A belated congratulations for the release of Off The Edge of The Earth and Into Forever, Forever late last year! For people who may have been living in the wilderness and haven’t heard it yet, can you tell us a little about the album?
It’s a fun little journey through time and a reflection of what Art vs Science was doing for most of 2014 and 2015.

What ideas and inspirations did you draw upon for this record?
I guess it’s kind of a mixture of hedonism in going out and spirituality in trying to be good! I think that’s the catholic guilt in us. Mix that with our lifestyles and then you’ve got a little bit of what the album is doing. I think it’s fairly introspective but then at times it looks outwards as well. I’m not sure, better just to listen to it.

We hear you were a bit more hands-on with the production of this album, is that true?
In a sense, for the first time we brought pre-formed things into the professional studio! I’m actually a trained audio engineer and we just thought to save a bit of money we’d start doing some stuff ourselves so we finally bought some decent recording gear and turned one of my parent’s bedrooms into a vocal booth and did the vocals for some of the tracks in their house. I think that’s a trend we’re going to go even more towards just because you can do so much at home and you get better at it each time.

Sounds like a great experience.
Yeah, it was hard but it was definitely a great learning experience as well for the band.

Rolling Stone described the album as rock songs with an electronic edge, is that how you would categorise your music?
Definitely, that’s always been our objective. Someone in the early days described us as AC/DC with keyboards but this last album was probably more like Sabbath with keyboards. In the space we are in, there are a lot of influences coming in together to make a complex palette of sounds at times, which I think is reflective of this stage of our lives and how our influences are melding together. I reckon we’re going to go ultra simple for the next one.

Awesome! Do you have a planned date for the release?
Not at all. We’re planning a bit of a US jaunt halfway through the year so I think it will be nice to have maybe an EP out before then so we have something really fresh when we get there. Sometime this year I think we’ll have another release.

Take us back to the beginning, how did Art vs Science come about?
Basically, in Jim the keyboard player’s garage. We played in a rock band together and didn’t really do much with keyboards and one day we were messing around on this really crappy old Yamaha kids keyboard and plugged it into Jim’s massive guitar amp and it sounded pretty cool. My mate from school is a promoter, he’s head of Falcona now but back in 2008 he was running Sosueme. in Sydney and someone pulled out of the headline spot so he called me to see if my old band could play. That band was on the way out and the bass player was overseas so I told him that we couldn’t play with that band but we’ve got a new thing that could work. He asked if we had enough material for a headline spot and I sort of just lied and said yes. We got into Dan’s garage and busily wrote a bunch of songs and called ourselves Art vs Science and that was it really. We played the gig and it went really well, when people started coming in to the room instead of leaving it we knew we were on a good thing.

Did the fact that you had the gig booked help or hinder the writing process?
I think it helped. We’d probably done a hundred gigs around Sydney in the old band and probably another fifty or so with just Jim and I playing acoustic covers so we weren’t strangers to having a live audience. It was really fun actually because we weren’t writing to record something or achieve a specific thing, we were just writing songs to play to an audience for 45 minutes. Actually I kind of miss those days because we didn’t have any hits so there weren’t any songs we were expected to play, everything was new. It was a nice time in my life.

Since then you’ve gone on to achieve immense success as a band. What have been some of the major career highlights?
I think playing at Falls Festival at Marion Bay over New Years was probably a major career highlight. We had played at Falls Festival in Lorne in the past but I felt like I didn’t quite give it enough, I don’t know if the people who saw us want to hear this! I normally have this superstitious thing where I always walk around in the crowd before hand and I always wear the same pants I am going to wear on stage and a bunch of other things I do which tend to make sure I have a good set but I forgot for some reason. So we came into the Marion Bay one thinking we really want to smash this. We also tweaked the set a bit and made it more high energy all the way through. Each show is like a footy match and you either win or lose. Even when we lose, generally we play everything quite well and the audience is happy but when we win, there’s this extra element. We won at Marion Bay.

You’re coming to the Gold Coast for OzFest on Australia Day weekend. What are you most looking forward to doing while you’re in town?
Having a swim! Basically just visiting the beautiful beaches and anything else that gets recommended to us. I haven’t been to the Goldie for a while so I’m looking forward to it. What should we do?

Check out The Weekend Edition Gold Coast, that will sort you out with places to eat and drink and things to see and do!

In March you’re embarking on an album tour, what’s the best and worst part about being on the road?
I think the best part is that you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do that day. As a musician you generally have a free schedule and you can do as much or as little as you like so you have to make sure you’re doing stuff otherwise you become a sloth and get depressed. When you’re on tour, you don’t have that concern because each day you go somewhere and you check-in and do all of your jobs, you hang out with your friends, you play a show and that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can sort of switch off a bit and let the world change around you. The downside is you’re away from your girlfriend. Touring is fun when you’re single but I’m much more enjoying having a girlfriend at the moment.

Who has the worst habit?
We all have one or two things that piss each other off. Dan snores, Jim likes to annoy people by being overly friendly and I like to wander off and meditate so I am sometimes late for things.

If you had to choose, would it be art or science?
I think science, because true science is discovery and so is making music. Music is a form of science because you go on stage and you’re watching the audience, seeing what works well and what doesn’t work, it’s kind of like an experiment. A lot of what everyone does every day is a replica of something they have heard or seen in the past that has gotten some sort of response.

Any words to live by?
Get plenty of exercise. I completely quit pot about two-months ago and about five or six weeks into it I got really sad because this part of my life wasn’t there any more and exercise was really one of the best things just to bring back the colour into the world. I also meditate. Even if you’re not a spiritual person it’s a pretty good thing just to be able to sit down and concentrate on one concept for 20-minutes because when you do, you realise how crazy your mind is most of the time. It’s like a little monkey with ADHD looking at things and then another thing, the thoughts are so widespread and scattered it’s hard to make sense of them. As it turns out, all those things that people say are really good for you are actually really good for you! And go vegan! Or at least get your meat from free range places.