Ezekiel RodofiliIf you haven’t heard of Hazards of Swimming Naked, they’re a Brisbane-based post-rock band that have been around for a while. As they’re playing at the Brisbane show celebrating Art As Catharsis‘ fifteen years of existence, I was fortunate enough to speak to Gareth of the band about the band.
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Ez: The band is called Hazards of Swimming Naked.
Gareth: Yes. It’s a mouthful.
It kind of suits the band. It was a joke name. We’ve been going on now for over twenty years, but way back in the day the band was just a side project. As happened, the side project gets way more traction and suddenly becomes the main gig. And you’re kind of stuck with an interesting name that you didn’t take too seriously back in the day, and people start to know you for. And that’s how it is.
Ez: So you kind of pulled a Regurgitator, then.
Gareth: Yeah, pretty much. There were probably three different bands that we were all in. This was a creative side project gig, and then it took off. JJJ found us and we released our first album, and going back to The Zoo at our peak, we kind of sold it out. That and seeing most of Australia off the band was cool.
Ez: What were those bands that you all came from?
Gareth: There was a band called Ghost Town High which was our drummer and two of our guitarists, and my band was called Lifeless Alarm, and it was like that post-hardcore sound, heavy. Chrispy and Reggie who are also in Osaka Punch. They used to be known as The Kidney Thieves.
So we were all doing our thing and then it took off a little more for Ghost Town High and Lifeless Alarm. Then Kidney Thieves turned into Osaka Punch and they’re obviously doing quite well for themselves.
But Chrispy was our guitarist from the start to about 2011. Then he left for a good few years. Then we had Michael Gagen from Echotide and Arcane for about eight years. Then Chrispy came back and Reggie came on board on bass, and that’s kind of been our second wind for the last three, four years.
Ez: How did the band come to be? You were obviously youngsters at the time, with a sort of youthful exuberance yet to be worn down by the world. Did you all know each other?
Gareth: We’re pretty much all Far North Queensland Boys. We all grew up in a small town called Innisfail which is an hour south of Cairns.
I remember playing music with our drummer, Rick. We were in High School bands together, which is crazy to think that we’re still mates now. Adrian and Rick as well. Chrispy, he linked up with us in the early 2000’s. He’s also from Innisfail and we connected here, but it was that connection to Innisfail that got us all together in the same room. As you can imagine there’s a certain laid-back vibe that comes, I think, from people from far north that I feel resonates through the music. But also just when you’re around like-minded people, it’s all pretty relaxed. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi as they say, or whatever *laughs*. It’s pretty chill, which not necessarily makes for the most productive band on the planet, but makes for a very enjoyable and easy band to be in.
Ez: Stereotypically, towns like Innisfail are considered quiet towns and places with a lack of things to do, and thus what comes from that is a certain kind depression and restlessness, and boredom, and perhaps for some people a certain fatalistic mindset.
Obviously you do get the easygoing things, which is great. Things shouldn’t be hustle and bustle all the time, but it does it comes with its cons. Do you feel that perhaps those were drivers in getting out of Innisfail?
Gareth: You hit the nail on the head. Growing up too… we’re all over forty, right? So growing up, there weren’t phones. TV was shit. Even video games were nothing like they are today, so in a small town like Innisfail you can go two ways. You can start smoking weed, drinking young and just kind of playing the fool, or like for us in the band, we were like “We’re gonna pick up guitars and drumsticks and funnel that small town boredom into creating music”.
I can still remember hanging with Rick and Adrian in his house with a whole bunch of other mates and all their instruments, and we were just playing music and hanging out. So luckily for us it did go into that, but growing up you could see people kind of fall into the other sphere. Potentially both, smoking weed and playing music, but definitely it felt like there were some unhealthier ways to cure boredom.
Once school finished, as was tradition you pretty much bolted straight away. Four days post-school I got in my car and left home and went to Cairns for a few years. Then the other boys, they came down to Brisbane, and then we pretty much reconnected in… 2001? But it was pretty much the thing, as soon as school finished you just bolted, and most people went to Brissie.
Ez: I imagine music was a form of survival for you, and Brisbane, considering all that it has been through… All of Queensland really, but Brisbane, what it had been through and its resilience in the art scene sort of made it a magnet.
Gareth: Yeah. You kind of had that almost North Star guidance. Powderfinger are from Bisbane, The Gurge are from Brisbane. In the mid-to-late 90’s it was a such a cool little melting pot of some really awesome bands.
Ez: And I imagine all those years of music continuing to thrive and suddenly being out from a fairly heavy-handed government, it must’ve felt like cultural explosion almost.
Gareth: Yeah, freedom, right? And I think at the time we got to reap the rewards of that when we were coming into it, you know? That had been paved by all those earlier bands.
And it’s kind of changed a bit, sadly, but back in the mid-2000’s when we were getting cranking and we were young, there were some really good opportunities. Just plenty of places to play and you could play for free, or get paid a little bit and people would rock up. There was a cool little place called The Indie Temple and another one called The Globe. You could just book the venues, it was low risk, get a bunch of mates there and it was pretty awesome. The landscape’s change a bit now, particularly post-covid, I think. A lot of places have shut down.
‘Cause we started quiet early, there were some really cool indie venues we’d play, or just people’s basements that were known for putting on unique and different music, and then we’d go there and there’d be like 100 people trying to cram into this one venue and we’d play a set… there’d just be a bunch of people there ready to see us.
We just came back from playing Dunk!fest which was pretty incredible. It was hectic. Felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but hopefully not. Biggest show we’ve played, probably ever. Sold all our merch, and it was a really cool experience.
We did with one of our label mates, The Sea Shall not Have Them. They started at a similar time to us. When we were in Amsterdam, we were talking about the old days as you do, and how special those moments were. When it’s happening you don’t realise how unique and cool it is.
Ez: In regards to coming to working in a post-rock context, was this something that just happened naturally from your disparate backgrounds in music coming together, or was it something that say, you were consciously channeling?
Gareth: It’s funny man, ’cause when we started making the music I didn’t really know what post-rock was per se. It was just we were making music that didn’t have vocals, thank god *laughs* and it was all textury and filmic and cinematic. So I think that brings its own unique flavour and ignorance, which kind of adds to it.
The first album was really spearheaded by Adrian, and most of the music was written by him. Then we all kind of added our own flavour to that, and it wasn’t until the second album which was a lot more of a band effort for the majority of the songs.
While we all respect and like post-rock – I’m a big fan of MONO, but particularly Russian Circles – it’s probably almost is a sum of our parts outside of post-rock. There’s a lot of Kyuss in there, Tortoise. Mogwai and Godspeed are the more post-rocky stuff, but man, I grew up with a bunch of Metallica and Pantera. We jam out to Pantera during band practises *laughs* We’re playing all this beautiful post-rock and then we’ll slam into Pantera to mix it up, ’cause that’s kind of what we grew up on.
I think while we don’t wanna be this big metal monster, you can’t help but have that bleed through sometimes. When we bring the noise it can get pretty sludgy and doomy.
Ez: Let’s talk about your most recent release, which you have to say is your best release. It’s court-mandated.
Gareth: *laughs* If we’re looking at the latest, it’s a single. Which is good ’cause I do think it’s one of the best songs we’ve written and it’s definitely the best recorded-sounding song that we have played. We got it mastered by Forrester Savell. It sounds really nice. There’s a certain kind of sheen but also rawness to it.
The single is hopefully off an album which will be coming up hopefully next year at some point. It’ll be our third album in twenty years or something. We do not do things quickly.
Ez: I guess that’s really taking post-rock to an extreme.
Gareth: *laughs*
Ez: So writing music now, I imagine the approach has changed compared to when you were younger, partly because you all have a better understanding of how each other works, how to approach your instrument…
You know how it seems for a few artists when they get older, they don’t necessarily have their hunger and the way they convey music changes and some people find it a bit lesser…
Gareth: I get really excited when I hear an artist I’ve listened to for a long time and they release something, and I don’t know what they’ve done but it just catches something almost youthful that they had before, and they’ve somehow been able to like, not replicate it but just create something that’s just as good as what they played fifteen, twenty years ago, right? Case in point, Paradise Lost’s last album. I only heard it this year, and I was just like “Holy shit!” I love their stuff from the mid-nineties, The Icon and Draconian Times eras as well as a few other ones. But this is probably in my top four, if not top three albums that they’ve ever done in their thiryy-odd, thirty-five year career. I just could not believe it.
For me, I think there’s almost a trap you can fall into when you become an adult where you lose a bit of that youthful innocence and curiosity that comes with being young and hungry. I tthat as an adult you can overthink things. In relation to making music it’s like “Okay, you’ve got this beautiful line, it came in thirty seconds. You just picked up the guitar and it’s there”. Your 20-year old self would be like “Yeah, that’s it. Done.” But as you get older you start to dissect and overthink things to the point where you lost all this natural energy that came with what was in that initial thirty seconds and then it goes too clinical.
That’s what we’ve learned through doing what I’ve said: making something that sounds great, then overthinking it, re-writing it, changing this part, changing that part to the point where we’ve just trodden it into the ground. Just being able to pull yourself back and be a bit youthful with it, which sounds like an old man speaking, but…
It’s just a trap, being an adult *laughs*.
Ez: I think the thing is and the phrase I was looking for… ’cause music doesn’t necessarily have to sound or feel youthful, but I do think some artists, as they get older, they do kind of slip into that trap of adulthood, and they might still be producing art, and to be fair there are a lot who get older who still produce art that is vibrant or relevant or whatever it needs to be its most effective, but a some tend to lose sight. And sometimes that overanalysing does work depending on how that person works, but it’s a fine balance between, say, the technical and the… I don’t wanna say primitive, but you know what I mean?
Gareth: Yeah, it’s a fine line, like a needle that you’ve kinda gotta thread around like “There’s something here so we’re gonna work on it” and “Oh, we’ve overcooked it”.
Ez: So with this new single and hopefully album, essentially the approach is to not be overthinking things.
Gareth: If it feels good, sounds good and plays good, trust in that and maybe just let it lie, and know that if we’ve played it 100 times then naturally it’s gonna probably start to feel a little bit stale, but the person listening to it for the first time is gonna be going “This is awesome”. So just being smart enough to trust in what we felt earlier, which probably comes with age, I guess, which is kind of ironic, right?
Ez: Going into recording “Last Drinks”, was it done live or piecemeal?
Gareth: It was all done live in the studio very late at night, and then we re-amped the guitars later on. And as no one will ever admit to when they say they’ve done something live, the odd little drop-in and pick-up here or there, but of course that never happens *laughs*
It’s the last track Mikey played on, and Chrispy actually recorded the track in his studio Hunter Ground Studios, so it was quite a beautiful kind of send-off for Mikey and for Chrispy coming back.
Ez: Is that why it’s called “Last Drinks”?
Gareth: No *laughs* although it is very apt. It’s got that kind of double meaning, right? There’s no real meaning the title directly, per se, but essentially it’s all about those themes. Around “Is it a good thing? Are we commiserating? Are we celebrating the final journey?” And that’s the beautiful thing about post-rock; I think it’s fully open to the interpretation of the listener.
Ez: Fair enough. Well, I’m not gonna dig into that.
Gareth: Well for me, it definitely represents that. It’s that kind of beautiful send-off for Mikey. It’s full of little audio representations.
Ez: In that case then, let’s go pointlessly deep.
Gareth: Mm!
Ez: Do you think then, that possibly “Last Drinks” could also represent somebody’s being frozen in time, held back, whilst everyone else moves forward and thus talks mournfully about death in a rather introspective and perhaps crestfallen manner?
Don’t answer that.
Gareth: *laughs* There you go. There is actually a sample in the song and it’s a guy speaking, so it might go towards that.
Ez: Well you know they say that death, like life is a transitional state and we become one with the earth once more as the organisms feast on our flesh and bones, thus nurturing the soil to grow more trees.
Gareth: We’re all just borrowed energy and we’ve got to give it back at one point.
Ez: So, playing live. I imagine you don’t play live too often.
Gareth: So on average four shows a year, depending on what’s happening. Also probably once a year we’ll do what we call The GoMA shows (Gallery of Modern Arts). They’ll ask us to play along to a silent movie, and we – When I say we, it’s usually Adrian – will create a whole score to a silent movie. So we’ve done Joan of Ark, Nosferatu, and the last one we did was Man with a Movie Camera.
We set up in this 300-seater cinema and then we play along to it and a bunch of people come and watch, and that’s pretty special, too. We normally do one of them maybe ever year, every second year.
Ez: Is there anywhere to find those soundtracks?
Gareth: No. We always go “We should record them” and we usually do, but we never release them, which is a shame as that would obviously increase our catalogue substantially, but it’s tough because it’s a lot of effort.
Ez: So because you guys don’t perform live too often, there’s probably a pretty significant push to really make each show count. That’s not to say bands that are road dogs don’t want to make every show count, but there’s a bit of a difference between making every show count and being really well-oiled and rehearsed so you’re not… it’s sort of more second-nature vs. “This is our third show of the year, so we’re gonna knock it out of the park”, you know?
Gareth: From a personal level, I think it makes it more special ’cause we’ve done both. Particularly as the years have rolled on, we’ve had ones where we played 20, 30, or just heaps of shows across the year. Then there’s times, like now and the last ten years where it fits a bit more into three, four, five a year, depending on what’s going on, and it does feel pretty special. It feels a like I’m having my cake and eating it too. I’m able to work full-time, be with family and do the music stuff part-time as well, and enjoy it, which is the key there.
I can speak to the other guys too as we’ve had this conversation. We feel blessed to be able to do it and do it at the pace we’re doing it instead of the opposite where you have to crunch through. It does become a bit monotonous and less special and you get over it a bit, and you get pulled left, right and centre ’cause you’ve got your band responsibilities and external responsibilities of life.
We actually just recorded a live album which was the Dunk! set, ’cause we got that honed down to a razor focus. When we came back and we had the Art As Catharsis Fifteen-year Anniversary show coming up, we were like “Well let’s get this set down”. We did that recently in a studio and filmed it as well, and that is gonna be released as a full live album. About fifty minutes, about eight songs and that’s our Dunk! set plus two extra songs.
I feel lucky hey. It’s funny – I’ve fallen into this trap as well where you think the dream is doing it full-time and and it would be amazing, but to be honest… it was about 2008, I just had kids and I realised there’s gonna have to be a balance there. I couldn’t do this full time, especially in Australia.
Ez: It is kind of strange being a touring band in Australia. Very spread out, it’s kind of a full and empty country at the same time, and because you’re driving long distances or flying or whatever, the cost of touring goes up.
Gareth: The profit margins get way smaller.
We’ve seen it first-hand. We’ve played with lots of bands. When you pick their brain about it, they just go “Yeah nah, it’s not that good hey”. It’s like “Oh, really?” It’s sad. The financial element for some is just crippling. They can’t keep down a full-time job because they’re always on the road, but the road pays almost nothing. It’s a cycle they’re in and they end up hating it.
There’s been a few bands where from the outside I’m like “Oh you guys are living the dream”, and then when I finally play with them I’m like “Yeah, maybe not”.
Ez: And it sucks because you don’t want to consider the financials of it, but you really have to and it becomes so much more of a sting. It also sucks because Australia is known for audiences going hard at gigs and being a country full of fans of live music, and you also know that there was one point where it may not have been the most financially viable, but many more bands could do it.
Gareth: Yeah, ’cause you had the album sales and whatnot.
Ez: Or just even things being cheaper at one point, more venues available.
Gareth: One of the biggest eye-opening things for me was an interview with Devin Townsend, and he was just being brutally honest around the numbers. He was going through everything, how much money his band he made, how much take home he had in his pocket. He kind of said “This is my fortnightly amount, that I live off”. It was less than I was making at the time.
Ez: Well, on a happier note, you did mention the AAC fifteen-year shows. Hazards are not on AAC.
Gareth: No, we’re on Bird’s Robe.
Ez: How did Hazards come to be involved?
Gareth: You know Kodiak Empire?
Ez: Yeah.
Gareth: We played a few shows with those guys throughout the years. Ben [Shannon] hit us up, said “Hey, did you guys wanna play this show? It’s for fifteen years”, and we were like “Yeah, that sounds pretty cool”. We hadn’t played the Zoo since it changed its name to Crowbar, and it looked like the lineup was good. So Ben asked and we said “Yeah, let’s do it”.
Ez: Why do you think a label like Art As Catharsis has been able to survive and keep going as long as it has, given the adversities it and other small labels have faced?
Gareth: For me, they’ve got a really cool, eclectic line-up. A bunch of really cool bands on there, which I think is important. If you keep your artists happy and they’re on your label, the rest kind of falls into place. From a financial view, they’ve probably god really low overheads.
Ez: Well, one last question for you, and maybe this is a bit of a tricky one, but what does Art As Catharsis mean to you?
Gareth: It’s a good question. I’m not too sure, hey. I think just what I went to before: Just solid bands. I think if you know the bands on the label, there’s a certain quality that’s coming with it. I know that probably sounds a bit PR-y, but if I’m looking at a band and I can see they’re attached to Art As Catharsis in some way, it’ll probably give me a bit [push] to check ’em out.