Samari and Jem the Misfit return to Wellington with Kill Me DJ for the Gun Metal tour, this Saturday at Good Luck.

tks: Ok, so you both left for a sunnier place a couple of years ago. What’s Melbourne been like for extending what you’d already been doing in Wellington with Electroluxxe?

sam: For me it has been a chance to explore a range of artistic opportunities. I can now play a huge range of musical styles, there is a much larger music scene in Melbourne which allows for a more diverse range of venues and gigs.

jemma: The larger music and visual scene in Melbourne has been a great way to extend my VJing. There are a lot more venues set up with the capability to have VJs perform and a much bigger community of VJs to work with and bounce ideas off.

tks: Did you find you slipped into the Melbourne scene easily, or has it been hard work?

j & s: It has been surprising how quickly we have managed to get into the scene here. Melbourne has a really competitive club scene and we were lucky to land the monthly night at Loop to host Electroluxxe within the first few months that we were here. We have found that people are really pro-active and happy to talk about future opportunities but it is hard to get in on established residencies.

tks: I wish Wellington had something like Loop, a place that seems to put equal emphasis on audio and visual elements (as a VJ I’m very sensitive to the lack of resources in venues here for video performance!). Are you still regularly playing there?

j & s: Yes, we are running Electroluxxe as a monthly night at Loop which is taking off.

j: I have another monthly residency for the Pitch (B):tch night and often play for the BeatBox, My Name is Lars and JailBreak nights which means I play at Loop at least 3 times per month.

s: We have also been developing our collaborative work as ‘Duotone’ which is a more ambient and conceptual style of performance. We were included in the electundra audio visual festival at Loop in November last year and have just been invited back for the festival again this year, which we are really looking forward to.

tks: How do you develop your DJ/VJ sets? Close collaboration or work independently?

j: It depends on whether we are playing together as an act or we are playing gigs with other people. When we are working on sets together it is a close collaboration where we both have influence on the audio and visual. Currently we are working towards having more integration between the sound and the visuals and we have started to work with feeding visual clips with audio from my VJ software into the mix, something you will be able to see on the tour.

s: I get inspired from a lot of different places, movies inspire me with aesthetics, stand up comedy inspires me with narrative in my DJ sets and some times tunes just scream for a visual.

tks: How did you hook up with ex-Supergroove drummer Kill Me DJ?

s: Originally he played for one of the wellington parties, I loved his set, really fast paced and varied, after that gig we did a couple of other gigs and we always talked about doing a tour together… hence the Gun Metal tour.

tks: What’re the Gun Metal nights about, what’re people going to hear/see?

s: The Gun Metal tour came from my original Gun Metal mix CD – I started noticing this new sound coming out of the artists i was playing, it takes from some of the original acid techno but with more of a futuristic feel. I realised it had this sort of liquid metallic sound to it, fast paced and driving – we coined the term Gun Metal for the sound. A lot of the visuals reflect the same ethos, fast paced, driving and kind of future militant. For me this reflects the state of politics the western world is in now – a kind of military capitalism.

Which basically means on the night we’ll be smashing out fast cut mixes and tunes from the likes of Oizo, Boys Noize, Proxy and Don Rimini.

j: With the visuals there will be a lot of dark themes – war, robots and the living dead. The visuals use lots of red and harsh black and white as well as gritty textures and crisp vector patterns. Watch out for the ED209 and a cameo appearance from the Terminator. This is going to be a full on visual experience.

tks: Any thoughts on what the Wellington club scene could be doing better?

j & s: Well the first thing that comes to mind is to encourage new ideas and diversity within the scene, as Wellington is a small city it makes it hard for new artists to come in underneath more established ones and harder for new genres to take shape. It would be great to see clubs putting in visual setups as this is something we have found really adds to a club night. Day clubs or all night all day parties would be a great addition to the Wellington scene ha ha.

Gun Metal Tour
Kill Me DJ, Samari, Jem the Misfit
Saturday 19 September
Good Luck