Three out of four readers of this interview must have disco-moshed to the music the Age of Consent band members put out not too many years ago. They are two out of four men who wrote you the hymns about lovers of others, three-dimensional sex shows and Chinese martial arts, that needled your inner ADHD bambino. Why yes, we’re talking Shitdisco here! Singer and multi-instrumentalist Joe Reeves gives us a brief introduction to his and drummer Darren Cullen’s new project. One that sounds almost contrastive to the sound you were accustomed to. You can listen to three of their demos here; The Beach, Heartbreak and Truth. After one listen yourself you’ll find that the music is much more serene and emotional than their previous work, and tilt more to early new wave and post-punk music than the colossal concentration of dance-punk bands they used to be compared to since forever. As there actually is no thing such as genres, it doesn’t even matter – Reeves explains where this afresh sound comes from and tells us about what they have in store for us, their joint efforts with Vitalic and Yuksek, and Purple Rogers Nelson. Join sides with the Age of Consenters on Twitter and Facebook!
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Sup? I’m very well, thanks! Darren too, is very well. We are both growing beards. We are delighted with the start of our new band, things are going well. We’ve recently been in the studio, rehearsing our live set. We’re also writing more new songs which is always fun.
Joe on his new band.. Our new band is called ‘Age of Consent’ and we make dark and brooding midnight pop music. So far, I think it’s pretty different to our previous band Shitdisco, although I guess it’s up to the audience. In Shitdisco, primarily, we used to write our songs by testing them live but with Age of Consent it’s much more of a studio-based project so we can be really really expressive and emotional which helps resonate with the listener. Now, we have to figure out how to translate that to the stage. In Age of Consent we write songs about universal emotions of escape and freedom, death and reinvention. Basically about things that have happened in our own lives. When I’m writing a song, I like the tension that comes from playing with the dynamics of a song. For example, in the verses I like to reference things I am interested in, like the Situationists’ International (in “the Beach”) and then expand the focus to bring in bigger, more emotional subjects for the chorus, like love, loss and escape.
Joe on the new band name.. Our band name was a mistake. We thought it meant something completely different, like the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment. We thought it suited the music, plus it’s the name of a Bronski Beat album by Vince Clarke which has some amazing moments on it. Then we realised it was the name for the consensual age when you’re allowed to have sex.
Joe on his approach to Age of Consent as opposed to older projects.. We definitely have another approach to writing and recording our songs as opposed to our older projects. With the lyrics for Age of Consent I am trying to tap into these fundamental themes and the human emotions you go through every day. With our previous band, the focus was very much on hedonism and escape but with a lesser interest in more complex emotions, like sorrow and sadness. These are the things that people feel every day. We have also written songs with other people, like Yuksek and Vitalic. With Yuksek, we wrote and sang the vocals for the track This Is Not Today but we have actually never met. He did one of our favourite remixes of OK from the Shitdisco album, Kingdom of Fear. Then he asked us if we would like to collaborate on his album. He’s a really easy guy to work with. It’s the same for Vitalic, although our vocals weren’t used. We were really late in sending him our takes, so it didn’t make his album. It was really weird, one day I was walking down Oxford Street in London and my phone rang. There was no number so I just answered it and there was a voice saying “Allo? Allo? This is Pascal!”. I had no idea it was Vitalic! Amazing! We wrote some tracks for an all girl Japanese pop group called 80Pan too, each time trying to express different emotions.
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Joe on a third Age of Consenter.. If we got to pick any artist to join the band it would be Prince, but I’m pretty sure he would just fucking take over and it would all go purple.
Joe on his sources of inspiration.. Musically, we’re into people like; Berlin-era David Bowie, Vince Clarke, Giorgio Moroder, Brian Eno, Heaven 17, TV on The Radio, The Knife, Washed Out, Yeasayer, The XX but it’s not just music that influences us. We draw as much from cinema and literature as we do from our favourite songs. Terminator 2 (honestly) is a really succinct, clever and slick human drama but with so much emotion. It’s not just a pure action film, it’s a story about a boy forming an emotional bond with a robot acting as a surrogate for someone missing, like a parent. It’s pretty dark, but positive at the same time. It’s about everything! Similarly, Assault On Precinct 13 is a 1970’s version of the traditional Western siege movie, where there’s violence and death. You don’t really know why, though. The music in both films is amazingly evocative and of it’s time. As you can probably tell, we’re also both into science fiction, more specifically retro-futurism; looking back at old views of what the future might look like when it arrives and when they get it wrong. You know, like hover cars or going on holiday to Mars.
Joe on his all-time favorite records.. My favourite album changes all the time. I love Sign of The Times by Prince, Upstairs at Erics by Yazoo, Lust For Life by Iggy Pop. Oh yeah, and the ‘Lost Boys’ Soundtrack- it’s amazing! I’m not really a fan of that ‘bread and butter’ indie guitar music. There’s a few bands who are really great at it, then there’s loads of bands who do the exactly same thing and it just doesn’t speak to me at all. The EP of covers we were planning on, haven’t done that yet – we’ve been listing songs for ages that we want to cover, there’s so many. The hardest part is deciding. If any readers have suggestions, please let us know! The weirder the better.
Joe on his sources of inspiration.. Musically, we’re into people like; Berlin-era David Bowie, Vince Clarke, Giorgio Moroder, Brian Eno, Heaven 17, TV on The Radio, The Knife, Washed Out, Yeasayer, The XX but it’s not just music that influences us. We draw as much from cinema and literature as we do from our favourite songs. Terminator 2 (honestly) is a really succinct, clever and slick human drama but with so much emotion. It’s not just a pure action film, it’s a story about a boy forming an emotional bond with a robot acting as a surrogate for someone missing, like a parent. It’s pretty dark, but positive at the same time. It’s about everything! Similarly, Assault On Precinct 13 is a 1970’s version of the traditional Western siege movie, where there’s violence and death. You don’t really know why, though. The music in both films is amazingly evocative and of it’s time. As you can probably tell, we’re also both into science fiction, more specifically retro-futurism; looking back at old views of what the future might look like when it arrives and when they get it wrong. You know, like hover cars or going on holiday to Mars.
Joe on his all-time favorite records.. My favourite album changes all the time. I love Sign of The Times by Prince, Upstairs at Erics by Yazoo, Lust For Life by Iggy Pop. Oh yeah, and the ‘Lost Boys’ Soundtrack- it’s amazing! I’m not really a fan of that ‘bread and butter’ indie guitar music. There’s a few bands who are really great at it, then there’s loads of bands who do the exactly same thing and it just doesn’t speak to me at all. The EP of covers we were planning on, haven’t done that yet – we’ve been listing songs for ages that we want to cover, there’s so many. The hardest part is deciding. If any readers have suggestions, please let us know! The weirder the better.
Joe on the limits of the band.. Where we would never go as a band, I suppose that all would depend on context. The type of music we make is informed by what happens in our lives, so the style/genre of music we make and are interested in comes from what resonates with us and our life experiences. We don’t make guitar rock songs, because we have ideas that sound better when they’re articulated by synthesizers and heavily effected guitars. But we might make guitar rock music, just if the context is right! Never say never!
Joe on Age of Consent’s future plans.. In the short-term future, Age of Consent will be doing another vocal collaboration, this time with Beens, an up and coming German electro group who have just done a party banger of a remix for us. A more loger-term goal is that Age of Consent will be the first band to download our entire consciousness onto memory sticks and let people remix it. •
