Music
'Beams' at 15: The Presets on their scrappy, divisive debut
In 2005, Sydney duo The Presets released their debut album on Modular Recordings. 15 years later, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes tell Red Bull how Beams changed their lives.
Back in the early Myspace days of 2004, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes were all over Sydney -- if you knew where to look.
Their knockabout project, The Presets, was new on the scene with a demo CD that would become the Blow Up EP. Modular Recordings, the Sydney-based label behind Ben Lee and The Avalanches, dug the duo’s style. With Modular’s backing, The Presets picked up some scrappy gigs around town. They warmed a sparse dancefloor at Candy’s Apartment before hot-right-then labelmates Wolfmother packed it out. They played infamous electro weekly Bang Gang at Moulin Rouge in Kings Cross with a one-time-only bass player. They gigged for Blow Up believers at the now-shuttered Hopetoun Hotel and any pub that’d have them.
But mostly The Presets played in other people’s bands. Both adept session musicians, Moyes and Hamilton joined their friends Daniel Johns and Paul Mac as touring members of The Dissociatives in 2004. (Behold, their TV appearance on Rove, blending expertly into the background.) Meanwhile, Hamilton played keys for acts as disparate as Pnau and Silverchair. (Here he is, perched in the shadows behind Daniel Johns, playing to a 50,000-strong crowd at Sydney’s Wave Aid benefit.)
Speaking to Red Bull on the phone from their respective homes, The Presets are happy to analyse their former selves. “We were working musos doing what we could to get money,” Hamilton says. “It was rewarding and educational, but we began to hate spending so much time promoting other people’s shit.” Moyes jumps in, “We were total fucking punks.”
The Presets
© None
They both laugh at the memory of supporting Paul Mac on his 2005 tour. “After we played, we ran to the merch table and told everyone that Paul Mac’s merch was shit and they really wanted our merch,” Hamilton says. “Our goal was to try to outsell Paul -- who we love.”
“He had like 20 merch items, and we had one t-shirt,” Moyes recalls. (In their defense, the t-shirt, printed with the rainbow skull design from the Blow Up EP, was pretty cool.) “We had a bit of a chip on our shoulder about being treated like session musos,” Moyes continues. “Seeing the way managers and roadies would treat the artists, we were like, ‘Fuck that shit, you’ll be working for us one day!’”
Before The Presets, there was Prop. By now the duo’s backstory is well-documented: they met as students at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, admired each other’s swagger (and clothes), and ended up in the same high-minded instrumental five-piece.
An early band bio began: ’The members of Prop are all music graduates -- this is not music by accident!’ Hamilton’s main instrument was keyboards; Moyes commanded the not-very-ravey vibraphone. Prop’s music was textured and accomplished, but niche by design.
Hamilton and Moyes would stay back late after band rehearsals, messing around on all the instruments. “I’d be on the drum-kit and Jules would be on the synths,” Moyes says. “We’d just play really dumb stuff.” Their ‘Blood Bubbles’ version of Prop’s own ‘Magnetic Highway’ set a template for The Presets. Before long, they’d made a sleazy, synthy little gem called ‘Let’s Go!’. Blow Up was coming in hot.
“I had this little studio set-up in the kitchen in a house I was living in in the early 2000s, and Jules had a set-up at his house in Balmain,” Moyes says. Between part-time teaching and session muso gigs, they’d get together to record. “We were just trying to get our own thing happening -- whatever it was,” Moyes says.
The songs on The Presets’ demo didn’t sound like Prop. (The five-piece quietly disbanded following 2003’s remix album, Cook Cut Damage Destroy.) For one, they featured Hamilton‘s vocals front and centre. The Presets’ version of “dumb” music was campy, in-your-face and somehow both silly and deadly serious. On ‘Pretty Little Eyes’ and ‘Cookie’ (the latter co-written by Daniel Johns in a mini-break from Silverchair), Hamilton uses his voice as a theatrical instrument, going from a whisper to a growl, trying on roles outside himself.
“At the beginning, we wanted to be like Basement Jaxx or the Chemical Brothers,” Hamilton says. “We wanted to make tracks and have other people sing on them.” As it happened, Hamilton’s placeholder vocals stuck. “I never thought I’d be a singer in a band. It wasn’t something I was really prepared for.”
“I never thought I’d be a singer in a band. It wasn’t something I was really prepared for.”
Released on Modular in November 2004, The Girl And The Sea EP showcased a more refined Presets sound. From the hushed title track to the luxurious instrumental stomp of ‘Summer Of Love’, the duo cut the sleaze with some sunlight.
The songs from Blow Up and Girl And The Sea met in a no-fat live show. On cramped stages, Moyes sat tightly coiled at the drum-kit, while Hamilton vamped between the keyboard and Korg synthesiser. An iPod sent out two mono signals to the front of house: beats on the left, bass and synths on the right. “We got it really loud in the foldback monitors and hoped we played along in time,” Moyes recalls.
Hamilton had frontman moves -- draping the microphone cord over his shoulder as he worked the synth, slicing the air with his hands, dancing to the corners of the stage -- but limited experience singing live. “I look back at video recordings of early shows, and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if I was trying to be Ian Curtis or the singer from Suicide. At some point, I just decided to sing loud.”
Early on, Hamilton’s voice had an arch, not-quite-natural quality -- its affectedness was all part of the fun. “I sang in a cathedral choir when I was a little boy,” he says. “We’d sing all these psalms in a proper English accent. That, and listening to English bands, was the only training I had. Over the years, I got more confident to sing like how I sound.” (On last year’s collaborative EP with Golden Features, Raka, Hamilton’s voice is at its most relaxed and unadorned.)
Energised by the Girl and the Sea EP, The Presets went to work on a debut album. Beams arrived on Modular in September 2005, featuring a host of new songs alongside EP carryovers ‘Girl And The Sea’ and ‘Kitty In The Middle’. Modular was at the peak of its powers. The label released two star-making debut albums around Beams: Cut Copy’s Bright Like Neon Love (2004) and Wolfmother’s Wolfmother (2005). The Presets were in good company, but never entirely at home.
“We sort of felt like we were out on a limb in Sydney,” Moyes says. “Even within our label, the styles were very different. Wolfmother was blowing up, and Cut Copy was ahead of us. We loved the club scene in Sydney, but didn’t really feel we belonged there either -- not long before The Presets, we were going to jazz clubs. We thought if we played as many shows as possible, it’d create its own world.”
We loved the club scene in Sydney, but didn’t really feel we belonged there
On Beams, The Presets made a point to not be boring. By then, Hamilton and Moyes had seen enough electronic geniuses play blank-faced live shows behind a laptop. They wanted the opposite of cool and aloof -- starting with their album cover.
Modular collaborator Jonathan Zawada, the artist behind the rainbow skull, turned his mind to Beams. “We were lucky to have Jonathan in our corner,” Moyes says. “He’s interested in what makes an act eccentric.” Together, they decided to channel the visual style of Fleetwood Mac’s classic Rumours album. “We thought it’d be cool to do the crazy, hyped-up, electro Mad Max version of that cover,” Moyes says. “It got the cogs in Jonathan’s mind turning, and [that's how] we end up with our pants around our ankles.”
Fleetwood Mac's Rumors cover, which inspired the album art for Beams
© Fleetwood Mac and The Presets
Both men crack up at the memory of their photo shoot. On the final Beams cover image, The Presets (both in masks and, crucially, pants) look out from a tableau of random objects. “I kicked and screamed about that image because Kim has his shirt off,” Hamilton laughs. “I thought, god, who’s going to want to look at that?”
The Presets wrote most of Beams around band rehearsals for the Dissociatives’ 2004 tour. “We’d be in rehearsals for six hours, then go straight to Julian’s place and spend four more hours jamming,” Moyes says. As a result, Beams fizzes with ideas, often changing course from one track to the next. It’s more polished than the EPs, but much looser than what came later.
The album’s opener, ‘Steamworks’, perfectly set the hot and heavy tone. Named after a gay bathhouse in America’s Bay Area, ‘Steamworks’ is still one of the duo’s favourite creations. “The song is just ‘oo’s and ‘ah’s, but it has a strong character -- that’s hard to do,” Hamilton says. “The sound is a bit sweaty men, and it has always ripped live,” Moyes adds.
From a steamy start, Beams lines up stompers like ‘Are You The One?’, ‘Down Down Down’ and ‘Girl (You Chew My Mind Up)’. Built for closing shows, ‘I Go Hard, I Go Home’ is The Presets at its most purely propulsive. In between, there are bubbling curios like ‘Worms’, ‘Hill Stuck’ and ‘Black Background’. Album closer ‘Beams’ sounds like end credits music for a strange midnight movie -- or, as Moyes puts it, “a bit Kermit The Frog, a bit ‘Over The Rainbow’.”
Beams is particularly fascinating in contrast to its follow-up. While Beams swerves and surprises, 2008’s Apocalypso is all white-knuckled forward motion. “I think those little interludes [on Beams] are so cool,” Moyes says. “We deliberately steered clear of them when making Apocalypso, because we wanted it to be as vocal and up-for-it as possible.” Apocalypso was also a leap forward lyrically: “You got me thinking 'bout the kitty in the middle of it” can’t rival the rallying cry of ‘My People’. But the rough edges make Beams its own special trip.
“We weren’t particularly great,” Moyes says. “I mean, we were competent musically, but as producers we had a lower threshold than we do now. The level of your ability is your ceiling at any point in time.”
Now, The Presets were rolling. The duo sold out Sydney’s Metro Theatre for the first time in late 2005, then set their sights further afield. Outside of Australia, Beams found its people. In 2006, German electro innovator DJ Hell licensed Beams for Europe via his own International DeeJay Gigolo Records. His remix of ‘I Go Hard, I Go Home’ also brought Hamilton and Moyes into the orbit of acts like Digitalism and 2manydjs and label collectives Kitsuné and Ed Banger.
Amidst the whirlwind, The Presets lost their trusty on-stage iPod at a party in London and toured with Ladytron and Soulwax. The latter’s muscular live show was an eye-opener. “That Soulwax tour really put the fire in us,” Hamilton says. “In Australia, we didn’t see a lot that was really inspiring us.”
The press, meanwhile, wasn’t immediately sure how to read The Presets. Given the Modular connection, Cut Copy was an easy comparison -- despite Beams not really sounding like the well-mannered synth-pop on Bright Like Neon Love. Pitchfork gave the album a near-hysterical pan (rating: 3.7) that ended with the tut-tut, “Moyes and Hamilton both know better.” Other blogs went all-in on praise. Both reactions left the duo unruffled.
“Pitchfork didn’t particularly like us back then, and they probably don’t now either,” Hamilton shrugs. “I don’t remember us caring much. We were focused on the shows.”
“I remember Richard Kingsmill saying to our manager at the time that the Ladytron album from that year was better -- something bitchy like that,” Moyes adds. “It was never unanimous what the album was. A reviewer in the UK said it was the best thing since Depeche Mode’s Violator. We were scratching our heads, because we never really listened to Depeche Mode. If anyone came up to me really gagging about the album, I’d be more skeptical, like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”
“I remember Richard Kingsmill saying to our manager at the time that the Ladytron album from that year was better -- something bitchy like that”
The almost three years between Beams and Apocalypso were the busiest in The Presets’ career. “We were just young punks going super hard,” Hamilton says. “I don’t remember there being any kind of break.”
Between international tours and album sessions, Hamilton and Moyes were always together. So how did The Presets not implode? “We were so close all the time -- like literally a foot apart on two beds in a tiny hotel room, then next to each other in a splitter van, then next to each other on a plane, then next to each other onstage," Moyes says. "The only time we got to be alone was going to take a piss. It was really hard, but it worked, because we were like brothers who really loved each other.”
15 years on, The Presets remain proud of their debut. “I re-listened recently when we had to approve all the masters for its vinyl reissue,” Moyes says. “And it’s fucking awesome!” In some ways, Beams set the blueprint for The Presets’ most recent album, 2018’s Hi Viz, which shares its exuberance and friskiness (albeit with added polish).
“In the early days of Modular, there was always talk of, ‘Which producer do you want to work with?’,” Moyes recalls. “But we only wanted to do whatever weird thing we do, warts and all. For better or worse, we don’t really sound like anyone else.”
“That’s the best thing about Beams,” Hamilton agrees. “It sounds like The Presets.”
Jack Tregoning is a freelance writer for Billboard, the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs and Red Bull Music. He tweets at @JackTregoning.