Concord Dawn

New Day Rising



It's the Saturday of the Bledisloe Cup match in Auckland and the weather is changable at best. The city is humming though, and Ponsonby Road is swollen with crowds of people doing lunch - including the All Black management team. A few blocks down one of the more relaxed residential Ponsonby streets, drum'n'bass duo Concord Dawn are feverishly polishing the remaining tracks of what will be their third album. This villa doubles as Matt Harvey's home, and he and Evan Short have been sequestered here for the better part of two months, kept company only by incessant breakbeats and the heightening scream of cabin fever.

The studio itself is a relatively humble affair, a hefty PC, an effects rack, a brand new but still unused mixer, and heavy carpets on the wall to deaden the sound and keep from driving the neighbours bezerk. A modest set-up that belies the fact that Harvey and Short have been one of the major success stories of New Zealand music in recent times. They've sold, at last count, somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand records internationally, and scraped the nether regions of the UK charts with their breakthrough single Morning Light. This track has opened doors for Concord Dawn, granting them access to the closed ranks of the international drum'n'bass scene, where the DJ is the ultimate arbiter of taste, and those on the dancefloor vote with their feet and their wallets.

It's been a whirlwind experience for the still relatively young Auckland duo. Since Morning Light was picked up by UK DJ Digital for release on Goldie's Timeless label, they've toured individually through large parts of both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, headlining shows to over a thousand people in territories as far flung as Estonia, Hungary, and erm, Hawera. On the back of Morning Light and a steady stream of 12" vinyl releases on revered drum'n'bass labels such as Renegade Hardware, Commercial Suicide and Moving Shadow, Concord Dawn's international profile now means they are in high demand on foreign shores. So once the album release is out of the way in September, they'll be off overseas again.

Concord Dawn first appeared about five years, gaining prominence through their unprecedented popularity on student radio. Their second album, Disturbance, was released in early 2001, and rising interest in the duo's unique hard melodic angle on drum'n'bass began to cause ripples internationally. Many of the tracks on Disturbance have now been released as 12" singles to the vinyl hungry masses, and it's this format that accounts for the majority of Concord Dawn's contribution to the export market. These sales were spurred by Morning Light's success, even though it appeared much later.

"We kind of knew we'd written a good tune, we could tell it was gonna be big," says Harvey of the track. "It was the first tune we'd done with vocals, except for a Sticky Filth remix we did. It was the first time we'd written a vocal tune. People like words and stuff, and the fact that it had that trancey thing and a male vocal. There's not too many tunes like that, or there wasn't then."

Morning Light was a breath of fresh air, a really unique moment, especially the first few times it was heard on the dancefloor, where it was absolutely the highlight of many a set. But the ad-hoc manner in which it came about deserves to go down in New Zealand music folklore.

"We didn't figure that we were writing something different, we just followed our gut instinct in a way" elaborates Short. "It was like 'Let's use these drums like this, now let's put this bassline in'. Then that sat there for a couple of hours, and we had a couple of beers, and Matt was like 'You should do some singing'. We got a mic and plugged it straight into the computer's soundcard, and just recorded a really rough take. After that I spent probably an hour auto-tuning it and time-stretching stuff and making it fit into the tune. Then we said, 'OK, tommorrow we'll borrow a nice mic, get a good mic preamp, and go into the studio next door and we'll get it sounding really classy. And we spent all day trying to get it, and it just sounded rubbish, nothing sounded as good as the original. Sometimes you just have to run with it..."

The way the track made its way into Digital's hands is a similarly fateful fable. The visiting DJ came around to watch the cricket, as he was an acquaintance of one of the boys flatmates, where he was presented a CD containing the track by Short. But if it had been up to Harvey things could have been much different.
"I was like, 'Don't even give him the CD! Don't even bother, he won't like it...it's not even his sound, man!' But Evan persisted..."

"That was our lucky break really...he's basically the A&R guy for Timeless Records," explains Short. "We put some contact details on there, but didn't figure he'd be into it. About three weeks later I got a text from him saying he wanted to put it out on their label for smaller producers, called L-Plates. He took the tunes to Brillo who runs the whole Timeless family, and said he wanted to put it on L-Plates. And Brillo was like 'No no no, that tunes too good, we'll put it on Timeless.' And then DJ's like Bailey and Klute got hold of it and loved it, and were slamming it. They were touring around the world, and next thing you know on all the chat boards, people are going 'We heard this track called Morning Light'. Or like 'Klute just played this track with vocals, what was it?' So people in the States started hitting us up about it. It kind of spread and spread from there."

Although Morning Light reached 109 in the UK charts it went much higher in dance and DJ charts, fuelling a demand for new Concord Dawn material, and paving the way for their burgeoning DJ careers. It also spurred the duo's enthusiasm for introducing different sounds into the sometimes monochromatic sound palette of drum'n'bass. The most extreme example of this to date is Raining Blood, a kind of tribute to the Slayer track of the same name. Although they've been accused of sampling the riff, it is actually courtesy of Short, an accomplished guitarist who has previously bloodied his fingers with Auckland hardcore act Day One. When the riff kicks in you know you're witnessing something a little different, but when the noodley 80's guitar hero solo hits it's bound to leave you with your jaw hanging somewhere in the vicinity of your ankles.

"When we did that track, I was doing it on my laptop on tour in the States," says Short. "And the first time I played it over there, in San Diego, it went bananas. And everywhere I went it was the highlight. Then you get these posts on the net saying 'Drum'n'bass should not be crossed with metal, this is a blasphemy, blah blah blah.' But we've been copping flak for most tracks. Even for Morning Light we got loads of shit. And at first you're really hurt, you think it's a failure. But then you realise that the people who like it aren't going to post. And if they don't like it they will. It's just humanity's need to be negative. If you get twenty people bitching about it there will be one hundred and twenty who love it."

"We definitely opened up to what you can do in the context of a drum'n'bass tune," continues Harvey. "We were like 'Oh fuck it, we can do what we want'. And that definitely helped. A bit more confident, and especially on this album that's meant we've done a whole lot of different tunes and not really been scared about whether people are going to like it."

"At the end of the day if we do something and we like it, then if we get some negative feedback we're a lot more sure of ourselves. But I never expected that tune to be big, so I thought we'd put it out ourselves, and play it occasionally at gigs and some people might be into it. Next thing you've got these labels going, 'We've got to have that tune'. It was almost another Morning Light for us," finishes Short.

Another thing Short and Harvey have been slammed for in the hyper-critical domain of online drum'n'bass forums is for their use of Fruity Loops software. This music software is perceived by some to be inferior, and the fact that Concord Dawn use it exclusively these days and have created their best moments using it apparently doesn't count for much amongst the detractors.

"I think we're the only people in the world at our level who use it exclusively," explains Short, who works as a mastering engineer and knows what he's talking about. "You get some people, like BT, who audition samples and write beats with it, but then take it into another program. But we've learnt how to do full automation of everything, and structuring tracks, and are pretty much doing everything you can do with other stuff in Fruity Loops. The only thing we're going to change is we've bought a nice big Mackie console, and we're going to mix it down with that, record it onto DAT, back into the computer and then master it."

They started using the software independently of each other while Short was living in the UK for a half-year period following the release of Disturbance. The realisation that he couldn't live without his creative partnership with Harvey spurred his return, and within weeks Morning Light had been laid down. At that time the Concord Dawn studio was at the Kog Transmissions record label headquarters in Kingsland, Auckland. The new album, entitled Up Rising, is being released by the duo on their own label of the same name, following their departure from the Kog stable.

"Basically things changed up at Kog," reflects Short. "We'd been there for a while and we'd seen quite a lot of people come and go. A few office managers had come and they'd leave after six months. We stayed there through a lot of people coming and going, but then it went through a big change where there was a difference of direction. It made us question what we were doing, and what we wanted from a label. When we first aligned ourselves with Kog, we were very young and we didn't know how the industry worked and they were very helpful. We learnt how things were done. We realised we knew enough to go and do it ourselves now."

In order to release the album, Short and Harvey have set up a company, and are paying themselves a meagre living wage. However, they are looking to the future, intending to invest in property if the album sells in quantity overseas.
"We're trying to be a bit more sensible about it," says Harvey. "If the album does well we're looking at buying a house. That's our superannuation scheme, 'cos there isn't one for DJ's. Since we've started the business we've been a little more sensible and started looking at the bigger picture."

And the picture's looking pretty good, as they both relate their highlights from tours abroad, such as hour-long signing sessions in Eastern Europe that included women's stomachs. And Harvey says a grandparent is rapt that Concord Dawn are mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide in relation to New Zealand music. You know you've made it when...

Gavin Bertram