Ezekiel RodofiliAdam Cooper is a musician whose work in music involves bands such as Hardware, Lake and Solaris. He also was part of Blacklevel Embassy. In celebrating Blacklevel’s last album turning fourteen, I was afforded the opportunity to talk with Adam about New Veteran.
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Ez: Well, I guess we should kick it off.
Adam: Well I’m interested in yourself. Where’s the interest?
Ez: I used to listen to FBi way back, which is how I discovered SPOD. I first heard you guys when FBi was playing Eternal Championz. Later on I went and saw Shellac, and I walked in when you guys were in the midst of playing “Tony”. I got more into the set as it went, and at some point after the gig I saw you released an album. Saw the video clip for “Old Revolt”, was like “Okay I’m buying the album”. I then next saw you guys at Black Wire Records, then supporting The Mark of Cain the night after.
Adam: I remember that show!
Ez: And the album stuck with me quite a bit.
Adam: Really? This is like, fourteen years ago *laughs*
Ez: I got hold of the other releases and the work has stuck with me, and I really dig New Veteran. It’s a very interesting album, I think.
From speaking to Brett, my understanding is that you met when you were very young. He was in one of his bands and in Sydney, you were in one of your bands. Was it Hardware?
Adam: Yes.
Ez: And then you guys became friends from there. And eventually you moved to Melbourne around the turn of the century, and you also started a band, Solaris.
Adam: When I moved down, one of my first experiences was driving down to Geelong to meet up with the guys who would become Solaris. Matt McGrath, who is the drummer for Solaris, had sent a cassette tape to another guy I was playing in a band with. Just some stuff he was doing. And so I thought “Oh this guy’s really interesting”. It was like late 90s electronic music, and I really dug it and thought I’d go down and hang out with this guy, and we started a band from there.
Ez: So from your perspective then, how did Blacklevel form?
Adam: Obviously the connection was with Brett, and I think originally he… you know the whole Little General trajectory, yeah?
Ez: Sort of.
Adam: When I moved down, potentially I would either be another addition to that band, or maybe something new could come out of that. I remember having at least one jam with the band at Dave Kneale’s house at the time, which was great, but what I think was interesting about it is it definitely looked like it was Brett, Dave and I sort of playing on this side of the room and the rest of the band on the other side of the room. It seemed clear there was some sort of connectivity between us three, so I think it was something we just followed up from there.
There were wacky ideas to create a five-piece and have two drummers and two bass players, but ultimately it landed on the three-piece. It seemed to make sense that the three of us connected, and it went from there.
Ez: So your first release was Fear Like Young. You then had the split EP, then Baroc, which is different to what Blacklevel became later. There are those elements of noise; there’s more quiet in there, too. Some songs hinted at what ASP would be, as well as parts of New Veteran. Were you still feeling your way?
Adam: Fundamentally, you have three separate albums with three separate drummers. The constant is Brett and myself, and I think we have a very particular way of playing, writing, connecting musically. Then you’ve got the variance of Dave Kneale on Baroc, Dan Mackay on ASP, and then Joel Ellis on New Veteran, and it’s the three of them that really make each of those albums what they are.
I don’t know that Brett and I change all that much throughout *laughs*, but I think that it really comes down to the differentiation of drumming. Dave is kind of a jazz-inspired drummer. Dan is a much more Rock ‘n’ Roll-type drummer. Joel, he’s more of a brute force, industrial style drummer, so each album sounds different.
Ez: That actually makes sense. I hadn’t made that connection.
So Baroc is a much more moody affair, and it has elements of noise. And at least, up to Baroc, what I hear is there’s still parts of your histories, but you’re not beholden to them, and there’s something forming.
With ASP, from my point of view, is a much more sort of pop, melodic record. It does have that sheen, but it does have those elements of noise in it. And after that, you guys kind of went quiet a bit. Was that because Dan left?
Adam: I think, fundamentally, yes. And then we had another band called Margins, which was the complete opposite end of the spectrum running in parallel, in opposition *laughs*. Really, I think what’s interesting about those two bands is that Dan would be characterised as more of a rock drummer, but the work he does on both Margins albums is outstanding and showcases what he can do, which is far more than rock drumming.
I think the other thing to consider is that there’s always this tension with Blacklevel, where it’s like it’s too art house for the rock crowd and too rock for the art house crowd, so it’s never really finding its place. It sits as an outsider to everything. And then you couple that with the fact that it’s very confrontational. It’s very abrasive, and it’s not an easy listen. It makes my wife very anxious. She doesn’t like listening to it *laughs*. She’s not really a fan.
Ez: Do you think Margins being Margins also helped allow New Veteran to turn out the way it is? For me, I know it’s very different, but Margins seems like it sort of grew from the quieter, more tender moments of Baroc, and you can kind of see ASP moving away from that too, so sort of a divergence.
Adam: I think that Margins is just at the other end of the spectrum of interest in music that we had. I also think that sometimes you can get very worn out playing very intense music, and you can get to a point where it is sort of quite draining, mentally and physically to just be continually in that very intense mode when you know that your interest in music and the scope of what you can play is actually a lot wider. I think Margins was an exercise in “Hey, let’s do this other stuff that we know we’re capable of, and shows a different side and gives us a different level of satisfaction in terms of not having to be…” intense is not the right word ’cause Margins has its own intensity.”
Ez: It’s less hostile.
Adam: Yeah, it’s not as muscular, not as visceral. Not as physical.
Ez: So you guys prioritised Margins for a bit, and then you got back together for Future of the Left, and Andy Falkous badgered you guys to keep going. Would you have kept going if he hadn’t?
Adam: I would’ve just kept going regardless, probably.
I think it’s interesting that you look at the whole New Veteran thematic. Just the title itself, there was one point where I read some… I can’t remember if it was a review or an article on the band that made reference to us being veterans of the Sydney noise rock scene, and I thought it was just really strange to be the age I was and someone calling me a veteran, so I thought “This is kind of interesting. Let’s run with this”. This is 2010, so I was 35? It’s interesting, the idea that you can be a veteran at that age. It made me think to myself that music, especially in a local scene sense, is a young person’s game most of the time. I thought it was interesting, this kind of idea of what is it when you cross the threshold into being a veteran.
But there’s this period you go through where you have to accept the music you’re playing is not necessarily going to be selling a lot of records, making a lot of money. It’s not gonna be sustaining you with some kind of employment, so what is the reason that you’re doing it for? And ultimately, you’re doing it either because you’re stupid *laughs*, or because you just get some sort of satisfaction from the creation of it and the working with other people, which is certainly where my interest happens.
I also think it’s a form of therapy for a lot of people. I think for me, for a long time it was quite a therapeutic thing. So I would’ve kept going regardless, in whatever direction it went. It was less about success in a monetary sense and more about artistic success, creative success, connectivity with other people, being in a room, threshing out ideas… that’s the satisfaction.
Ez: In being therapy for yourself, is that why the music is so confrontational? You were confronting yourself?
Adam: A lot of the time it is, and so I think the manner in which it’s played has an element of therapy to it. It’s not staged, it’s not curated, that’s just how it comes out. Buuuut, there’s also a part of Blacklevel that people miss, which is the humour behind it. The satire. A lot of the songs that are written are satirical. Most of the songs are about characters; they’re about people that we’ve come across. A certain event that might’ve happened with a certain person that was particularly interesting or obtuse, and I think sometimes people who have interpreted some of the songs as being far more dark and serious than what they are when sometimes they’re actually comedy! I think a lot of people don’t get that.
There was a review that was written and the reviewer was kind of missing the point. They were seeing one song that was purely satire as being really serious, and then seeing a song that was really actually quite close to my own experiences as satire, and I was like “Hang on! This is out of whack” *laughs*.
Ez: As I got older, I realised that some of them were more humorous and tongue in cheek, and on the way to interviewing Brett I had some more thoughts about it, which he almost entirely dispelled, so you’re gonna have to hurt me some more here.
So let’s get into the songs.
Adam: Okay.
Ez: From what I’ve learned, “New Veteran” is a more serious one, and it’s about what you touched on just before. From an old interview with Brett, “Old Revolt” is about how bands will talk about how they’re into rock ‘n’ roll and try to present stuff in a new way, but it’s all old because they haven’t really done their research.
Adam: Yeah, fundamentally. And I guess, can you name for me who’s rock n roll in 2026?
Ez: Enslaved?
Adam: I’m talking like Rock ‘n’ Roll here *laughs*
A bit more in attitude.
Ez: To be fair, it harder to be rock ‘n’ roll in attitude these days because it’s even more expense than it was fourteen years ago.
Adam: Absolutely.
Ez: So it was more about a facade of rock ‘n’ roll attitudes.
“Viking Tattoo”, I’ve learned is a bit more personal. Slightly satirical but a bit more personal. My understanding of, in talking about being a brother’s keeper, it’s where a family would have a second child in case anything went wrong with the first.
Adam: I’ll give you the background. I don’t know what Brett’s given you.
When we were recording ASP, an uncle of mine I was very close to and very close in age, and had grown up with, he was only thirty-eight when he died. The song is about the experience of his brother, my other uncle, in dealing with that. Part of his therapy, part of his processing, was to get a tattoo. He wanted a tattoo of the uncle I’d lost, and he wanted him to be portrayed as a viking because in his mind… I think he made a connection of human struggle, battle, strength, adversity, and he associated that with some sort of viking persona.
I’ve a long history of making art, drawing and painting, so he asked me to design the tattoo. At first I was quite hesitant to ’cause this was like an entire back tattoo on someone who had never had a tattoo before. I was like “This is really full on, and I think you’re still going through the trauma. I’m not sure this is the decision that you really wanna make. Can we think about this for a second? Is this just a reactive thing? Is this something that you want to live with for the rest of your life?”
We probably went through a year, eighteen months of back-and-forth on whether this was appropriate or not, and in the end he convinced me that that’s what he wanted, so I went ahead and did the design, and the song is about that.
Ez: The next song, I believe is “Tony”, which is about Brett trying to buy a video game machine and the guy being an absolute pain in the ass about it. And then…
Did you ever build that deck?
Adam: Ah, no. The deck one is actually quite… of all the songs, there was just so much fodder within the story.
This is a friend of a friend – this is going back a number of years now – trying to score some weed from someone. And a friend of a friend of a friend who was an older gentleman at the time who came around to the house to drop off a quarter ounce which is named in the song… Generally when this happens, people come ’round, they sort of drop it off. “Here’s the cash, thanks very much”. This particular individual decided to come in and make themselves at home, and then I actually couldn’t get rid of them out of my house *laughs*
The references are to two films that were running on the television. One was Stone which is the bikie film which is where some of the bikie references comes from. The other was Mad Dog Morgan, which is where the other references come from, particularly to do with Bill Hunter.
The whole time that this person’s at my house, he was trying to convince me that I should build a deck on top of the house, to a point where he asked for some paper and started designing the deck, and measuring, and saying how I should build it, what materials, and the whole time I just wanted this person to leave. Obviously I was just too polite to ask him to leave my house so the fault’s on me, but I got a great song out it.
Ez: I think it’s “Gary” after that.
Adam: I’ve enjoyed going swimming, and for a long period of time I was quite a regular at the pool, and enjoyed going into the sauna. There was an individual, his name was Gary, who was a very frequent attendee at the pool. Essentially he was on work cover for a workplace injury that had affected his well-being, so this is someone that was there kind of every day, and he seemed to take a particular interest in engaging with me whenever I was in the sauna, and had some very obtuse interest in Russian political history. He was trying to get me involved in reading a bunch of Russian political theory *laughs* and would then come up in the change room and try and push books on me while I was trying to have a shower.
Not a bad guy at all, a very harmless individual, and clearly someone who was doing the right thing by themselves, going to the pool, trying to get better, trying to make themselves well, but maybe an overreach in affection towards myself.
Ez: We don’t really need to talk about “Weng Weng is a Secret Agent”. It’s pretty obvious.
Adam: Yep. Thanks very much to Wikipedia for that one. Amazing what you can pick out of Wikipedia.
Ez: Had you seen any Weng Weng films?
Adam: Oh, I knew about Weng Weng, but once you decide “That’s going to be the subject”, getting online and doing some research just to pick out some very specific parts of that person’s story is very useful.
Ez: “Midnight Siblings”.
Adam: “Midnight Siblings” is about spending new years’ 2009 with a pair of sibling sisters who were having a much better time of the night than my wife and I were having.
Ez: After that you’ve then got “Neighbour Ray”.
Adam: So “Neighbour Ray” is a neighbour of mine that lived on the corner of my street who had a very strong personality. I’m not sure what the nature of the of the relationship was with the person who had owned the house prior to myself. Often would refer to him in particular ways that would suggest she was quite close to him. But yeah; seemed to take a strange interest in coming to the front of my house with a leaf blower at particular points of the day in which I was working at home, and running it without any leaves to blow.
I think part of the issue was that I’d park my car out the front of the house and she didn’t like the fact that I used up a car space that she felt she was entitled to. I had a brief run-in with her about that, and I think from that point she took a very nasty dislike to me, so she’d do the blower thing every day to the point where it escalated into local mediation *laughs* She ended up moving in the end.
Ez: I’m gonna tell you what I thought “I Keep Making Tiny Men” was about, because I know it’s kind of, kind of not. I thought it was about someone developing a god complex, and the frustrations with that, trying to bring life and it not working, trying to build servants, automatons.
Adam: It kind of is, you’re on the right track, but if you apply that to the art of animation. My background is as a teacher, and I was a visual arts teacher. I used to do a lot of work with individual needs students making claymation films. From there I got a few government contracts to make teaching and learning resources, and it used claymation characters. So this is about applying exactly what you just said to the art of, essentially, claymation, making these characters and animating them.
Ez: Was it stuffing with your head a bit at the time?
Adam: I just found it really intriguing, the idea that you are in a way playing the god because you’re actually bringing something to life that is, essentially, inanimate. So whatever that character is imbued with is literally coming from you. There is no other sort of factor that’s impinging on them. It’s coming from one sentience.
Ez: So why do you think these characters, these stories spoke to you the most at that particular time in life?
Adam: I don’t know that there’s anything that’s too romanticised about it. I think that the subject crops up and you either latch onto it and run with it or you don’t, and I think those subjects come from anywhere.
Ez: I get why “New Veteran” and “Viking Tattoo” and a few others, but it strikes me that these particular ones are interesting to pick, because they have a certain everyday banality to them, but they’re presented in a very confrontational, very intense way. As you said, you have to grab onto these stories, but to me there has to be something in them that makes you want to explore the humour of them.
Adam: You use a really great word in saying there’s a banality to them, and there is, and I think that’s the idea. The intensity behind it, there’s an interesting thought in that; the idea that evil exists in banality. It’s not like the grand gesture; it’s the evil gesture. It’s what’s actually in the merely banal and day-to-day things. So there is an intensity to banal things that people miss a lot of the time, and there’s also the idea that even the most banal thing in the world, the further you delve into it, you can actually extract a lot of meaning from them.
It’s like the idea that no one’s boring; it’s just that you haven’t spent enough time listening to their story. Like literally we’re talking now, you’ve randomly contacted me to talk about an album that was made fourteen years ago. I can go home and use you as subject matter. There’s so much in this conversation I can walk away and turn into a song.
Ez: *Laughs* Oh, when’s the next Blacklevel Embassy album?
Adam: *Laughs* But this is the thing. I have this conversation with my wife all the time: the songwriting experience and the idea that the audience places their own meaning onto the song and the lyrics, and it’s not to do with what’s intended by the songwriter. This is the classic John Lennon take where it could be about anything. It can be banal, and then people will place their own meaning on top of that, and that’s a really great thing; that’s what modern art should be, right? So I don’t think that there’s any great mystery into taking the banal aspects of a particular person that you’ve met, or an experience that you’ve had, and then presenting it in an intense way, because I think the deeper you go into any experience or person, they all become intense.
Ez: The other thing is that these are everyday, these are things that happen all the time, but in the moment, they can feel consuming and universal in a sense, personal, which can be what helps them develop.
Adam: Absolutely. Everyone’s had that annoying neighbour. Everyone’s spent a new year’s that was crappy. Everyone’s had someone that’s made them feel awkward in a particular situation in a sauna *laughs*
I think you’re right. I think these are universal things and I think often they are the most interesting. I don’t think you need to necessarily be using profound things as your subject matter. The world is not a bunch of profound moments. The world is, essentially, a bunch of very banal moments stacked up against one another.
Ez: Let’s talk about the writing of the music itself. You said it’s more shaped by the drummer, but something I did notice… I’m glad you mentioned the artiness because I think that whilst New Veteran is a very intense, direct record, in some ways a rock record, it’s also very abstract. Sort of non-abstract music being done in an abstract way.
All the playing is not what you’d expect for those types of songs. There’s a lot of non-standard guitar work, and the monotony of the bass and drums has a certain heave and doesn’t actually feel monotonous. And the the way the drums are structured is quite different.
Adam: Yeah, I think you’re right on the money.
Ez: So at this point, how were you feeling with the band?
Adam: I think that for a period there, we didn’t know that we were actually going to find another drummer. We tried out a couple. They were lovely people and played really well, but they weren’t the right kind of fit for Brett and myself. There was probably a level of intensity in the way that we naturally played that certain drummers maybe weren’t quite at, and that’s not a criticism; that’s just how it was.
I think as soon as we got in a room with Joel… Joel has a very heavy, big and loud presence to him when he plays. I can remember the very first time we got into the room and he was playing very simply, but it was something about the sheer volume and presence he played with that was matching what we were doing, so it was instantly like “Yep, this is the person”. And on a personal level, I think Joel’s great. There’s something about his personality; his taste in music is incredibly varied. He has this incredibly wide, expansive musical interest.
Joel’s into things that are very abstract, and probably leaning more into things that, you know, when we talk about things that are a bit more artsy or abstract, that’s where Joel and I make a very strong connection. So there’s a power and intensity, and industrialisation in his playing, but behind that there’s all of this subtlety, and very out-of-the-box thinking.
Ez: Did that allow yourself and Brett to be more free?
Adam: Well no. I think what’s interesting about it is the monotony of his playing matching…
Brett’s approach at the time was to minimise his playing and play as little as possible, which I think is interesting because if you go back to the first record, he’s playing a lot busier. So he does evolve over time, but he has a very clear focus on what he wants to evolve to, and this is very Brett. He’ll set himself a task and say “That’s how I’m gonna do it”. Then he puts the process in place to get there, whereas I’m a bit more “I wonder what would happen if I did this?” Or, “I wonder what’s gonna come out today”, or “Lets just try this and see what happens”.
So I think that Joel became the counterweight between those two things because he can play very heavy and monotonously, so he can match what Brett’s doing in terms of being very minimal, but he is attuned to hearing a lot of dissonance, subtlety, wackiness, weirdness that I might bring, so I think Joel is the fulcrum that those songs need. He’s the reason why that third album actually comes into play. Without him, obviously it doesn’t happen. He’s also a kind of player that can hinge between Brett and I really well, so that’s why it sounds the way it does.
Ez: And my understanding is the recording of it was very fast.
Adam: Yeah, but I would say that’s just the nature of the band. I think the band was always incredibly organised and incredibly well-prepared. Brett will hate this one, but it’s almost like a sports team, right? You set yourself some guidelines around the game, and then you set yourself a strategy for how you’re gonna play it, and then you practise practise practise, and you train, and you get so intense about the training so that when it comes time to hit record, you don’t need to think. You can be spontaneous and your muscle memory from all the training kicks in.
Ultimately, you want to get to the point where you’ve got the presence and spontaneity of being in the moment, but you know because the music is quite precise, that you’re going to play it in a way that’s not going to come off sounding shit because you’re basically too loose. So that’s the point to get to, and that comes from a lot preparation, a lot of training, hence the sports analogy.
Ez: You also did another song, “Metronomic Head”, which didn’t make the record and instead was released on a Tym seven inch. What was the reason for leaving that off?
Adam: Brett was always, to his credit, very particular about what standard of output would end up on the final product, and was always particular about things having to be a particular standard to make the cut. I think it’s great to have someone in a band that has that kind of ruthlessness, ’cause if you’re going off in different tangents like I do and, and you’re like “Oh let’s do this, and this is great, this is weird let’s throw this in!”, a counterpoint to that that says “Well, we want to trim this down to what’s absolutely essential”. I think there’s something that’s in the play between those two things that’s actually really powerful. So that track was just deemed not at the standard to make the album.
Ez: How do you think New Veteran came across in a live setting?
Adam: I think Blacklevel is what it is. It comes across in a very intense way. It’s uncompromising, and I think you’re either [someone] who enjoys that and will step into it, or you’re not. I think one of the criticisms that could be placed against the band is not creating enough space for audiences to step into and enjoy. If you’re constantly pushing the audience away, you can’t then be annoyed that people go “Oh, I don’t like that music. I don’t wanna be near that music”. You have to be prepared for people to be hesitant toward that. You can’t play a line in that way and expect people to come and embrace it.
Ez: And then obviously things went quiet after those last few tours because of life, essentially. Do you think New Veteran was probably the right record to end on?
Adam: I think yes, ultimately. It was a great record. All three records are great, and they’re great in different ways and they’ve got three different drummers who are all outstanding and I feel very privileged to have played with, so I’m very proud of all three of them. I would hate to think that another record would not be of the same standard.
I think is something that the three of us would have to be very committed to to do anything else. Plus, the moment passes. Life moves on. You evolve and different priorities happen. And you want something to be great in its moment and then leave it that way, even if people don’t appreciate it at the time. Anything that’s really great will survive. I’m talking to you fourteen years later and you’re still interested in it. Who says that in another fourteen years someone doesn’t say “That was actually really good”? In time, things that are actually well made, they will last. That was the whole point of the record; making something that lasts.
Ez: So obviously your relationship to New Veteran is going to be a bit different to Brett’s. How do you feel about it at this point?
Adam: I feel like it was a great record of its time. A great snapshot of what we were doing, creatively. I think it was probably underappreciated at the time and continues to be underappreciated, but I don’t get hung up on that. All that matters is that it actually exists.
There’s plenty of moments in people’s lives where the opportunity to create something comes and people don’t take it and regret that. This is a moment that I don’t need to feel any regret about because it actually happened, and that has to do with all three members of the band, and largely, all three of us being committed to it, and it’s really fucking hard to make a record. It’s hard to write a record. It’s hard to just have the thing exist so the fact that it exists, and as strong as it is, that’s all I need.