"AS- Did you start out more as DJs or did you come at it from the rock/post-rock perspective and eventually incorporated more electronic elements?
JH- It was definitely rock, neither of us deejayed back then. Kim does now, I still don’t. I am a keyboard player first and foremost, I was trained as a piano player and I just fell into keys and then got into synths and that led to programming and production and all that feeds into the dancey, electronic aspects.
As classical musicians, we felt like computer music, in the classical world especially, was very exciting for us. Stockhausen and all those modern classical composers, the way they could create whole worlds on this computer. That was always very exciting for us. So that’s why we wanted to start making electronic music, at least.
As far as dance music goes…I think we just liked to dance, going to clubs, so it seemed like a logical thing to do.
AS- How would you characterize that time?
JH- I guess the first thing I think about is how quickly things went because we had been touring for so long. But also, socially here in Australia, I was looking at a lot of things myself lyrically. I was doing a lot of touring overseas, meeting so many beautiful people in the States, Europe and the UK but there were some things happening in Australia at that time that I wasn’t too proud of.
Social things, moral things. The terrible way we treat refugees and the indigenous populations the Aboriginees, race riots. I realized there was a lot of those things that people were aware of in Europe, and it didn’t make me feel that good about Australia. I wanted to put a little bit of that in the record.
The record is written at the end of the Howard era, our last PM, and he was a real creep. He really hurt this country so much. And it was a really bleak time to live in Australia. Thankfully its changed here. I was thinking about with Apocalypso, how at times with our government, the way this country felt, it did feel kind of like the end of the world when you watched the news. It did feel very cold, stark, pretty miserable place.