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Music

Cut Copy

CUT COPY with HOLY GHOST! at Sound Academy (11 Polson), tonight (Thursday, April 7), 8 pm. $30. PDR, RT, SS, TM. See listing.


Australia apparently isn’t isolated enough for Cut Copy. When the Aussie pop band began work on their third album, Zonoscope (Modular), they holed up in a warehouse on the outskirts of their native Melbourne. They had no phone or internet access and avoided their friends in an attempt to reimagine their creative process.

“The whole album was about experimenting and finding new ways to record,” says frontman/producer Dan Whitford. “Being isolated was important in that respect, because you’re not sitting there thinking about what everyone else is thinking about. You’re going off on your own tangents, and that’s the best way to approach making a record.”

What started as a weekly lease at the warehouse turned into a six-month residency during which the band played around with percussion, analog synths, weird guitars and effects units and vibed out to Werner Herzog’s metaphysical Amazonian adventure, Fitzcarraldo, which they projected onto a wall.

The aim was to step up all aspects of their music from adding more painterly detail to the lyrics, bigger crescendos and more diverse rhythms, to undertaking an ambitious world tour that sees the band playing their most treasured analog synthesizers live for the first time. They’ve also expanded from a trio into a four-piece.

In the album’s liner notes, they thank Herzog “for introducing us to the zonoscope,” which Whitford describes as an escapist tropical dream world where classic pop songwriting collides with epic dance music.

The idea that the past and future are inextricably linked permeates the album, and is most bluntly expressed on Strange Nostalgia For The Future, an instrumental “score” written while watching a section of Fitzcarraldo and named after a 1982 Brian Eno quote.

“It’s not like something new can only come from the here and now. Often, to create something new and interesting, you almost need to go back and revise your thinking,” explains Whitford.

“There are as many interesting ideas, qualities and techniques in music from the past as there are in music now. I always feel like our music is a sort of patchwork or collage of music from all eras.”

music@nowtoronto.com

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