Art Vs Science

Fri 25th Feb, 2011 in Features

Art Vs Science have unleashed sporadic trimmings of musical debauchery over the past few years which, combined with frequent festival appearances, have garnered them a huge force of fans around Australia. After tasty appetisers like Flippers and Parlez Vous Francais? they are about to serve up a main course, with debut album The Experiment sure to be among the most-played party music of 2011.

After sneaking in a listen of the long-awaited record it’s fair to say the ridiculousness hasn’t taken a backward step, and given their success thus far, this really could be the year of Art Vs Science. FL caught up with vocalist and keys man Jim Finn to get his thoughts on the finally finished product, fresh from signing a couple hundred covers for some loyal followers.

How do you feel about The Experiment now that it’s ready for release?
We’re really proud of it, we’ve spent so long working on it. I think we started the recording of it around January 2010, so it’s been going for a year and a bit now and we’re very happy to get it all finished. I don’t think lots of the songs were written back then when we started so it’s really good just to see it all finally finished now and see all the songs we managed to write in that time.

I’m sure you’ve heard the words quirky and bombastic used to describe Art Vs Science before, is that something you always intended to incorporate into your music?
We like the sort of weird element in our music. I think whenever we hear songs that are too obvious and too simple it doesn’t really please us to listen to those songs, songs that make us excited are when you hear something and say ‘woah, I didn’t see that coming, that’s awesome but, weird!’. I kind of hope we get that reaction from people, that even though it’s a bit weird and a bit quirky and a bit out there, hopefully it’s still got the core elements like a good groove or a cool hook, something that makes them like the song even though there’s some weird stuff in there too.

The track Bumblebee probably epitomises that sort of craziness, how did that track in particular come together?
Actually that track and another, Meteor, came together in the space of about 20 minutes. We wrote both those songs exactly as they are, because we were up in Brisbane in a studio doing pre-production for the album and we’d finished everything. So we had all these songs that we were going to record ready and were congratulating ourselves on a job well done and went and had some beers down by the river in Brisbane. Then we thought ‘what can we do now? What’s something fun we can do? We could go back to the studio and jam, we like doing that!’. So we got back to the studio, our gear was already setup and we just had a few more beers and started jamming and pressed record on a laptop, and Bumblebee just sort of came out. We just started with the [Jim beat boxes the opening beats], and exactly as it is on the album is exactly how it was first ever played by us. Dan Mac started doing a crazy [Jim inserts further beat box version] and I remember going ‘woah, that sounds like a bumblebee’ so I just started saying ‘bumblebee’ over and over. So we thought, we should totally put that on the album.