Midnight In A Perfect World

Australia’s favourite DJs, ITM50 champs The Aston Shuffle, are gearing up to release their debut LP. One half of the duo, Vance Musgrove, gives us the guided tour of ‘Seventeen Past Midnight’.

‘I Wanna See You': This track predated working on the album proper, but we always felt it had an 'opening track' vibe about it. It's very dancefloor oriented without being overly cheesy, which is pretty much what we always try to achieve.

'Bring It Back': It's very stripped back... We tend towards layered, thick, textured sounds, so to have a track that was pretty much about the bassline riff and nothing else was very refreshing to us.

'The Surface': This song has actually been gestating for a long time. This track and 'Into Forever' most clearly show the overall theme we were aiming for with this album, which was a sense of optimism and uplifting hopefulness.

'Your Love': It's about trying to create a feeling, a vibe, a particular kind of mood. Obviously this is a more upbeat dance track... but not super aggressive. There's a lot of (super aggressive dance music) out there and it has its time and place. But we’ve always shied away from it because it's not us and it's not a message we'd ever try to send.

'Where Are Your Teeth': The name is completely random... But this track is us in party jam mode. We wanted to make something that was very carefree and on that up and happy tip, and a little bit girly as well.

'Do You Want More': This was actually our very first foray into the world of pop records. It's a collaboration with a singer from the UK called Danimal Kingdom. It's very much a vocal, poppy track, but it's rooted in dance music as well. The one thing we always kept as a reference point for everything was, 'is it dance music?' R&B dudes are doing dance music these days, and it seems to be something everyone wants a piece of, but at the end of the day, audiences are not stupid. Audiences can sense the authenticity in something. If we're trying to be something we're not, we might as well go and become bankers.

'Round And Round': There was something that always struck me about that sample [‘Round And Round’ samples The Go-Betweens’ ‘Streets Of Your Town’]. The thing that tends to appeal about a good sample is that you could just loop it and never get bored with it.

'Start Again': It's a collaboration with a band called Lovers Electric; it’s actually the next single. It's got that optimistic streak... It's quite uptempo as well, but it doesn't stray into 'huge' territory.

'Drop’: We knew we had to have a straight-up club banger on there; something that's just unashamedly, completely electronic. It's definitely got its influences in some older, more obscure stuff. It’s a bit of an homage to these old techno records we play at 3am in the morning at a club when we're really drunk, and nobody gets them because they're so weird and obscure.

'Anticipointment’: We coined that word in the process of writing this song. I'm trying to put this in a way that doesn't sound bitter or cynical, but basically, there were a lot of collaboration offers we put out into the world, and 99 per cent of them didn't come through. So we ended up writing a song about that sense of anticipating something and ending up completely underwhelmed.

'Amaze': This is the closest thing to a full-on downtempo moment on the album, but it's not filler. It's a song in its own right. It might be my favourite song on the album, actually.

'Into Forever': This is the first of two tracks we did with Nik (Yiannikas) from Lost Valentinos. It's very much a dancefloor kind of song with an anthemic quality to the chorus.

‘Seventeen Past Midnight’ drops on April 15 through Downright. The Aston Shuffle play The Met on Friday April 1. For the full transcript, pick up Junior #4 or head to junioronline.com.au