Gyroscope

Fri 5th Dec, 2008 in Features

After headlining a national tour and creating an ARIA-topping album, Perth rock unit Gyroscope is already writing songs for their fourth album. They’re also preparing for the summer festival scene. Drummer Rob Nassif chats with FL about songwriting, performing and drum lessons.

For your next record, how many songs do you guys have general ideas for?
Well, we wrote nine throughout the year in between tours. And now the process is just mainly for [singer/guitarist] Dan [Sanders] to put vocals on those nine songs. He’s done five of them so far and they’re sounding great. And for the rest of us it’s really about coming up with the next batch of 10 songs, really. For me, personally, it’s involved getting drum lessons for the first time in about five years, and then hopefully the ideas will flow from that.

So what kind of things have you been working on in your lessons?
Just a whole bunch of different things. For me it’s just about joining the dots. I’ve never been a big reader of sheet music and I’ve been getting right into that, doing little things that I might have done here or there in songs, and realising, “Okay, that’s what it looks like in sheet music. And if you do this and you switch this around, well, you’re doing a similar thing but it sounds so much better.” It’s just been about really broadening the scope for me personally.

When you guys write songs, will you sit in a room together and all write or will each of you do your own thing and bring it back together?
Well, it’s really a case of everyone comes up with their own ideas, so for me it’s just drum beats. I just come up with different drum beats that I like. [Bassist] Brad [Campbell] will do the same thing with bass lines. Usually, just little sections, maybe a verse, maybe a chorus, maybe a verse and a chorus. Typically Zok [guitarist/vocalist Zoran Trivic] will come up with whole entire songs. He’ll write a whole song because for Zok it’s easier for him to express himself and get his ideas across when he can put everything down in one hit. And Dan will do the same thing but not quite as deep.

What we then do is compile all those ideas. That’s what we’re doing at the moment. Say there’s at least 15 to 20 ideas floating around. We [then] get into the rehearsal room and we all start tearing apart those ideas. Generally, the process just involves everyone adding their own flavour; deconstructing stuff. And then the same thing for the drums, the same thing for the bass. There’s no real particular way. The main important ingredient for our band is that there’s lots of ideas there. Because where there’s ideas there’s enthusiasm.

You guys came out to the east coast for the Open Arms Festival. It’s one of the first festivals where you guys were one of the main acts.
Yeah, it’s cool, eh? This year has been great like that. We had a really good spot for Splendour in the Grass – sort of 5:30 at night and it was getting dark and it’s been pretty incredible. I think we were the second to last act. It’s really exciting. The crowd’s drunker. You get up there and give it your all and the crowds have generally been really responsive. The whole process of touring for this last album has been so fantastic because we’ve done every step of the ladder up to this point. I got to say, it’s really nice stepping it up a bit more and playing a bit later and seeing those crowds do what they do.

Is there any different style or technique – something that you’d like to see happen on the new record?
That’s a very personal question. I’m only one out of four within the band. For me, I would like to see a more cohesive record, a record that flows more cohesively from song to song. I think it can be great being really diverse and I’m glad we did that with Breed Obsession – but I think bands typically tend to react to what their last album was like. If you look at U2’s Pop album, which is very electronic-based, and the album after that, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, they did the exact opposite [of Pop; they went back to playing all their real instruments.

“Not that I’m trying to draw a comparison there, but I think bands tend to react to however their last album was. It’d still be interesting and super crazy and all the rest of it, but I would like a more cohesive record personally. Whether that happens though is a totally different thing. The thing with Gyroscope being such a four-cornered table, no one person’s influence can sway that. For me, the most important thing is that it’s a challenging and exciting record.”

Gyroscope is gearing up for some big festival dates this summer.

27 Dec – Rollercoaster Festival, Mandurah, Perth
30 Dec – Pyramid Rock Festival, Phillip Island