Since releasing their second album three years ago, SubAudible Hum seemed to have stepped back from view. However, like their name would suggest, the Melbourne band were not embracing a period of complete reticence, but were quietly brewing and bubbling away somewhere, churning out the hum of their stunning new album which, you will be happy to hear, is the very opposite of sub-audible.
yourGigs (yG): Your last album, In Time For Spring, On Came the Snow, was really brilliant. It would seem to me very difficult to follow up.
Daniel Griffith (DG): I know what you mean. They always talk about "the difficult second album" but it kinda felt like this was the difficult second album. It wasn't easy, but we just focused on exactly what it was we wanted to do. The last album was ages ago. People will compare them, but you can't really. Everything's different globally, politically, creatively.
yG: What have you been doing all this time?
DG: We toured for a bit and had some line-up changes. You know when you get new members in the band you feel like you can't really bombard them with too much so we spent a lot of time learning back catalogue stuff. We have been making this album for a while, since May last year. It was actually finished quite a while a go. It took us a long time to release it.
yG: How was the recording process?
DG: Recording is a lot of work but it's good work, it's creative. Especially in Australia though, it's hard to respect yourself and your art when the wider community does kind of view it as "well it's fun, that's not work, it's fun". Like what you're doing is a hobby, just because it's fun and fulfilling and uplifting. There's a large percentage of the working population who see it as - whether it's through jealousy or misunderstanding or just a different work ethic - they see it as not really work.
yG: For me your music has a very cinematic, theatrical feel to it. Are there any movies in particular that inspire your music?
DG: We definitely make very visual music and there are specific movies that inspire me but of course I can't think of any right now. I can't really connect with a song unless there's a certain imagery - a landscape - going through my head. I guess with the last album I was really affected by Syriana in a conceptual way. Cinema has a lot to do with where ideas come from because it is an audio-visual experience and because we relate to mimicking real life, in a hyper-sensory kind of way.
yG: Well I guess even the title of this record, Tall Stories, is quite cinematic in that it denotes story-telling and narratives, as in film.
DG: Yeah. It started off as a throwaway title but it relates to being fed lies and untruths. It's a cynical look at tall stories but it's also a collective idea that each song has its own political aspects and concepts and its own thoughts, and a lot of them are quite exaggerated, particularly for the kind of life I live, which is quite comfortable really.
yG: I read a review of your album that really celebrates your drummer Joel Griffith and even goes so far as to name him the album's most important player...
DG: [Laughing]. Yeah it's almost sexual.
yG: ... To what extent would you say each band member contributes to the songwriting process?
DG: I write the songs and then everyone attaches to the song like a tick and does their part. This time round the process was a lot more collective than ever before. I have a suspicion that the person who wrote that review is probably a drummer themselves.
yG: What's next on the SubAudible Hum schedule?
DG: I'm not sure just yet. We want to start doing a really cool audio-visual show where the vision is as much a part of the show as the music. We would play along to vision, some of it improvised and some of it stuff we've done before. There could also be some exciting supports coming up but that's not 100 percent confirmed yet ... So we're just gonna do these album launch shows and take it as it comes.
Check out the gig guide for details on SubAudible Hum's album launches.
Aimee-Lee Curran
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