe only 3 or 4 years time, where someone can make a hit song purely through prompting an artificial intelligence engine (that is probably already happening actually), and you have to ask yourself “why are you an artist?” For me, I know why.

Your recent work scoring and performing in the theatre production 'MEMBER' brought a strong narrative energy to your music. How did that experience feed into the storytelling or dynamics of this EP?

I've been working with an amazing writer, director, and actor (Ben Noble) in MEMBER, which is, I think, the third or fourth show we've done together, in different places around the world. Being a musician in a theatre context is so so different. When you're on your own or even when you're with your band up on stage, you know, you're sort of 'self-referential', like you're able to do whatever you feel like. In a theatre context, when what you are playing is a cue for someone else, or you're being cured by what the actors actors are doing — it's an amazing experience because we impact each other in a dynamic way. In the moment, the actors and the audience give me a sense in a given moment, like, ah... I need to lean into this moment of sadness that I didn't quite expect — or sometimes an actor has changed their lines around unexpectedly, and so I need to respond to that on the spot.

There's a real imminent alive-ness — a presence that you really need in theatre — you have to be extremely present and alert, and it's quite stressful actually! But that presence, and that alertness, and that aliveness, those are the things that actually I think are a key influence in the music we've made in this EP.

The DUEL NATIVE sound blends chamber psych, folk rock, and choral dream pop. How do you balance those diverse elements while keeping the performances feeling natural and intuitive?

That's a complicated question!

I'll be honest. I didn't even know what 'Chamber Psych' was. I didn't know that was a genre and it was only after recording these songs that either the producer or the publishing label told me what the genres were, so you know, whether it was folk-rock or chamber-psych or dream pop or choral pop. I wasn't actually aware of genre at the time of writing or recording, and there's a freedom in that too, because genres have their archetypes and their conventions, and these are supposed to flow through to what you wear, how you're branded, etc.

So how do I balance those diverse elements while keeping the performances feeling natural and intuitive? I mean, it was very much an unconscious effort on my part so I can't take any credit for anything other than being natural and intuitive and not actually overthinking!

You’re performing 'AI (Live)' in Sydney and Adelaide soon. What can audiences expect from these shows — are they more of a gig, a performance piece, or something in between?

Well... a little secret that you heard here first! The shows are going to be a little bit of a communal performance — depending on the vibe, potentially there will be elements where the audience will participate.

For the Adelaide show, I'm doing something we've been setting up for several months now. I'll explain: one of the songs on the EP is called 'Where I Was Last Found', and we managed to perform the song at a theatre production of the same name, at Red Stitch Theatre in Melbourne. A play was written with my lyrics as the point-of-departure for the playwright, and let's just say their interpretation was wildly different to mine (in a good way)! To counter-balance that, I wanted to play this song inside an Escape Room. So we've set up the Adelaide show as an Escape Room! When the audience arrives, they'll be given a piece of a puzzle. And for the whole performance to be fully unlocked, they have essentially 90 minutes to try and unlock the show.

I don't know how to explain it without giving more away, but if you're in Adelaide on the 28th of November and you like Escape Rooms (or maybe you've never been to one), you might want to come to this gig because it's as far as I know, no one's ever done a gig in an escape room before.

DUEL NATIVE LIVE

Pleasure Club SYDNEY on 20th November

Lowlife Bar ADELAIDE on 28th November