The world's greatest print and online music magazine. Independent since 1982

In Writing
Subscribe

Rhinestone cowboys: HTRK interviewed

October 2021

The Australian duo find melody, structure and storytelling through folk and country. By Steph Kretowicz

Australian band HTRK have released Rhinestones, their sixth studio album in 18 years on N&J Blueberries. The detour to starting their own label – named after their initials and inspired by a punnet of berries – marks a striking though appropriate shift in style and approach. Rhinestones is a subtle ode to Nigel Yang and Jonnine Standish’s recent country and western influences. It’s a nod to the notion of a bedazzled cowboy made famous by the likes of Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton, and it's the closest the two have come to writing fully-fledged, heartfelt ballads.

Standish and Yang are known for their brooding post-industrial noise, along with affiliations with late-new wave and experimental artists Rowland S Howard and Mika Vainio. Uncannily, before and during lockdown in Greater Melbourne, independent of one another both Standish and Yang turned towards singer-songwriter Bridget St John and guitarist Robbie Basho for inspiration. The outcome of that synchronicity is a selection of “perfect, short and sweet country songs” suffused with the inimitable HTRK character, and the geographic and aesthetic distance of two artists embedded in the electronic music scenes. They spoke with Steph Kretowicz.

Steph Kretowicz: Has the direction of HTRK shifted at all between recording before the first lockdown and after, or was it a case of arrested development?

Jonnine Standish: I think how it had differed in that with those two songs – “Reverse Déjà Vu” and “Real Headfuck” – Nigel was leaning more to acoustic guitar. We were interested more in songcraft. Personally, I was really interested in songs that kill you, like this Josh T Pearson song that I’d been playing today. That was one thing that I was personally interested in, which you get a lot from some country and folk songs.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “kill you”?

Standish: It's hard to elaborate because it’s a feeling. It’s like a humorous sadness. In the songs that kill me, there’s always some humour, and some wit mixed with an authentic feeling that the musician or singer has experienced something pretty heavy, and I believe it. I’ve felt it too and I love that feeling. That's what mindset I was in with “Reverse Déjà Vu” and “Real Headfuck”. It wasn't arrested development because we take years to write albums so having some thought and space always does us really good. For this album we had the right amount of time to create what we needed with space in between. I think it worked out well.

Nigel Yang: That time when we couldn't see each other, for me, was useful in practicing guitar. I hadn't played it before properly, so I was kind of teaching myself from scratch. Every day during lockdown, practicing and listening in a crash course in singer-songwriter music, which I'd never been interested in before. It’s quite the opposite to arrested development. It was kind of an accelerated process, even though we couldn't see each other.

Was there anyone else that you were listening to that inspired the shift to country?

Yang: I didn't really delve very deep. I was listening to Neil Young On The Beach, and then exploring all of his influences, Bert Jansch, also Jonn introduced me to Bridget St John and then Robbie Basho. Then learning John Fahey on guitar. American Primitivism and some English folk revival. I think we were both keeping from each other that we were getting into this kind of stuff. It was just a natural urge and then we realised that we were both into this stuff and it felt good to be kind of in sync with our current tastes.

It’s interesting that you were both listening to the same thing at the same time.

Yang: We just turned away from electronic music, I think. It feels like our community is the electronic music scene but it was starting to sound – to me and I think Jonn – very bland and soulless. We wanted to move away from anything that was to the grid, or that had a mechanical feeling because it just wasn't interesting to us any more. It could have something to do with lockdown, but it might not.

Standish: I think also in 2020, I just had a need to pick up any instrument that was in the studio and teach myself, anything physical. There's something so physical about acoustic guitar and voice. What we loved about it was that you could set up at the Tote front bar, you can set up on the street. That's what I love about the voice; you can just get on a plane and turn up, you've got your instrument with you. I think the physicality of these two instruments, voice and guitar together, picking up anything from around the room, that's what I'm interested in at the moment. Finger clicks and everything tactile. Room ambience.

Yang: It's something to do with trying to get rid of the crutches that we have accumulated over the years; things we would rely on. Even when we're rehearsing, it's hard to not use a microphone. It was a real shift in our thinking to get away from amplified sound, effects and electricity.

Standish: Nigel was playing acoustic and I was still singing on a microphone. I think Nigel felt a bit weird and he asked me to drop it. You’ve got to really lose your inhibitions to sing without a microphone, but it makes you concentrate on melody a lot more, which is something that I wanted to really push with Nigel on this album. I wasn't expecting that we would be so focused on songcraft and song structure. When we started off, we really wanted the melody to kind of flip in and out, and be a lot looser, but something else took over and we became fixated on making these perfect, short and sweet country songs.

When you were talking about picking up different instruments, it sounds like there are certain environments that support a particular approach to music. Loneliness, distance. It's something that is talked about a lot when moving through different cities and the kinds of music that emerge there. For small places with lots of background noise, you have a sound system. Somewhere that’s quiet, you don't even need a microphone.

Yang: That's true. Perhaps in our personal lives too. We weren’t clubbing and that seemed like a world away.

Standish: And socialising. When you’re socialising, you want to hear big beats and big synths, and for everything to have sexual connotations.

Yang: I don’t want to hear ‘big synths’ [laughs].

It also has to be loud enough for you to able to have a conversation without interrupting. You can't really talk at the same time as listening to a quiet folk music performance.

Standish: It's not music to talk over, even though it's subtle music. It's not music that you put on the background and work to, so much. Just talking about place, the studio that we've got here at my house, it feels quite haunted in a way. It’s a big, unfinished A-Frame country home, with a lot of books everywhere and animals running around. It kind of reminds me of late 70s, early 80s horror films. Especially in a song like “Valentina”, it has definitely manifested some horror concepts for me, and Nigel's guitar in that particular song sounds almost like a Victorian music box.

When you said that you were both listening to the same kind of music and moving in a similar direction, both unaware that the other was doing the same, would you say it has something to do with being through so much together for so long?

Standish: We feed each other our influences, not just subconsciously. Our influences definitely bleed a little bit, and we might not realise it. I think that I've probably been pushing a lot of singer-songwriter music more than I realise on to Nigel. With our NTS show, Nigel is skewing heavily towards music that is almost like 33 minutes of intense silence; it’s such deep listening, minimalist music. Whereas I’d throw in Dory Previn singing about wallpapering her bathroom in flowers and being socially awkward because a gentleman had come back to her house for the first time in five years. Our tastes aren't always completely aligned but they bleed into each other and we take them both on. Then I find myself listening to minimal gongs for 24 hours, and Nigel's listening to Neil Young [laughs].

Yang: The NTS show is actually a big part of our tastes melding because previous to that we wouldn't share much music with each other. That's been something kind of peculiar to our relationship, that we don't. I can imagine a lot of band members – particularly if there’s just two – to be sharing a lot of music, or listening together to stuff a lot, but we don't. It was a pretty big shift in how we're able to share what we were listening to with each other and find commonality, despite our differences.

It's symbolic of the relationship as a whole, I think, because we are so different. The music that we put together in this NTS show, kind of bridges interests in minimal production and composition, as well as our experiences in electronic music and raves and stuff like that, while also trying to draw a line between that stuff and current interests of song writing, and folk and country. That is interesting to me, to try to draw those lines between genres that normally wouldn't ever meet.

Was there ever a time where you are more aligned?

Yang: Actually, no. I think we've always had quite distinct musical tastes. Ever since the beginning, I remember being at a party or whatever and if Jonn would put something on I’d be like, ‘what, what is this!?’. Shock. Surprise. And it still happens, where I have to get my head around things and that's a cool thing. To still stay surprised by your collaborator’s musical tastes, it's pretty good.

What about the Rhinestones cover art. I'm assuming that’s Jonn’s influence.

Standish: It’s a joint thing, for sure. It's like Nigel is my boss, actually. I'm constantly throwing things in front of Nigel for his approval, which is actually a really enjoyable process. I said, ‘I'm really into rhinestone transfers; really religious or ‘soccer mum’ rhinestone transfers’. I think I was trying to shock him but he loved them, and I do too.

When we're both feeling something as heavily as each other, I’ll investigate it a little further so I spent six months collecting every single rhinestone transfer from Texas that you that you can imagine. “Not today, Satan”, and “Soccer moms in the house”, and “Recharge” with a Bible that's got a USB port, all made out of rhinestones. We tried to keep our own design classic. We're always thinking, ‘In 10 years-time, how will we feel about this record cover?’ The blue rose has been a motif that has been reappearing for a couple of years and it just found itself on to the cover of our album. It sits there quite nicely.

Yang: The reason why I liked it as well is because it was multilayered. I felt like our interest in all of this music was, not fake, but the opposite of how a lot of artists in these genres of folk and country are. They've grown up with it since they were children, it kind of gets passed down from their families; it’s immersed in that culture and it's an authentic expression. Us kind of delving into that world felt like a real outsider move and rhinestones encapsulated that idea because they’re just cheap plastic imitations of the real thing. I like referring to how we were approaching the music but also the songs themselves, as not being particularly precious or ‘real’ from the outside but in the in the working on them for so long becoming something that is precious to us.

I just got caught on you talking about but having differing tastes because you’ve worked with some electronic music icons. I assumed you would have converged at least around there.

Standish: We both love a lot of the same things strongly. It’s just that, if you think about a spectrum of taste, and Nigel's is quite condensed into one section, mine will stretch out into badness. It’s the same with rom-coms and things like that. I have a tolerance for pop culture that would make Nigel want to jump off the balcony.

HTRK’s Rhinestones is released by N&J Blueberries. Subscribers can read Claire Biddles’s review of the album in The Wire 452 via our online archive.

Leave a comment

Pseudonyms welcome.

Used to link to you.