Issue #003 (March 2003) Toby1 Interview Email this article to a friend By Paul Armour “With the sublime vocals of classically trained Ruth Wilson and the innovative production style of Duann Scott, Toby1 is laptop rock”, or so says the press release that came with the CDR fresh from the mastering studio. ‘I think its still warm from coming straight out of the burner’ says Duann as he passes the disc too me… What’s with the name Toby1? DS: Well there are two stories to the name, or should I say two lies to it. The first is that I was going to name my first-born child Toby-one, but no woman in her right mind would run with that. The other story is the obvious Star Wars connection, but as you know there is a band called Kinobe and we thought Toby1 plus Kinobe what a perfect double billing one day, and we would get first rank, because Kinobe plus Toby1 just doesn’t sound right at all! Really, the name for my first-born will be Nacho Gonzales…truly! Actually, we had this gig booked at Minke Bar in Adelaide and at this stage we were Duann and Ruth or Ruth and Duann, which didn’t really work. We had a deadline for the press for the gig and we came up with it in the heat of the moment! Laptop rock hey? Live you sound very much like a complete band but it’s just you two, a lappy, violin, flute, mic and other random noise generating devices. Can you explain your live set up? DS: Yeah that’s us; I am hoping to define the genre that we started. RW: Little people behind the screens do all our work for us, the computer controls them and damn, they’re good! DS: When we started out I had a lot of analogue instruments synced live and running through a sequencer. That got cut back because it was getting too chaotic and out of control hauling the gear around; it was temperamental in good and bad ways, but basically it gave me the shits. I love my laptop. Ruth sings live and plays various instruments, depending on what she can be bothered bringing along. So it is “band” music in a way because all the sounds are live when we recorded them, the bass is fingers on strings, no sequencing, it is us playing. We have a back-of-the-house-studio number with our lovely mixing desk and all our instruments set up, always ready to rock! We run everything into Protools, so I can multi track all the elements, and mix them together. For live performances, I like remixing, tweaking and making sure the effects are right for the room we are playing in. RW: Usually Duann will have something and pass it onto me. I like to improvise and do a lot on the spot. That is generally where the track starts and we just expand from there. Another way we work is when I have a song laid down and Duann reworks it until it sounds nothing like it started. That is normally the gauge as to when it’s sounding good, otherwise we would still be mixing and playing around and never get around to putting down anything final. Are there any plans for the complete Toby1 band? DS: Not right now. That would be the ideal plan, but at the moment the live the band is a laptop, Ruth and her assorted instruments, and me. It’s easier, simpler and a hell of a lot more fun for us. How do you describe your sound? RW: That’s a crap question and I hate it!. It’s Jazz, pop, folk, rock, electro… DS: The easiest shortcut would be compare it to someone else, and people have been saying that it’s somewhere between Portishead and Björk, with a bit of Moloko thrown in on the side. RW: The automatic assumption is that you are therefore a lesser version because you are merely just a copy…it doesn’t work for me. DS: It could be worse, we could be getting 1992 Iggy Pop comparisons. The exciting thing for us is that all our projects are so diametrically opposed musically: there’s the stripped back acoustic folk of Ruth's solo work, there’s the experimental stuff I do, and then the Modular electronica thing. When we come together all these different tangents converge and create the Toby1 sound. You have an album about to come out? DS: Cracks Increase, our debut. One of our songs is called “Cracks and Creeps”, and one day I thought it was called “Cracks Increase” and it stuck. It is going to be released through Surgery in February and we will be touring it through the East coast, which is pretty exiting. We are getting some remixes done by Scalene, who toured Australia last year; Mitchell Akiyama and DJ Luv are giving their treatment to some of our tracks, hopefully to be released on the C0C0S0L1DC1T1 label. Have you guys been in a few other bands/acts together before Toby1? RW: Masongreystrange. There is a real estate agent in Adelaide called Mason Gray Strange so people thought we were taking the piss, but actually we were using that name first, so there! DS: Masongreystrange was purely peripheral, we practiced occasionally and when we got gigs we’d get drunk and you know, do the rock thang. The drummer Jamie would usually strip at the end of the gigs…Jamie actually did the fantastic artwork for the album, oh what a beautiful tie in! Jamie introduced us to each other way back in the 90s sometime…that part is all a bit hazy. RW: As all great band stories go we broke up! Zak moved to Melbourne and Jamie went overseas. Everyone split except Duann and I, so we kept on collaborating. I’d write songs and Duann would bastardise them. DS: We weren’t going to do anything with the songs, but one week after The Minke Bar in Adelaide opened we got thrown in the deep end and had a gig. With three minutes of useable material we had a week to get a live set together. In that week we came up with about seven of our tracks, all quality of course! We continued to play predominantly at Minke and then Triple J recorded us, and later Surgery were keen to sign us up. It has all unfolded kind of quickly. We only function with pending deadlines, you see. That brings me to Modular, the other incarnation under which you perform and produce. DS: That’s how the Surgery connection came about. We were going to do another Modular album, but it fell through and so the Toby1 project naturally landed in the waiting room to be consulted. Modular was a completely improvised electronic outfit, using experimental home made gear based on sequencers we found in a Cash Converters bin at three in the morning one day. We found seventeen Sega systems, which then became 16 step sequencers, and they were the basis for all our instruments and sounds. Modular was a project with Reece, who is an electronic wiz, and me. It was always more personal interest and an experimental act than a listening project. It was fantastic fun, but it was better in theory that in practice, Modular was the Communism of electronic music! We had some nice old 70s analogue gear but the problem was it would take an hour to pack the gear, hours to set all the gear up, then you had to sync it all together, another hour too break it down and then about a week to get all the gear running again in the studio, so it wasn’t practical. That’s why it’s laptop rock for me! When we split we divided the equipment up, and that became the electronic component of Toby1. Reece has the rest of the babies and I don’t get to see them much anymore…I miss my children. I hear that Ruth and Reece went out together…what a bizarre love triangle Toby1 and Modular was! RW: There was a period when we were all living in the same house together. Duann had a bed-sit studio in one corner, which he shared with some mice. We had a hose running from the kitchen hanging from the roof as our shower. There was a freak with a crazy barking dog in one part of the house and Reece and I in the other part. Duann was continually working with both of us at the same time, so it was quite a productive space to be in, even if it was a total mad house.