harvest interview: dark dark dark

We had a little chat with American folksters Dark Dark Dark in front of a backstage polo match at the splendiferously serene Harvest Festival. Their new album Who Needs Who is out now, and you can catch them at Sydney and Brisbane's Harvest legs this Saturday and Sunday (if the day is anywhere as sunny and frivolity-filled as the Melbourne shows were, we can highly reccomend it!) Tickets still available here.

Where do you guys live?

Nona: I live in Minneapolis and Marshall lives in New Orleans.

Marshall: It's like a 24-hour drive. They're the opposite: north and south. We're joined by the Mississippi River. She's at the source and I'm at the bottom. It's an accidental analogy!

How has where you grew up influenced you musically?

N: In Minneapolis there are a lot of stringed instrument players but people are interested in doing things aside from guitar. And I think growing up in that environment inspires people to learn a lot of different things and try a lot of different instruments. I started playing accordion later in life. I liked the sound of it, but I also found that it was easy to play. I already had the piano knowledge so it came kind of easily to me. It was fun to play and I wanted to play it all the time – that's a good sign for any instrument.

M: Most of the stuff we do is intuitive. It's kind of like we just ended up with our instruments. It's like with my playing the banjo – I tried to play guitar, but I'm not good at it.

N: We both taught ourselves those instruments, and I think when you approach a completely new thing, something that's foreign to you, and you have no influences, it's a good thing. Like I didn't have any accordion influences at that point. I hadn't grown up listening to Balkan music, y'know? And now I listen to a lot of Eastern European stuff.

How do you write your music when you live so far apart and there are so many other band members?

M: Nona primarily writes everything and the band arranges it.

N: I'm not used to being the centre of attention. I'm learning to live in that space. It's fun.

M: She never thought she had an excuse to be. It's just been a really cool period of Nona realising she had space to be an artist.

You guys have been involved in some pretty great art projects in the past too and there are some rad ones around the grounds of Harvest too. How do music and art coalesce in your eyes?

N: We just go where the wind takes us. I think an art project will come to us again and hopefully we'll have the time for it. For me, I express myself best with melodies. That just comes to me first. I think that the art, I have learned how to grow into the art installation side. But that's not really my thing as much. That's probably Marshal's influence more because he's more of a visionary person.

A visionary! That's a nice compliment, Marshall.

M: [laughs] I think it was an accident! She meant visual.

N: No, I meant visionary! Because you always have the ideas about art direction and you can see the bigger pictures and into the future and know how you want to represent us visually or in other ways. And I'm like, 'Oh, here's a melody that popped into my head...'

So what's your vision for the future then?

M: Living some kind of lifestyle or making some kind of art and doing it for a living. Sacrificing day jobs and bills and other home comforts and just becoming available to your art! I learned a lot of that stuff from some of those art projects. We came back from one of those Swoon projects and decided, 'Okay, we're going to go for it. We're going to try and do this, no matter what.' And that became Dark Dark Dark.