tks: Who is this, what’s your operating number?
mr hayday: 00PAYDAY, Bravo Romeo Oscar.
tks: Great number to operate, especially mixing it up with the alphabet. Did this kind of disregard for the boundaries of polite society make you who you are today? Some background please, describe the 3 stages of Hayday: Baby, Master, Mr.
mr hayday: Baby: Small town, Keriatahi beach and my dog, Juno, Hubba Bubba, music circles with Mum and the neighbour’s kids.
Master: Lived on a yacht, Correspondence School, Dick Smith Electronics, scales on the Casio, small town again, Mk3 Cortina, Cool Edit.
Mr: Cool Edit Pro, finding a comfortable relationship with the musical input from the Master years.
I still answer the phone with a ‘Hello, James speaking.’
tks: Wow, what a gentleman. Ok, so you’ve just answered your phone with a polite greeting… but the phone keeps ringing, ringing and ringing! Do you:
a) put on your electronic’s hat and find the reason?
b) put on your musician’s pants and find a melody?
c) choose some kind of hat-pants hybrid and make electronic melodies?
d) blame yourself for not being polite enough?
mr hayday: Hah — well the manners are ingrained, as is a short-temper for technology that refuses to do its job. These days if that happened I would be less interested in the liberation of the telephone as how to best deal to it. Perhaps with a swift backhand. Probably put it in the storeroom with all the other broken things and attempt to throw it out for the next 5 years. That’s these days, mind you. Master Hayday would have pulled that sucker apart and tapped and twiddled, for sure. In fact I remember doing that with an old pulse-dial phone, you know, the standard issue green Telecom one with the bell ringer inside; your Nanna still has one. You could get a little shock off those things, something charged up inside when you dialed, a capacitor of some sort. I remember getting a few buddies to poke in an unassuming digit when I found that out. Suckers. Being a geek meant staying alive when you played at my house.
tks: I am in awe that you have any friends left. I remember when I first got a COMPUTER I hated using Photoshop… I wanted to write my own software so that I could have GRAPHICS, my way. I pretty quickly lost interest when I realised I was really bad at programming and didn’t really have any ideas that would be improved by doing things this way. What do you think makes fixing-it-yourself so shiny and appealing?
mr hayday: It’s usually a good excuse to obsess over something for a while. I know what you mean about wanting technology to do things your way. What’s funny about that is how a lot of producers of technology, hardware or software, try to open up _all_ the doors for their users but inevitably end up pre-setting their gadgetry anyway. A big part of the fun of making sounds for me is thinking up weird ways of using boring things. Protools. A dapple-gray workhorse. Undeniably boring. But there are lots of strange things you can do with the standard set of plugins, and a few quirky bugs here and there.
I think what’s attractive about fixing-it-yourself is that you’re reforming the -thing- a bit and making it more autonomous or something. Like this rusty bus-seat I bought a few years ago. I had to add a leg, sand it down, repaint it, polish the seat.. That thing was liberated when I was finished with it. Not like this damned telephone.. Can you put your end down, please?
tks: This phone is off the hook for now. I’ll take it down to the bottom of the paddock and put it out of its misery when the time comes, I promise.
I watched ‘They Live’ last night… has the great line ‘I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum… and I’m all out of bubblegum.’ I thought to myself, “that’s Mr. Hayday!” and punched the air (maybe that bit isn’t true but I really wish I had now). There’s such a heavy residue of ‘play’ in your EP but at the same time it all feels so wonderfully intentional and considered. You’ve got a great balance going on that manages to sidestep being either overtly cutesy or deathly serious – dead-end routes in music when utilised on their own, I reckon. When you’re listening to a track, either yours or others’, what gives you tingles down your sound bone?
mr hayday: Hmm, if it’s a big tingle then probably the melody. Nothing like a good tune. Thanks for the Ups!
tks: So, where do you feel you sit in the music scene here? The climate for NZ music has been dominated by the-style-of-which-we-do-not-speak-for-fear-of-black-deeds-occurring for so long, and I wonder if you’d ever identify as a ‘NZ musician’… is there any meaning in such an idea?
mr hayday: Yeah, I don’t know what that is really. I don’t really identify with what might be considered New Zealand music. Well, my preconceptions about what other people think that is, anyway.. Uhhh.. but I’m not sure that such a thing even exists. Too small here for much romance, everone knows someone’s cousin or sold the band a Honda or feels like “this music isn’t representative of my holistic, well-rounded and eclectic tastes”. I’m one of them probably, most people are. If anything, I feel like my music is pretty happy about not identifying with its influences or a scene. That’s where some of the play comes from I think – If you don’t own the Honda, you might as well take it down the paddock and put it in 2nd. Do some hacks, you know? That’s how I feel about the E.P. anyway. Things have changed a little bit now – I have a better idea of what’s mine and what’s not. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop making fun of my influences though. I mean.. I listened to drum and bass once… Admittedly, sometimes I wish I played something a bit more self-righteous. Like Rock and Roll, or Christian Rock at least. Yeah. But I dont think I can do righteous, so for now I will make goofy knee-graze chocolate made by a vanilla biscuit.
Hmm, scenes. From what I hear, I missed the halcyon days of electronic music in Auckland .. I hear whispers in the wind of “upstairs at beautiful music when it was on K Road”, I was too young though. The Audio Foundation brings interesting people to town. There’s a scene there. And they’re pretty friendly – they even let me have a go one night.
The Mint Chicks are a band that seem to have successfully ignored that whole thing. I’ve been surprised with the crowd whenever I’ve gone to one of their shows – It’s like, they know these people are listening to their music, but I can’t imagine they’re making it for them. I might be wrong. And I don’t mean to implicate anyone there. It’s not a bad thing, just a good example of scenes being sort of irrelevant.
Christ, I’m still typing. Did I answer the thing? Do I get the biscuit now?
tks: Yo, last q before we see you on Saturday… what is *your* ultimate reality?
mr hayday: Two Sh101’s .. one is controlling the other. um. Is this like Noels House Party?
ENDS
Mr Hayday plays at Mighty Mighty, May 16 with Diana Rozz, Gold Medal Famous and TIMEBALL. Just $5, support these people, people!
