The Presets: Down Under dance party

Mention a new wave of Australian dance music to Julian Hamilton, frontman for the rising Aussie electronic duo the Presets, and you’ll meet some resistance.

“It’s not a wave,” the singer insists. “It’s barely a splash.”

Despite releasing a number one album, the industrial-tinged “Apocalypso,” in his homeland, Hamilton (along with his bandmate Kim Moyes) sees the recent Down Under dance craze as an anomaly. “We’re still a country of blokey pub rock,” he says. “But it’s cool now to go to festivals and see all these people in pink dancing to us.”

While not chart-toppers in the U.S., the Presets and fellow countrymen like Cut Copy are making quite a recent impact here, mainly on the tour circuit. We spoke with Hamilton about the Presets' rapid rise and what’s behind the Daft Punk helmets.

You guys met at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. How do you go from that to dance music?
The Conservatorium is very classical-based. I think neither Kim nor I knew what we’d eventually be doing when we went there. We just wanted to do music. And it’s the best kind of training. I mean, it’s like if a dancer gets a classical ballet training, and then ends up in a Jay-Z video. By day, we’d go to school and learn about Beethoven, and at night we’d hit the clubs and discover the Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk. Actually, discovering that group was as much as an education as anything.

You’ve opened for Daft Punk. They’re quite shrouded in mystery—did you meet them?
We were their main support at one point, but we didn’t meet them. I saw them backstage—they look cooler with the helmets on.

Is there a competitive spirit between you and the guys in Cut Copy?
We’re all good mates. They’re on the same label as us. The truth is, they’re doing well, we’re doing well…and I’d rather have them do well than some shit band.

Is it odd being a two-member group?
Some of our favorite bands—the Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, Daft Punk, Justice—are two-member groups. Musically, being a duo works out well. Kim and I have been in bands before, obviously something is going right just having it be the two protagonists. We’re like a married couple. [Laughs] Sometimes, it would be lovely to have five people, so I could have a beer with the bassist one night and then somebody else the next.

Although I don’t quite hear it, I keep seeing Depeche Mode comparisons.
Actually, I didn’t like them growing up. I discovered them recently, because it kept getting brought up in interviews. I guess my voice reminds some people of the album “Violator.” To be honest, when Kim and I are forced to think about our influences, we really seem to be more influenced by the music we saw in movies when we were young. “Blade Runner,” “Escape From New York”—those movies that had really cool synthesizer soundtracks. My dad actually bought me a synthesizer when I was 12 so I could practice piano, but all I wanted to do was make these alien sounds that I heard in movies.

You had a number one record in Australia. Is your sound the norm, or are you an anomaly?
Well, synth music is bigger in Australia these days, but it’s always been a real “rock” country. You know, Midnight Oil, AC/DC. It’s a new thing. I guess people wanna dance.

A lot of your songs are ending up in ads. What’s your criteria for allowing that?
We get a lot of offers, but we say no a lot. If the idea is really whack, or it’s a TV show we don’t like, we’ll say no. But sometimes, they throw shitloads of money at you. [Laughs] It’s funny, it really can help—we had a song on this show “So You Think You Can Dance?” and it jumped back into the charts.