Shy Tone

After a ten year career spent assiduously avoiding any kind of success, the invisible empire are no more. Actually, to be strictly accurate, they've - we've - gone & changed our name. Because - let's not mince words here - your writer here's in the band. And has been from the beginning.... Little did we think, way back when, that the term “invisible empire”, innocently filched from a salacious Panther Burns song - Jumpsuit - would turn out to be a code phrase for the Klu Klux Klan. Who, luckily, don't have a Brisbane chapter…

Many years...and many more arguments later, the name is now the lost domain. Currently working said domain are original members Simon Ellaby & David Mac Kinnon (aka Frank & John Henry Calvinist), Greg Hilleard [also of Strontium Dog/Noose/Tripod/Niel Armstong Experience/Standing 8 Counts], the mysterious Mr E [Holy Ghosts/DNE] & Professor Jeffrey Wegener [Saints/Laughing Clowns & the Birthday Party, even…] And, as you can guess from that little list, we're a bad-tempered bunch of old farts, with strong opinions as to what makes for good music…

"Well, every time we do it, it comes out different. It'd be a bit wanky to call it evolution, but…"

"Point is...it changes every time. And more so when someone new comes into the band. It's not like our music's a fixed thing & people just have a slot to fit into. What happens each time is the combination of what each person brings to it."

And no-one in this band has ever followed instructions. If they did, we wouldn't have asked them to join…

"These things are hard to put into words, but I think one thing that I like about this band is the way we don't all sit back so that each person can play some stupid solo. It's the ensemble that's the thing…”

Well, that's the tidier end of jazz & blues put in their place - what about rock - or post-rock - or whatever the hell they're calling it these days?

"We do seem to have a tenuous relationship w/a lot of contempory music around these days that we don't listen to, or even have any exposure to. We might have some of the same [older] influences, but there doesn't seem to be much in common about the way we work."

"That's the one unifying factor through all the incarnations. If there's been any real evolution in the band, it's the chaos that's evolved. More than anything else. The formal elements really come out of that."

"When we first started out, one reason we were so full-on is that we didn't know any other way to get things to combust. And we used to have things fall apart on us...really badly. All the time. But now, we've learned how to push things from almost any starting point…"

As long as it's an open structure - which is why we don't play pop songs - trying to work within that model's like trying to dance in a straitjacket.

"On that note…the last time we played - first time w/this lineup - someone from work asked me how we could write something as fast as the opener…And - of course - I said that we didn't write it. A lot of people think that to play something that sounds complicated, you need to have it all worked out."

Whereas we just cheat...by finding so-called complicated things that build themselves naturally - and then use those as our starting points...

"It's an interesting point…Is it any less valid because it's not pre-ordained? Maybe that's the essential issue that we tend to address in whatever we do."

"Even when we do a cover, we tend to work with the idea of the song - and push it to see where it wants to go w/this band - instead of trying to reproduce something."

That's because we don't try to fake it. Music's not takeaway food or something - if'n it doesn't work, then...that's because we drove ourselves into a dead end - not because we mucked up something that was designed to be "safe" & "reliable" in the first place…

"What we do is like a benevolent dialogue - a resolution of individual personalities - because...whatever tensions occur, they're always consumed within the music. The resolution is in the mutation. And...we can have some bloody good arguments that just completely eat up the tensions."

Where else in life can you be the rudest, most full-on bastard around, for a space - w/no limits as to what you come out with - and have everyone else go "great solo"? And...it's a terribly un-alone thing as well, real music. More so than any other art. Because there's an abstraction to it...that allows any player to subsume their own contribution w/in the whole - to identify w/the process, rather than just w/their own particular contribution. And that is a terribly utopian thing to find in real life…

Which, of course, is the point. Once described as "the Velvet Underground in reverse", the former invisible empire, now known as the lost domain, play the Zoo w/Blue Wine & Turnpike on Thursday 3rd February, & join the farewell to Mr Bastard at the Shamrock on Saturday 12th February. At the first, we'll be welcoming in the new century with an entirely fresh set - composed [as usual] of freeform rock'n'roll, strange storytelling, old gospel & "blues" - as well as several things that have no name. For Senor Bastardo, however, it'll be cheese whizz all the way…

Advance copies of our latest - and only - CD, "the empire never ended..."[shy tone] will be available for sale...for those whose tastes run to that sort of thing.