At 8pm on a chilly Tuesday evening, I catch drummer, Dan Williams from Art Vs Science, amidst band practice at Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory in Sydney.

The phone line is bad, due to the shotty reception in Sydney’s famous underground club, but I can still hear what I imagine to be a spring in Dan’s step, and only 2 days since their second Splendour appearance, who can blame him?

Art Vs Science has only existed for 18 months, but the band’s Triple J’s Unearthed win last year and solid party sound has thrown them into accelerated success, with handfuls of festival appearances and now a national tour under the belt. Despite this, Dan speaks of pre-show nerves that won’t quit, and really, it’s quite humbling.

AvsS on nerves:

I would like to say that we were less nervous at this year’s splendour than last year, but we weren’t really! I have a pre-show ritual, which is half an hour of pacing… to no where in particular, then I go to the bathroom a few times. Sometimes we don’t even talk to each other at all for the half an hour before the show, because I just freak out and things get strange.

AvsS on commercial VS indie ethic:

When writing music, we just try to please ourselves. We just try to write music we think would be fun to hear at a nightclub or at 3am in your headphones on a bus, we don’t really think about it in a commercial vs indie ethic or anything like that.

AvsS on soft synth programs VS analogue sounds:

We use a whole bunch of crappy keyboards, and the bigger sounds are the keyboards played through the big guitar amps. As we get ever more ambitious, we are adding more keyboards to the stage to make even stranger sounds.

My late uncle left me a Ensoniq SQ1 keyboard in his will, and me and my friends were messing around with it about 18 months ago and found all these really bizarre sounds that we thought were super fantastic – so we thought we would start a band.

We are always in search for new strange sounds, although I guess we don’t have enough equipment to sample stuff yet – actually I don’t think that that’s a path that we really want to take, in terms of playing with laptops and stuff. I guess we are fearful of creating sounds in the studio that we can’t reproduce live. Instead, we have a very simple ethic, we don’t like to make things too complicated.

We also only have so many hands and so many feet, so there are a limited number of sounds you can make.

AvsS on the French language:

Funnily enough I don’t speak a word of French. I can barely remember any French words we put in the song (Parlez vous Francais).

The other Dan (Dan Mac, guitar, keys, vox) went to France on exchange when he was about 14, and he has very limited grasp on French, ironically the only phrase he knew how to speak was ‘do you speak French.’

When releasing the song we had concerns over whether our grammar was initially correct, we were afraid that we might have made the line, ‘do you speak French, and if you do, then take off your shirt’ gender specific, like we were addressing it to the males in the audience – and that was not our intention! It’s meant to be a universal kind of question. So we went to see a French teacher and has it all okayed.

People still complain to us that the lyrics aren’t grammatically correct.

AvsS on creating club hit ‘Parlez vous Francais:

We were messing around one day and swapping instruments, because the other Dan likes to think that he can play the drums, and I like to think I can play the keyboard. I think I had too much coffee that day and had like a spasm in my hand and pressed all these notes at once, and then we came up with a riff. So the song was born out of a spasm really.

AvsS on our nation’s capital

The times we’ve played Canberra, it’s always been ANU Bar but it’s a cool place and I’m not sure what’s in the water there, but all you people seem to like dance music very much.

Last time we went there people were throwing socks on stage and I don’t know what that was meant to mean, but it was good for us, because touring you have a lot of dirty clothes and we value clean ones. So if anyone wants to throw clean pairs of socks at us this time around, that would be greatly appreciated.

AvsS on what we get for our $15.05 + bf?

You get a cultural education in a few grammatically poor French phrases.