Electric Red

Wellington’s Red Steers is the latest signing to the A Low Hum label. Like most people, I was very intrigued to find out a bit more about this band. The first thing I found out was that Red Steers is the work of solo musician Daniel Johnston. I posed a few question to Daniel to dig deeper into his moniker.

Started as a project towards the end of 2007, Daniel says “(it was) an alternative task to the other music I had been making at the time”. Appearing out of relative obscurity, A Low Hum label manager Blink apparently heard the band after being played some tracks while touring North America with Over The Atlantic. On the A Low Hum website, Blink declares Red Steers was one of two artists “doing the most interesting take on pop music that I found anywhere”. His taste for good music has already brought us Disasteradio, Secret Knives and Over The Atlantic, as well as the magnificently organised, yearly Camp A Low Hum festival.

Inspired by contemporary electronic artists like The Knife, M83 and dntel, Johnston’s music is in a similar vein but pushes boundaries slightly further across the genre divide. Using an “Ableton live 7, compaq laptop, analogue modelling sythesisers, two cheap microphones and a collection of toy instruments”, Johnston recorded most the Red Steers tracks in his bedroom in the Wellington suburb of Newtown. Written, crafted, composed and reworked over the past ten months, the tracks now make up his debut EP titled Laga Luga Lagoon. Along with previous A Low Hum releases, the entire EP can be downloaded for free from the A Low Hum website.

A tangled mess of ambient electronic wizardry, Laga Luga Lagoon combines elements of contemporary keyboard pop with the distinct style and flavour of previous A Low Hum signing Secret Knives. The similarity between the two is perhaps more in the recording production than the music itself, but it draws the two bands distinctly parallel. Ironically Daniel is close friends with Ash from Secret Knives. Obscure no more, Red Steers is likely to raise some eyebrows and make a lot of listeners curious, and await a live performance.

Red Steers- Pointe Du Lac: MP3

Red Steers- Myspace

Posted by Nick Fulton under New Zealand