Andras & Oscar: ‘It’s a Meeting Point’

Melbourne’s Andras Fox and Oscar Slorach-Thorn team up for “sad house music” that’s also, in a way, purposefully stupid, they tell ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Andras & Oscar. Oscar & Andras. Are they the original odd couple? Both Andras – Andras Fox, Andrew Wilson, or A.R.T. Wilson, depending on the day – and Oscar – Oscar Slorach-Thorn, a.k.a. Oscar Key Sung, once of Oscar + Martin and Psuche – are staples of Melbourne’s electronic underground, veteran producers and performers who still remain fresh-faced and young (Fox is 26, Slorach-Thorn 24).

But they’re not quite alike: Andras is irritable, Oscar affable. Andras comes forever clad in his Seinfieldian uniform of dark jeans and white sneakers; Oscar’s look, ’90s-sitcom-wise, is a little more extra-from-A Different World. Oscar has long seemed like some future superstar momentarily dwelling in Melbourne: the soul singer with the heavenly voice and marketable handsomeness. Andras, well, no one would say he has a face for radio, exactly, but the producer and in-demand DJ did spend years hosting RRR’s excellent Strange Holiday program.

But Andras & Oscar, odd couple, make beautiful music together. After their first collaboration, 2013’s Embassy Café, boasted the strikingly beautiful broken-hearted-house jam ‘Running Late’, the pair have reunited for 2014’s Café Romantica, their first record for iconic local imprint Chapter Music. Both of their albums are named after infamous late-night greasy-spoons in Melbourne, giving an insight into the sly humour at the heart of their sentimental, nocturnal, determinedly downtempo take on analogue house music.

Do you think you have a persona?
Fox: I do have a persona, apparently. I’m Dark Jerry. I was dressing like Jerry Seinfeld a lot this past year, and a few people pulled me up on it: the white sneakers and sports jacket. So I decided that I’d be Dark Jerry. And I think that works, because I’m not that bitter a person, but apparently I have a bit of a jerk persona to me. Do I seem like a jerk to you?

I’ll let you know in 20 minutes. But is this persona something that you’re playing up? Is it a performative thing?
Fox: I don’t know, do I have a performance persona? [To Slorach-Thorn] What do you think?

Slorach-Thorn: In that video clip for [Andras Fox’s] ‘Pontoon’, is that the real Andy or is that a persona?

Fox: I’d say that’s pretty close to the real Andy. Because it’s a portrait of someone who has no idea what they’re doing, that film clip. It’s basically me running around in my underwear, looking for cool spots to do slightly emasculated but also slightly macho things. I think that sums up a lot of stuff I do: this playful appropriation of knowing what you’re doing, and at the same time relishing the fact that you have no idea.

Doing stuff that’s slightly emasculated yet still macho speaks of your music: taking electronic music, which can be such a macho dudes-with-their-gear realm, and using its tools to make sounds that’re more sweet and sensual.
Fox: There’s always been an undercurrent of, like, sad house. Sad piano house. ‘Just Another Lonely Day’ by Larry Heard [as Blakk Society]. ‘Missing You’, by Larry as well, that’s another one I love. Those melancholy tracks are the ones that mean the most to me. Maybe that’s my influence: the two Larries. That’s the persona: Larry David meets Larry Heard.

How do your two personalities – your duelling personae – work in Andras & Oscar?
Fox: In some respects we’re quite different: Oscar is a much better and more animated performer than me.

Slorach-Thorn: No! ‘Better’ is a weird way of putting it.

Fox: It’s true: you certainly give a lot more energy, you’re more comfortable dancing, chicks like you a lot more.

Slorach-Thorn: That’s not true!

“I’m more comfortable on stage than talking to people I don’t really know. It’s quite safe.”

Fox: I’m less comfortable on stage, I have the more straight studio background. But despite any perceived or tangible differences, Oscar and I have a lot of similar personality traits as well. We both have a lot of self-doubt, a lot of weird overthinking processes and neuroses.

Slorach-Thorn: I’m more comfortable on stage in front of a bunch of people than I am talking to like a group of, like, four people I don’t really know. It’s quite safe being on stage. But I feel much more anxious around people I’m not sure I actually like. I’m like another Larry David all over again. We have very Seinfield – very Seinfeld! – dialogues together.

Fox: I think that there’s a lot of similarity there, and that’s why we’re able to continue to do this, and why we’ve now made a second record together.

How does it feel functioning in the collaborative realm, being less in charge?
Slorach-Thorn: It’s great. It’s really liberating. There’s not this sense of despair that I usually get: ‘Am I doing the right thing? What am I trying to say? WHO AM I???!’ I get too deep in my solo work, I get really weird about it. But, with Andy, it’s quite a light-hearted approach where whatever comes out is how it stays. When we perform live, I find it hard to sing some of the lines in the songs, because to me they’re ridiculous and funny. That’s quite a nice thing to do, but that’s not a thing that you’re likely to do alone. It takes that social element in the making of the music to come into it.

Fox: You and me both encourage a slightly silly side of each other’s personality. When we’re left alone in rehearsal rooms it gets very silly very quickly. That’s a side of me I don’t get to express with many other people.

Why is that, Dark Jerry?
Slorach-Thorn: There’s just not enough silly-billys out there!

Fox: I’m a big control freak as a person in lots of ways. So I’ll oscillate between being in complete control of something or just letting go completely. Being around Oscar allows me to let go.

Slorach-Thorn: I think it’s similar to allowing yourself to be emotional around people. A lot of people aren’t willing to make the first move when it comes to expressing themselves or revealing themselves. I find that I am always comfortable to make myself very, very embarrassed. I’ll allow you to know something weird and embarrassing about myself way too quickly, and the effect of that is people tell me weird things about themselves; they’ll often say: “You know, I’ve never told anyone else this before, but...” The same thing happens with silliness. If you act like a moron and do like a 10-minute impersonation of a dog humping a wall, it lets the other person be free to get freaky with you, to be funny, to be silly. We all want to be a bit silly sometimes, but few dare to make the first move!

When you talked before about getting too deep into your solo material, is that how you think of it: that it has to be this expression of you, as a human being?
Slorach-Thorn: I can sometimes overthink the validity of the content. I think a lot about detritus and waste, whether I’m, like, just adding more trash to the sonic landscape. It’s just a fucking ego trip and an illusion, really, but it just goes back to insecurity, that constant feeling of needing to prove something, whether it’s just to yourself or to the rest of the world. Being around someone else brings you out of that illusory experience, allows you just to make music.

That kind of self-doubt and insecurity, that need to prove yourself and be validated, is pretty standard for an era of seven billion people. The world doesn’t need any more records. And that’s the existential battle of making anything at this point in time. Whereas, making music with someone else, it’s pretty easy to get positive feedback, to hear someone saying that what you’re doing is good, that it has worth.
Slorach-Thorn: Exactly! Every time you do something by yourself, you have to grapple with your place in the world, and that’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to talk about! I have no idea what I’m saying anymore.

Fox: Next question.

When you said that you’ve been ‘able to continue’ with this collaboration, to make a second record, does that mean that you thought of the first one as more of a one-off?
Fox: A ‘one-off’ would actually imply that we knew what we were actually doing or what we wanted from it. It was never so organised that we knew whether we wanted it to be a one-off or an ongoing thing.

Slorach-Thorn: The Embassy Café one happened by accident, so there was a sense that, well, another one could happen, too. Even though, in truth, there did come a point where we had to decide to get more serious about it.

Fox: But ‘serious’ feels like completely the wrong word. In the scheme of serious recording sessions, I don’t think anything we’ve ever done could be considered serious.

Slorach-Thorn: It was definitely not some “Let’s book a hi-fi studio and make this album” decision. It was more an “OK, let’s do this again” decision.

“We’re encouraging each other to push things in a really stupid direction.”

Fox: But that wasn’t a hard decision to make, either. The first one was just so fun and easy. That’s how I feel about this project: we’re playing together and encouraging each other to push things in a really stupid direction. Like, there’s this track on the Cut Copy Oceans Apart compilation called ‘Music Is My Life’, which is an insanely dumb song title. I was running some drum-machine loop, recording to tape really pathetically, and I was playing the slap-bass patch on the Korg M1, which basically sounds like the Seinfeld intro, over and over again. And over this Oscar is ad-libbing, and at some point, as if some possessive demon comes over him, he suddenly screams: “Music is my life/Music is my passion/My delight/Music is what’s happenin’”; then does this whole Michael Jackson ball-grabbing “Owwww yeah” thing. He did it once, and it sent me into hysterics. We tried to re-record it, but it was never the same, because it actually distorted a little bit when he was at the peak of his screaming. So we ended up cutting those vocals and making that track out of it.

Slorach-Thorn: That’s a really nice element of the collaboration. Andy will be picking through sounds, and I’ll start laughing at something, like for instance the slap bass. And he’ll be like, “Well, I can’t use that,” and my response is, “No, you have to use that!”

Fox: We help each other think that our bad ideas are good ideas.

Slorach-Thorn: That’s it! That’s the quote for you.

How does that egging-on help the actual music that you turn out?
Fox: It goes back to that notion of insecurity. It helps you to no longer be so self-doubting. It’s a form of encouragement, and that enables you to just keep working, and if you just keep doing that for long enough, something good happens. It’s dance music, it doesn’t have to be so serious. Or virtuosic. Amateurism is something that I’ve always been fascinated with, in regards to dance music. Because I think it’s way more endearing when it’s pulled off, when it is both a little bit fragile yet has enough effort and thought put into it to be able to be played alongside other dance records.

The risk of these records is that they’re stripped pretty bare. There’s a lot of mistakes left in, and the recordings are pretty fragile at times. There’s the possibility that people will judge us for that. Because dance music is a realm in which things are often so slick and so clean. We’re really putting our personalities into it. A lot of dance music is so anonymous, and really relishes its anonymity: using heaps of different aliases, putting things out anonymously. Andras & Oscar is a pretty self-explanatory name for the collaboration. That’s what it is: it’s not a new world we’ve created together, it’s a meeting point between our two separate things.

Do you think about the juxtaposition, or the contradiction, between making sad house music that you find hilarious? Because the fun and silliness you speak of isn’t so often in the songs; what you’re actually singing about is often really sad. Like, it just sounds wounded.
Slorach-Thorn: I get really sad.

Fox: He’s an emotional guy!

Slorach-Thorn: I’m one of those people who’s always making heaps of jokes and stuff, but I get incredibly down. I overthink things, and get deep into myself. I also think that sad music is quite pleasant to listen to. One of my friends, Moses Sumney, his music is so sad if you think about it: it’s essentially him just moaning, like crying, but it’s so beautiful. I don’t think you depress people by expressing what you want and what you think. Sadness is something that’s not that enjoyable to talk about, but it’s something that everyone experiences; it’s nice to hear it out in music, to have that solidarity.

How did you conceive of taking this project into the live realm?
Slorach-Thorn: There was no real conceiving to be done. I sing ’em live, and Andy plays the keys and mixes them live. The layers on the recordings really aren’t layers: I’m playing a keys part, Andy’s playing two keys parts, I’m singing. It is live! We made it live! We can play all the songs on keyboards, with actual keyboards. It’s not all samples and MIDI and Ableton Live.

“We use fragile, shitty gear for [a] reason: it keeps it on the edge.”

Fox: My approach to playing live music has always been: You feel the most alive in life when you’re closest to death. I think it’s the same with me for live performance. I only really feel like it’s really live if I feel that something horrible is about to happen; like I’m about to die some horrible ego death on stage because my tape’s going to get eaten or some machine is going to malfunction. We use all the fragile, shitty gear for the same reason: it keeps it on the edge a bit.

Do you ever try and create that air of magic-and-accident when you’re DJing?
Fox: Of course! But that’s easier to do. The records that you play may be records that you need to tease the magic out of, because they’re mastered really badly, so you’re rinsing the bottom end in or cutting off the treble, or doing something really complicated with an isolator rack or an EQ. I worked out a lot of people really like rotary mixers, and specifically this one particular one, an E&S DJR 400, which is a mixer that costs 10 times [as much as] the equivalent Pioneer one. You end up spending $3000 on this four-channel turntable mixer, effectively. It sounds incredible, it has great pre-amps, the isolator rack is beautifully made, all that, sure.

But I worked out on this [recent European DJ] tour, the reason I liked it so much is that you kind of play badly when you use one. The rotary mixers don’t give you firm zero-decibel settings, you don’t have any tools for sharp-cutting. And because you’ve got too many knobs to EQ it, you end up doing really dumb stuff with it: constantly fiddling, touching it too much, messing up the sound. You have no option to use effects or easy getaways if the mix is going badly, and I think that’s actually why you like them, because it encourages you to be a little bit stupid.

Being a little bit stupid ... does that bring us full circle? Is there anything left unsaid, Gothic Jerry?
Slorach-Thorn: Look at him, Goth Jerry. He totally is. He’s like Seinfeld as drawn by Daniel Clowes; the way his characters are all really sombre and defeated-looking.

Fox: Come on, Oscar, answer this: what is the ethos behind this record?

Slorach-Thorn: Getting it done fast enough to have a game of pool and a pizza before going to bed.

Fox: One thing that I haven’t talked about in any interviews yet is the whole ‘French’ thing.

You mean having an accent above the e?
Fox: Well, we’re always being asked if our music is Australian, if it’s full of Australian references. And there’s not really, but then there is in this one way. It’s making fun of European-ness, or classiness, from an Australian perspective. Like, there’s croissants on the [Café Romantica] back cover! I was thinking about baguettes the other day. When I was a child, my mum used to call a baguette a ‘French stick’, and it was a fancy thing you got once a week, on like a Saturday afternoon. It was a dry, horrible hunk of bread, but because it was French it was ‘classy’.

Having just got back from Paris, there the baguette is very utilitarian, it’s the daily bread. There’s a stipulation there that bakeries in Paris have to produce a certain percentage of their baked goods to be sold at cost or super cheap to homeless people: it’s literally the food to make sure that everyone gets fed. That’s where a song like ‘French Twist’ comes from: trying to be classy and appear European, but by even referencing France you’re already fucking it up a little bit. The handwriting on the front cover of Café Romantica is actually Salvador Dali’s handwriting. Me and my friend Lewis [Fidock], who did the illustrations, chose that because we absolutely hate Dali. We think he was an absolute wanker; he was so Oedipally obsessed it ruined his art.

Slorach-Thorn: That’s really Aussie, to subtly, lovingly be taking the piss out of someone.

Fox: The same with the Café Romantica thing: wilfully conflating French and Italian, that’s funny to us.

Slorach-Thorn: [bogan voice] What’s the difference anyway, ay? Spaghetti ’ere, baguettes there. It’s all the same!

And that relates back to your titular obsession with late-night dives?
Fox: It’s the same thing. In the same way that ‘classy’ French and Italian food is misinterpreted by late-night diners, I think we’re misinterpreting this classy, smooth, Café del Mar and Dmitri From Paris, sexy so-Frenchy house music; just two dudes doing it – and doing it all wrong – in Australia. I’ve never really thought of it that way before, but now it makes perfect sense.

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‘Café Romantica’ is out now on vinyl and digital through Chapter Music. Tour dates below.

Fri, Dec 5 – Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane, QLD
Sat, Dec 6 – The Shadow Electric, Melbourne, VIC [7pm, w/GL + DJ Lewis Fidock]
Sun, Dec 7 – The Shadow Electric, Melbourne, VIC [3pm, w/Geoffrey O’Connor + DJ Sleep D]
Thurs, Dec 11 – GoodGod Small Club, Sydney, NSW
Fri, Dec 12 – Connections Nightclub, Perth, WA
Sat, Dec 13 – Rocket Bar, Adelaide, SA