Interview by KAREN MURPHY

“The biggest problem that we faced in creating this record this time is that we never had the opportunity to black out an extended period of it to complete everything in one hit,” says Daniel Cunningham from Sydney band, PARADES, currently touring the country with their latest album ‘Foreign Tapes’. “By the time it was finished we had to go through all the bureaucracy of finding someone to release it. To compound everything there were so many other things going on around that time that needed attention as well – work, touring, and a whole other musical project within this one. Everything came together eventually, but in dribs and drabs. The next record will be done very differently to the way we did this one.”

With the album having a strong electronic focus, the band ran into problems adapting it for the live stage. “Trying to round up extra hands and voices to recreate the layering on the album has become a total nightmare,” Cunningham says, “logistically speaking. It’s always exciting to have friends come and help out but everyone’s availabilities are always so different. Essentially, we’ve overcome one problem and created several more. But that being said, giving the record a title was pretty painless. There was a short list of roughly 10 or 15 potential titles that we’d come up with, and amazingly we all agreed on one pretty quickly.”

And the problems didn’t stop there; bringing to the table a whole bag of creative inspiration, every member of the band wanted to have their own two cents worth on the sounds for this new album. “It’s a four pronged attack on every level,”  Cunningham says. “Everyone has their own ideas about how things should sound within a collective vision, which is definitely something we all encourage each other to go for. All in all, it was about half and half really…some songs were written entirely in a jam situation, others were quickly assembled live with the rest of the groundwork being completed in a computer box. It helped that we had one space for all applications, we basically had free reign over our time and what we choose to work on and how hard. If things are starting to get messy at shows, we’re able to head back into the space and fine tune it back to a higher standard.”

Although, after all that work and the little arguments that crop up along the way, a record is finally made, to hold and cherish. Or to download. “For me personally, I think having a physical copy of something you truly love listening to is hugely important for so many reasons,” Cunningham says. “But having said that, I have no qualms with downloading music whatsoever. I guess it’s just hard to pick one definitive point in time that sums up our most memorable moment… I think the fact that we actually went on our own tour in support of it was totally surreal. I never thought we’d get that far, nor did I think we’d ever have an album to begin with.”

And the shows themselves? Well…“at live performances our fans like to fold their arms and look grim, it’s absolutely mental,” Cunningham says.

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