It’s funny that in this day and age of instant gratification, there are still instances where inspired works of art seemingly don’t rip apart the collective imagination in one blazing moment, but slowly seep across the world instead, infiltrating infectiously.
The Sub’s debut album Subculture is one such work.
Released in 2008 in their home country of Belgium, Subculture was seminal then… and is just as seminal now in 2010, on the eve of its Australian national release.
Stand out track Mitsubitchi is testament to this: after all, what could be more timeless than taking a traditional European folk tune and fusing it with high frequency dance?
‘It was a little bit of a joke. It’s just this scale of folk music which I put through a dirty synthesiser,’ band member Jeroen De Pessemier said of Mistubitchi, which was originally written for the 10th anniversary of London’s famous club nights, Fabric.
Their other single, Kiss My Trance, is a similar sort of joke, a blatant parody of all that’s noxious about trance music made cool through a ballsy bass line, a blatantly sophisticated up yours to gurning glow-stick kids.
‘We didn’t have a purpose and that’s when the best tracks happen I think. It just happened more or less as a joke,’ De Pessemier laughed.
‘Sometimes we are just huge trance fans and its fun to make a track and to see how far we could take it without losing the credibility in it or just trying to do it in a way we liked it.
‘We kept it quite dry and very blah. I’m trying to fuck it up because I have this melody and we really like the melody, it was a beautiful melody, but it was like too cheese for us so we started to fuck it up as much as possible and that was the drive for us.’
This anarchic attitude permeates The Sub’s music, a punk aesthetic at odds with their childhood soundtrack comprised of Daft Punk, The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and smatterings of grunge.
Yet tearing things down and making them their own is what The Subs do best, De Pessemier’s approach to music akin to customising a pair of shoes: you have to mess them up just a touch to make them cooler.
‘If you want things your own way you’ll have to fuck them up a little bit.
‘That’s our attitude toward music. We try to have unique sounds. We don’t like preset sounds. Just customising, we really like it.’
Naturally, this rambunctious spirit goes into full assault at their live gigs.
‘The last gig I remember was already quite fun because I went into the audience and they started tearing off my clothes,’ De Pessemier chortled.
‘I was practically butt naked, really, because they could see my butt and they ripped apart my underwear so we took it and hung it up on the wall as some kind of token or Indian relic.’
So what’s the secret ingredient to The Subs inspired madness?
‘It just came from playing live, our music – we just don’t like it soft,’ De Pessemier said of their unique brand of dance music emblazoned with a punk attitude.
‘You know when dance music is too happy happy, joy joy or ping ping then we just don’t like it. We like it just a bit more hard.
‘And when playing live it just started to evolve and we did not know where it came from, it’s not really in anything because when I was young I grew up with grunge music and obviously we like that influence a lot but the punk came naturally.
‘You cannot tell that it came from this or that. Maybe it’s a result of the rainy clouds of Belgium.’
Or maybe it’s a sign of sheer brilliance.
Subculture is out now through Ministry of Sound. www.ministryofsound.com.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
