Name: Close Counters
Members: Allan McConnell, Finn Rees

Nationality: Australian
Current release: Close Counters' new album SOULACOASTA II is out February 15th 2023.
Recommendations: The book Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton is a fantastic Australian novel released in 2018 that is great fun to read.
The movie Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson is also a great movie that I keep coming back to, it has an incredible soundtrack that introduced me to a bunch of new 70s artists.

If you enjoyed this interview with Close Counters and would like to stay up to date with their music, visit the duo's official website. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

We started writing and producing music exactly a decade ago in 2013. At the time some big influences were the off-kilter beats of Flying Lotus and Samiyam - and also the dancey sounds of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and Bag Raiders.

[Read our Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs interview]
[Read our Bag Raiders interview]

We were fortunate enough to see Flying Lotus live that year at MONA museum in Tasmania, and we were super inspired by the importance of visuals and lighting in his live show.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

As we’re making music for dance floors, we’re definitely aiming to make music that invokes a physical response in the body - whether that manifests as a nod in the head / neck or getting up out of your seat and jumping around.

If we’re starting a song and one of these things happens that’s usually a pretty good sign that the groove is working!

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

Whilst we often make soulful house music, we’re always looking for new avenues to explore as part of our musical voice.

In the last few years, we’ve delved into producing more Broken Beat music - a style of music that originated in London in the 90s with producers such as Domu and Kaidi Tatham. It’s been a real exciting journey to experiment with different sounds and grooves from this culture.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

We have our identity as a duo within the Close Counters project, but separately we both work in other musical and artistic disciplines, which in turn helps feed the inspiration for writing and listening to new songs.

Allan works in mixing and mastering a number of local acts and has also started a new darker, uptempo solo project called Turbo Chook. Finn also plays in another band 30/70, and does artwork and animation under the moniker Piewack.

Through this alias, he’s done all the Close Counters artwork and tour posters, and has worked for a huge array of artists including Hiatus Kaiyote and Surprise Chef.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

We work by a mantra once given to us by local Naarm / Melbourne legend Chris Gill who is a radio DJ and owns the fantastic Northside Records.

The wisdom he imparted was “Be a freak, but never forget the dance floor”. This rang so true to us that it even made its way onto the artwork for our single GET DOWN! from the upcoming album.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

We definitely subscribe to both - when we’re creating music we do strive to be open-minded and original, but through the use of sampling we are often paying homage to older songs as well.

So in a sense we are definitely continuing a tradition, but with a slight re-imagining along the way.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

We definitely cherish our small collection of synthesisers and keyboards that we have in the studio. Our Nord keyboards have been handy as they’re fairly lightweight and versatile which means they can be taken out easily for tour shows, but recently we’ve been exploring the capabilities of our Prophet and also the Moog Grand Mother.

Our strategies usually include pushing the Moog to its limits with the fx that it offers and taking a voyage through the unlimited banks of unique sounds on the prophet.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

For a day that doesn’t involve a show, a day in the life usually involves going to our studio in Brunswick, Naarm/Melbourne - that we share with Allysha Joy and bassist Matt Hayes.

The studio is within a warehouse of a number of other creatives, that practice a number of different disciplines, including bespoke handcrafted cushions, and 3D printing. Downstairs there’s a small cafe run by our friends called New Age Coffee, so we almost always start our mornings there before working on tunes.

We then get stuck into some writing, and maybe take some breaks to go to get some food on Sydney Road, which is the main strip in Brunswick. In the evenings we’ll often be on the lookout for a local gig to go to, at venues such as The Night Cat and Section 8.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?’

With our new album SOULACOASTA II, we amassed a number of demos that had been written over a 4-5 year period and started to develop them a bit more solidly to form a full body of work. We used our first album SOULACOASTA as a template of sorts, aiming to achieve the same result of an album in which the tracks flow into each other as seamlessly as possible.

Once the album came close to a finish we picked the three singles for release, “SNAP TO IT! GET DOWN!”, “THE DON” and the focus track for the album - “ONLY ONE” featuring Melbourne soul band Izy. We then worked on accompanying artworks, visualisers and film clips for these songs to promote them.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

Since we are a duo, by nature, all of our music creation is done in a collaborative fashion. Often one of us will start a foundational demo that communicates an idea and bring it to the studio to be worked on together.

We’ve also extended this collaboration to many more degrees, often working with feature vocalists including Allysha Joy and Jay Gabriel - and doing remixes for acts including Young Franco, Denzel Curry and Bag Raiders.

[Read our Denzel Curry interview about Death, Creativity, and Luke Skywalker]
[Read our Denzel Curry interview about the Relation between Beats and Lyrics]

For these joint efforts there’s really no formula that we subscribe to; some songs we’ve started with the collaborator with a blank canvas and come up with a whole song, other times someone has started the basis of an idea and brought it to a vocalist to write to.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Music plays such a vital role in society, for not only its entertainment value, but its ability to express cultural identity and unite groups of people together.

We’re super lucky to be creating in the digital age and be able to hear and share our music to various pockets of the globe, and also to travel and perform to unique live audiences on the dancefloor with both our DJ and live sets.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

You could probably write a thesis on this question haha… We believe art definitely can be a channel through which we express and process thoughts, feelings and ideas about life and these big topics. It wouldn’t be so important otherwise and we wouldn’t be so driven to create it.

Our passion for music formed through childhood and through teenage years, dealing with constant changes in the world, relationships, body, mind etc. and into our adulthood, so naturally sign posted many big events.

Finn: Recently around Christmas, I played some carols on my grandmother's age care home’s piano for some of the residents. Most of the elderly people were listening along quietly, but in the last song an old man with severe dementia started singing in such a soft and sweet voice. He couldn’t remember most things in life but knew every word and note of “Silent Night”. That kind of sums it up.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

Well, the word ‘music’ can be traced back to … meaning ‘mother of science’.

For us as producers, we see music as a bit of a connection between art and science - and the two overlap. Exploring electronic and acoustic recordings is constantly fascinating and reveals how there are infinite options for creating sound.

Having an understanding of Science can help understand how things work and help create pathways to achieve new sounds. But at the end of the day music is emotional and spiritual and meant to be imperfect. You have to forget about the maths and science sometimes to let it flow out of your body.

We’re really just creating vibrations through the air.  

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Haha it’s chalk and cheese really. Music is limitless expression, making coffee is quite limited expression. It’s quite obvious

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it’s able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Well I think music making for many people is the act of asking this kind of question over and over in our craft. Through trial and error we find new answers every time, that’s what keeps us going. If we had a good explanation for this then we’d probably go about things in a different way.

For some people the music industry is probably searching for recognition and to satisfy the ego. But to focus on transmitting ‘deep and diverse messages’ is probably a better way to go.