Happy Axe

My musical background is classical. I was classically trained in violin from a young age. As I got into my teens I started becoming obsessed with Spanish composers, and composers of the late Romantic period such as Debussy and Ravel, whilst simultaneously starting to jam with bands, hang out with DJ’s and play with their turntables, and layer violin on their fruity loop compositions, and go to a lot of electronic music gigs.

I then embarked on a degree in violin performance, and my favourite form of procrastination was being in at least 3 bands at any given time. It gave me a taste for improvising, (something relatively foreign to classical music) the local music scene, the festival circuit, and the joys of touring. A lot of these groups though didn’t really allow me to really access that part of my composing and performing that stems from the classical world, something Happy Axe now does.

Happy Axe came about from a need to develop new ideas that worked in a kind of conversation between classical music and electronic music, two worlds that have throughout music history always had an interesting relationship.

One of my friends was jamming with me, and I was mostly playing violin, but one day he asked me if I’d ever played the saw, and did I have one lying around. I’d seen an amazing Newcastle band called Mojo Juju and the Snake Oil Merchants, and they had a great sawist, so I said I’d give it a try. I had a saw in the shed, and I tried to bow it with my violin bow, but nothing happened!

Next time I saw the guy from this Newcastle band, I asked him for a quick tutorial. He spent about 10 minutes showing me how the S-bend of the saw had to be, and at what angle to bow it. I then took a bow into Bunnings and tried bowing some of the saws whilst the teenage boy working looked on apathetically. I chose a saw with a nice response, and plenty of pitch range, and spent the next two weeks practising getting the pitch and vibrato right. I still to this day play that saw! $40 is the least I’d ever paid for an instrument.

It was awesome! The best part of the Tour was Norway. I had met a lovely Norwegian couple last year when I attended the New York City Musical saw festival, and I contacted them about heading to Europe. They drove me across the country and helped me set up gigs, which were so lovely. They have a duo called Bluebird’s Ghost so we had a bit of crossover and playing on each other’s songs. In some ways, it was surprisingly similar to playing in Canberra. Lovely small venues, with plenty of attentive audience members.

The main difference was, when you’re touring in Australia, I often come across really cranky sound engineers that talk down to me and are generally a bit unpleasant to deal with. Canberra venues like the Phoenix, Polo and Smiths excluded, their sound engineers are just the loveliest. But I had one sound engineer in Berlin who actually cycled home to her house to grab a guitar for Sam, as the other band hadn’t turned up, and we agreed that he could do a Burrows set in their place. She was so friendly and lovely and professional! So cool. And the venues had candles on every table, and people smoking in the dim light, something I haven’t seen for some time in Oz!

In terms of other musicians, I take inspiration from 90s trip hop groups like Portishead, and the more recent Goldfrapp, but also Bjork, Thom Yorke’s solo stuff, Patrick Watson, and a bit of Ravel and Debussy.

A lot of experimenting with weird sounds, and effects, and sometimes just recording a long improvisation, listening back, and picking out my favourite bits and structuring them into a composition. But some pieces just end up staying as an improvisation around a set of different effected sounds or processes. Occasionally, I actually produce the song first, as a finished recording, and then have to figure out how to perform it in retrospect. The process does vary a fair bit, depending on the piece. But a lot of improvising and recording informs the writing process.

Yes! That was so fun. It was a huge challenge actually, because often collaborating in the past with others, has meant me fitting a nice violin part into and already written song, which is fun, but comes quite naturally to me these days having done it a lot. It was surprisingly hard to step away from this comfort zone, into actually composing from scratch with another person. A long process, that required a lot of musical communication, with a person who I’d only met once before. I think I learned about collaborative composing in a different way to before.

The difficulty at first was just stepping on stage all by myself! I’m used to having a bunch of friends on stage with me, which adds a surprising amount of confidence I’d never realised until it was taken away. You also have to believe in your project by yourself. In a band, it’s easy, there’s multiple people saying to each other: ‘Yes! This is good, this is worthwhile, and now we’re playing it to people because we all agree they should wanna hear it!’ But when you’re by yourself, writing it all yourself – it sounds cliché, but believing in what you’re doing becomes really important.