An interview with CS + Kreme

credit: Louis Horne

CS + Kreme are responsible for some of the most alluring music being made today. Since forming in Australia about ten years ago, the duo of Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel have taken sounds from dub, ambient, experimental and even folk forms and crafted delectable musical offerings with every release. Together we went in deep on their experiences in Australia’s music scene, their collective creative process, and more.

What are your earliest musical memories?

CS: There's a few. I remember seeing the video for “Beat It” by Michael Jackson, probably not long after it was released, and just having all these 'whoaaa - what are these feelings?' kind of feelings. Like just being so turned on in a non-sexual way, or maybe even in a sexual way? But just being so electrified by this force of Michael Jackson, seeing the clip in the pool hall with him in the red leather jacket with the zips - that was the beginning of everything for me. I seriously often think that I'm probably a musician now as a result of that moment.

A weird one, and sort of embarrassing, was 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel. That was on the radio a lot when I was about 5 or 6, and when it would come on I'd get super annoyed as I thought somehow that I'd written it, lol, and that Billy Joel had somehow lifted it from my brain and put it on the radio. You know how when you're a kid and fantasy and reality are so intermeshed? There was a thing that the doo-wop harmonies did to me that I couldn't explain - that same 'what are these feelings?' feelings. Obviously Billy Joel is one of the very worst to ever do it, but if that song was actually by a legit moody doo-wop group in 1961, we'd all love it. Great song.

I had older sisters growing up who had record collections and so I heard Eurythmics and Talking Heads and stuff like that. I remember listening to UB40's version of Red Red Wine and feeling very sad for the protagonist, lol.. I suppose from there the next major leap for me was hip-hop. That was maybe the first instance of music feeling like it was 'mine', and it was a fresh and new thing, and my parents hated it, and it was this militant, rebel music that really spoke to my 12 year old self, lol. Being a kid in the 80s lent itself to some good musical situations.

SK: I remember lying on a couch when I was super young listening to my dad play piano and falling in and out of sleep, whenever I hear Chopin it brings back a lot of comforting feelings because I'm almost certain he was playing a lot of Chopin’s Nocturnes at that stage. I also remember seeing a brass band in kindergarten and all the sounds were super intense and exciting to me, especially all the deep bass brass.

I understand both of you were in a number of projects prior to CS + Kreme. Did things feel different when you started working with each other?

SK: For sure, I'd just put on hold a project that I had been in for ten years prior. The name of the band was Bum Creek, which I was in with uni friends Tarquin Manek and Trevelyan Clay. We were a very wild sorta Fluxist improv band and our live shows were pretty notorious. We had a bit of a cult following in Melbourne. I think our second-to-last show was at the Museum of Contemporary Art (art bar) on the harbour in Sydney and we got grabbed by security while we were playing because we were really giving it to the corporate crowd and they started throwing shit at us and hurling abuse and vise versa. We were walked out of the venue by 4 burly security guards and door shut behind us with a distressed Japanese curator in dismay.

CS and Kreme was so chill comparatively after that, and to be honest me and Con weren't trying to be super aspirational in the early days. I was also working in a project called F Ingers with Tarquin and Carla dal Forno which was getting interest after Blackest ever Black put out our record. That took up my focus at that stage and there was definitely overlap.

But me and Con just kept on making music that was really really good, which kept on growing. A few years on it really started taking over. I was into just trying a different thing that wasn't so avant (back then anyway).  Also Con was a bit older than me so there was a difference in temperament, a new experience in collaboration. 

CS: Yeah, we've talked about this a bit in other interviews but basically we just had this instant chemistry which wasn't like my previous collaborations. I really credit Sam with sort of unlocking a different part of me as a musician. I was much more internally restricted previously, in the sense that I probably had more musical hangups, like 'oh well you can't do this and you can't do that, because xyz..' Sam brought a playfulness to the initial jams that we had, and slowly I sort of started to thaw. My background prior was really not particularly about 'enjoying the process'.

Were there any artists in the Melbourne music scene you interacted with early on? I know you’ve collaborated with James Rushford and Judith Hamann, who are both some of my favorite musicians out of Australia. 

SK: Really early on we worked a fair bit with a super saxophonist Jack Doepel. He was more on a Jazz tip which was sitting pretty with the kind of hazy more sexy music of the first EPs. Bizarrely we interacted with lots of YouTube rando soloists who we ripped down and would throw on top of songs. We always had a cheeky temperament from the beginning. Perhaps some of the original sampling is problematic in that it wasn't really altered much from the original and we would be happy to put large chunks layered onto the song from very famous composers. Nobody has ever said anything because the samples were used in sneaky ways. One of Con's 808 beats was from......actually I can't talk about that, crazy stuff.

It feels to me like your music has a foot in the experimental world and the more rhythmic, club-oriented music world. Coming up, were you guys more associated with experimental music or club music?

CS: I don't feel like either. It still feels the same to me though, we're always seeming to operate in that neither-here-nor-there world. I guess you could say we like playing 3D 'experimental music' (I hesitate with this term) through big club sound systems. Neither of us feel very bound by genre or anything - as long as what we do feels like an honest example of who we are, then it's all good. Maaaybe on the first EP's we were more associated with some version of club music as our label at the time, Total Stasis, was semi-associated with that woozy Vancouver club-not-club sound of the early 2010s. If we had've performed that stuff in a club though it probably would have gone disastrously. In those days we just did secret little shows outdoors, by rivers, guerilla style.

SK: My roots are from club world. In my late teens/ early 20s I was obsessed with Detroit Techno, that's all I listened too for a few years. I would go out dancing sober for 8 hours at a time on the regular when the DJs came through. I thought Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, DEC, Juan Atkins, UR, etc’s music was to die for. Then I went to uni and studied computer music / surround sound and my taste got weirder and weirder, and I was the happiest listening to a sample of a sound hack time stretched  Zipper sample. Then I was into punk for some time and wanted to get drunk and play in a band [laughs]. We both had such a varied musical previous life that I think naturally we just kept shit really open and let it happen as it did. I think that's why we have kinda come up with our own thing, just naturally.

I’ve read a lot of people talk about Snoopy in relation to the COVID lockdown, even though it came out right before. Why do you think it connected with people during that time?

CS: Yeah, it's really a happy accident with Snoopy. I suppose it's remembered as a lockdown or a COVID record, but when we made it there was no such thing as COVID. It just happened to be released in mid February 2020, when the shit was starting to hit the fan. It definitely signifies a big leap in our productions, and we were really excited to share that at the time. As to why it connected so deeply, I can't really say. I think CS + Kreme has a naturally 'internal' kind of feeling that just lent itself well to that situation. The record we made after that, Orange - that's really a lockdown record, as that's what was going on when we made it. Melbourne had a brutally long lockdown period compared to the rest of the world. Orange is 100% a product of those times. I really like that record but it sounds like proper COVID to me! Virus-y and paranoid.

SK: Yeah that's a real weird one, I mean it was just serendipitous. That said, the world was pretty fucked before covid. I remember feeling quite emotional when we were writing Snoopy. The weather and fires in Australia...fark...  general feeling was definitely soaking into the emotion of the music. Also, I think there is enough ambiguity left within the music so people can put their own feels onto it. That's super important. “Saint” feels like a Covid post apocalyptic anthem now, Cons lyrics are so amazing, but from memory it's more of an ego death vibe, not a world death vibe. But both work.

I hear a lot of disparate sonic elements in your work. How does your music usually come together? Do you start with the more electronic sounds and layer acoustic instruments over them?

CS: Really depends. A good case in point is “COTU” off the last record. That started life as this cult-y happy-clappy acoustic guitar thing that was almost Beatle-ish, and then we just took the scalpels out and devolved it until it sat right. We don't really have a set method of working but I suppose everything has to start from somewhere, so I guess it could be a beat or a bassline or a drone or an acoustic guitar or a loop or whatever. No rules.

SK: No rules really, things can get messy pretty quickly. We are often throwing things in and out with haste. Sometimes the original core essence doesn't make the final cut. We chisel away at it, and a happy accident might spin us in a whole new direction.

I loved hearing Bridget St. John on the last record. How did that come together?

CS: It's as simple as we just asked her! Our mate Justin Tripp from GEORGIA was working on a record that she was involved in, and he connected us as he knew we were huge fans. And it was just as simple as sending her an email and asking if she'd be down to do something. She came and saw us play in Brooklyn a couple of years ago and we ended up having lunch. I couldn't believe it. That's a really nice, surreal little blip in our catalogue - really proud of that. Cross-generational collaboration is fun.

SK: So crazy, but it goes back to that thing where we are thinking "what would be amazing for this song?" It needed some wise energy.The world's a small place and contact was surprisingly easy. 

I love all your album artwork, especially the one for Orange. How did you put that together? Would you say there’s an underlying visual aesthetic to your music?

CS: That's Will Bankhead (Trilogy Tapes)'s domain. All glory to him. He has an insane knack for capturing our records visually.

SK: It's important to mention Thomas Jeppe who did the art for the first two Eps. His simple vision really made the records set an immediate impression, they are stunning with their simplicity yet intrigue. Perhaps he set the tone.

Where did the title The Butterfly Drinks the Tears of the Tortoise come from?

CS: I think from being stoned watching a nature documentary a few years back? I filed that title away for later use and this latest record just ended up being the perfect time for it.

How did your approach to this most recent album differ from the previous ones?

SK: Hmm. I think more than ever we already had seeds germinated before we started. Con was coming up with these folky vibes and sending them through via mobile. We had also bought some new tech. We also had in mind that we wanted it to be shorter and be able to be listened too on rotation, a sorbet after Orange. Not sure that's were it ended up but that's the origins.

CS: We were perhaps cognizant that the last record was a difficult one so we deliberately lightened it up a bit this time. I don't really like to write with an audience in mind, and I wouldn't even say that we did this time around, but we were aware that it felt right to not get too heavy with this one. I love difficult records though and I'm sure there will be more of those. 

I loved the vocal samples on “Fly Care” and “Blue Joe.” What were some of the sample sources on the new album?

SK: So a bunch was actually from "Earth is Paradise" from Orange. I was cutting up and re-sampling Cons voice takes in effort to hear, in a place holder sense, how human voice would work. In the case of “Blue Joe,” which was the first song finished, we just kept the vox samples as it sounded simple and cool.

I understand your records come together through improvising and editing. How different does the music feel when you perform it live?

CS: Yeah, we’ve happened onto a new way of working now where we repurpose our studio tracks into sometimes unrecognisable live versions, so that they'll only really exist in that live space. That’s quite fresh for us at the moment, super fun. Nice to be free of the burden of being faithful to studio recordings. And then they just become their own thing, seemingly unrelated to the original seed. It's not exactly a new concept, it's just 'versioning', but that's what we're up to now.

SK: More and more, live and studio are two different beasts. Our music doesn't easily lend itself to immediate translation. For our latest set it was super nice as we just threw out the idea of recreation and remade some of the songs into new works. I'm finding this a nice way to work. The other thing is we never had the intention of "Horizontal" music being a fixation of the liveset. Often we get crowds sitting down before we play because of some of the descriptions floating about, but really this is the last place we want to be, our live set is hopefully dynamic and vivid. We are looking to effect the body and let you forget life for a second.

Do you have any interest in ever going on tours, or are you strictly focused on the studio?

CS: Yeah we definitely tour Europe quite regularly, or as regularly as we can, living in Australia, but we haven't done very much in America other than one tour in 2022. You're in Chicago right?

Yeah!

CS: We had a cool show there at the Museum Of Surgical Sciences. I really like it in the States and would love to return. It's just such a different landscape, in all senses. We are off to Japan again in a few weeks which is a whole other thing! Feeling very lucky to do this.

SK: Con really sums it up. I'm interested in going to China, Mexico and South America at some stage. I would love to at some stage in the future be able to have a method that lends itself to morphing our set into different realms depending on the actual venue. We are mildly improvised at the moment, but it would be nice to be super super free but confident of presenting a deep and engaging show. I do love the studio though.

Are there any artists you want to collaborate with in the future?

CS: I'm sure there's lots but maybe no one to be named explicitly just now. It would be amazing if we were brought in to work on some huge budget hip-hop record. Vegyn was telling me a while back about his time working on the last Travis Scott record. That sounds like a very wild world. 

SK: I'm not really sure at this stage, will likely be what the music is asking for.  I think we are going to try have a jam with Hino and Yuki (from Kakuhan) soon.  I'm excited not to be limited by any fixation, who knows.