Richard Pike from PVT talks about the importance of process, brotherly sonic telepathy and those damn experimental hard-core nerd guys…

Before we start, I don’t want to go into it but, Pivot or PVT? Now you’ve changed the name, how do you say it?

PVT. Well officially its PVT, I’ll just say that.

When you’re around having band meetings, do you refer to things still as Pivot, is it a bit of a hard habit to break after all these years?
Yeah it is. I think now, we kind of still are Pivot, you know.
But legally we can’t go any further. Is that right?
Yeah, lets not go any further otherwise my people will get a call from someone else’s people, and…
Somebody told me that in the early days PVT was originally an improvised jazz band. How true is that?
Well we’re not a jazz band, but I think the way the band formed was more of just like an improvised thing but we weren’t playing jazz. It was kind of, I guess it was more of a jam sort of thing, you know? I mean a few of us came from sort of improvising backgrounds and had studied jazz and things like that but stylistically it didn’t really have any to do with jazz, it was more of just taking a new idea of improving as a group, using rock sounds and electronics and samples.

So you didn’t think a jazz background helped at all in creating the sound of PVT today?
Oh, no… for me jazz is a process you know, its not so much style and I think that’s something that, kind of really splits that music up into a couple of different camps, so for me learning to play jazz and studying that which I did outside of the school I went to and played it for a lot of years. For me it was about the process of the music and the language of improvising communicating with other musicians and with hopefully with people. So definitely having the language of improvising with people in the band on that level has informed what we have done over the years. We really don’t think about it so much any more, I mean we have moved a long way away from that in the last 5 years.

But aside from jazz, forgetting jazz how do you see what you are doing now, the music you are making?
I don’t know, I mean. I don’t think we think of it in terms of it being, qualifying and ticking any boxes. I think too much music is made like that now. I think the idea of genres has really disappeared lightly because of the Internet in the last 5 years because genres don’t mean a shit any more. It’s a bit of a free for all and as a result there’s a lot of rubbish that has no real intent. I think what we have always strived to do it is to create something that is our own thing, you know, that’s what motivates us. We don’t necessarily want to be just fulfilling a market. I think we just strive to do something that’s genuine and reflects our backgrounds and our personalities. We’ve have had all sorts of labels, to be honest none of them really mean anything to us. I think the best music comes from that place as well, it always has and people make music because its what drives them and gets them out of bed in the morning. We didn’t start this band for any other purpose than that.

You mentioned before about the improvising and the connection you have within the band, I’m always curious when there’s brothers or siblings within a band, do you think that you and your brother Richard share that sort of special connection?
Oh yes, for sure. We’ve being playing together since we could. Like since we got instruments we started and our instinct was just like to write music together and play so we’ve been doing that since we were kids – probably about 9 or 10 years old. And of course you have a shared environment and family and history but also you have, influences that come from a similar place because you know you grew up with listening to similar things and sharing music with each other, so at times there is a kind of unspoken understanding that we have in some ways that you kind of get. Your point of view doesn’t need to be explained all the time. You can rely more on instinct that there is a sort of telepathy there. I guess on top of that you get the brothers stuff, which, you know we get along very well. We have, you know, the occasional dislike, random brother fight.

‘Oh Sound Track My Heart’ was such a huge debut. How did you feel before going into Church with no Magic?
Wow, I’m trying to remember, we are in sort of a weird place at the moment because we are starting to work on a new record…
I think because the circumstances with the band had changed a lot, there was a real feeling of freedom about what we could do. The original line up was kind of dissolved by that stage; it was just Richard and I. It was really exciting and we had just started working with Dave, it was really exciting actually. Lets just do what we have always wanted to do and not think about it too much. Just as when ‘Magic’ was kind of different because we played the 3 of us together for a couple of years and as a collective our idea about what the band should sound like had changed and had developed over playing so many shows, we had done so much touring during that period. I think our ambition was to really throw caution to the wind a lot more, and try to stretch outside of ourselves a lot more.

Like with the vocals?
Yeah not only just with the vocals. The vocals were something that kind of had always been there in the arsenal. We just never arrived at a point where it felt like the right time to do it. So, I mean that was an obvious point that had a big shift that added a whole different dimension to the process. The way we made the record was very different and musically it was a lot looser and if anything, it’s our most experimental record. I don’t like using that term a lot, you know, we seem to get pigeon holed at being an experimental band. Then we get the experimental guys – the experimental hard core nerd kind of guys, that give us a hard time because we go round calling ourselves experimental. But I mean I think our experimentation is really much more about the process, how we try and make music. It is kind of bizarre, we sort of come from all sorts of angles and we piece it together.

Well, maybe you can run through a little bit of the process because it took you 6 years before you put out the first release, and also with ‘Magic’, is it going to be a while before the next release? You seem like you are perfectionists.
Well that’s something we are tying to get better at not being. I feel like our only ambition, and it was much the case with the last record, even then, its all baby steps, we feel like we are in this continual process of trying to unlearn everything we have learnt and just let go and let things happen. I think Church with no Magic was great like that. Maybe a lot of people might not hear the finer details but I mean there is a lot of really rough shit in there, like, kind of like a lot of live takes where we’re just ‘like cool, just leave it’ and we move on with the thing. The previous couple of records we were a lot more anal about the stuff, spent a lot more time. What’s become more important to us is just to tap through moments and all of the things that are the intangible qualities with music, basically, emotion.

Yeah, well I was reading up on part of the process of how you made it and I noticed you recorded it in a week or two and then spent a lot of time on post-production of it.
Yeah, well we did a couple of big sessions where we would leave the studio with literally nothing. We didn’t even really discuss what we wanted to do we just went in and we played for a few days and come out with just hours of music and then while we were on tour throughout the year we just spend some time, when we had time off editing through it and finding the bits that we thought were promising and then some of them we built upon that audio or some of the things we went and sort of rearranged or rehearsed and then re-recorded. Some we just left as it was and literally just replaced some melodic ideas that Richard had hummed into a microphone replaced that with the vocal tape, you know. So there are kind of bits of everything on the record. We had a lot of material left over, as well, that didn’t get released, we just kind of go in all sorts of weird directions, you know. We may at one stage dump that out there somewhere on the internet, you know, because there’s some weird things… obviously when you make a record you tend to group together the stuff landing in a similar area you know.

For a band that doesn’t seem to care much about the label and trying to fit inside a box to be marketed, you are incredibly hard working.
Yeah. Well I guess we’re serious. We are serious about what we do, we all try and do this for a living so its kind of like we’ve always been hard working I think, we just want to put it out there.
I think you have to be, as well, it’s a struggle, especially if you are trying to do things on an international level.

Yeah. Well I mean you spent 6 years before you put out that first release.
That was a weird time. We weren’t actually that active in the period leading up to the very first record, and we were doing all sorts of things in that period. I mean I feel like the life span of the band – we sort of started playing together in 99 or 2000, I think we only started really doing things in 2005, so when that fist record came out and after that things started to happen quickly. I guess that’s the case of finding the right people or the right combination of people and having a unified idea of what you wanted to do.

You are playing at the Beach Road Hotel on the 2nd February and you are doing a run of dates at the Laneway Festival. What can the audience expect from you there?
I think we’ve improved a lot. I mean we have been playing the record a lot, so I guess the songs tend to change a little bit. I think people who may have seen us live when we launched the record back in August may get something slightly different. I’m kind of secretly hoping we may have some new songs to play, but that kind of depends on how much time we have in the next few weeks, to put some stuff together, we are sort of working on new material, so you know, I think the last time we played Laneway, we ran a couple of new songs.

Have you made that end goal for the next release? Can we get some sort of a date on that
Oh yeah. Well we wanted to come out – we’re sort of aiming for February next year.

Published on AU Review website – 27th Jan, 2011

Broadcast on The Band Next Door on 2ser 107.3 on February 23, 2011