Thirteen years ago, Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes of the dance-punk duo, The Presets, met at music school in Sydney, Australia. Over a decade later, they have two well-received studio albums under their belt and fans on this side of the world. The Presets have toured with the likes of Cut Copy and Daft Punk, and have won numerous awards including the J Award for “Australian Album of the Year.” Currently, they are performing throughout the United States before they head back home for the conclusion of their tour.
This winter, I chatted with Kim Moyes on the phone about how he met Julian in a Sydney Conservatory common room, his favorite food to eat in the U.S. and experiences with crazy Australian fans:
Stephanie Freitag: When and why did you decide to become a musician?
Kim Moyes: I was quite young, maybe around ten or eleven, and I wanted to become a musician because I liked watching this guy play drums at the church that my mom took me to. Somehow I was kind of swept away by the band there. I wanted to learn as much as I could about music and eventually, it started to take up all my time. It turned into something that I knew that I wanted to do professionally by the time I was about fifteen.
SF: How did you and Julian meet?
KM: I ended up going to music school and that same school has a university attached to it—it’s called the Sydney Conservatory. Julian also went there in the same year and we were in a similar course although we didn’t really have the same classes together. We met in the common room between classes and you know when you just like what someone’s wearing and you sort of start chatting? We sort of became friends like that. Eventually, it turned into something where we started to make music together.
SF: Why did you decide on the band name, The Presets?
KM: When we started The Presets, nobody was really doing this sort of electro-crossover stuff. We knew this band called Prop and it was pretty forlorn and intense. We wanted to do something that was kind of the opposite—we wanted to do something really stupid, and really dumb, and really easy to get. We had a sort of a joke that we would make a band that was with only the presets on a shitty keyboard that you could buy. But eventually when we started writing music, we realized that would be the worst thing ever so we started making music more like we do now.
SF: How has your style and sound evolved since your debut album, “Beams”?
KM: I think it’s evolved a lot. With “Beams,” we were sort of quiet and finding our feet in the band and there were a lot of directions that we sort of explored in that album. It’s quite a concept album if you listen to it. After doing that “Beams” for about three years, we got a strong sense of what were about and what worked well live. Our sound became a lot more streamlined and a lot more techno-oriented.
SF: What have you been working on since the release of your second album, “Apocalypso”?
KM: Well not much, but we’ve been touring for about a year now. We haven’t had much of a chance to do any Presets stuff. Actually, in the past few weeks we’ve been working on putting a new live show together for this tour that we’re doing in the U.S. We’re bringing in the new songs off the record that weren’t there last time and remixing older songs to make them sound more fresh.
SF: What do you enjoy most about tour?
KM: Seeing far-off, distant places is really great. Meeting lots of exciting people and bringing music to far corners of the earth is pretty great. It gets a bit hard when you’ve got girlfriends back home and your life is constantly on hold and being interrupted, but it’s still pretty cool. Also, going to crazy restaurants that you couldn’t go to back home. Like in Australia, it’s really hard to get good Mexican food whereas in the States, it’s pretty hard not to get good Mexican food.
SF: How do the fans in Australia compare to the fans in the U.S.?
KM: Australian fans are pretty scary, especially in certain parts of Australia—up the coast where all the surfers live. They have this kind of energy about them where you never know if you’re their best friend or they want to beat the shit out of you. Even during a show, they’ll be looking at you with the evil eye and fucking screaming and pointing at you—screaming so much that their veins are popping out of their neck and they’re getting really red. It’s that kind of like, “Fuck, yeah!” vibe. Afterwards, they yell at you and tell you that they really love you and stuff but it kind of comes across really aggressively. I mean, in the U.S. you might get that kind of really enthusiastic reaction, but I doubt it. After a show in America, they come up to you really quietly and shake your hand, saying, “Well, we really appreciate that you came here.”
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