Pip Duvall: Earthcore is never a full time thing to us and despite popular belief we’ve never made enough money to exist entirely off it, so I’ve done every other kind of job you can possibly imagine over the last ten years, as most artists end up doing.
T: How do you go about choosing a musical ethos or viewpoint for each gig?
P: There is a little bit of a style thing where we have a vision of how the overall event goes. It almost like a vibe where nights kind of build up; you have peaks and so on and then smooth out at the end, and that’s reflected in the style of music. If you could say that we had some kind of formula as such then this is how it goes; we try to start off with more breaky beats early on and then build up throughout the night to much more pumping techno. Mornings turn a bit tranceier and then usually go more progressive. Being able to offer the diversity of music is important. To a lot of people it may not seem diverse but then to the people who have been with us for a long time and been to a lot of our events, the styles are really different on all the stages.
T: The main floor at the Mitchell River Earthcore had the feel of a giant rock gig, with the separation between stage and crowd really strong. Was that deliberate?
P:We have moved more towards the stage, but a lot of that’s been driven by the acts. For the last few years we’ve had bigger acts such as Juno Reactor, Sun Project and The Orb whose physical stage presence is so huge. We’re talking up to eight people with African drummers doing flips on the stage: to fit that sort of thing you need a huge stage and stages don’t come in small, medium and large; they come in big, or BIG. The type of act we’ve been getting has pushed us towards that kind of big, rock stage presence which is interesting because a lot of people originally got interested in this type of music because there was no stage. When we first started having parties, we used to have the DJ in this box that no-one even noticed. The nature of the act is a large part of it but also I think the important thing to remember is that while dance culture started out by moving away from the show gig, their audiences are desperate for one. Performers who stand there with headphones on, never look and up and turn a knob – that’s not a performance, regardless of how great the sound is. That’s why people love acts such as Sun Project: they’ve forgotten how great a stage show can be.
T: So do you think a psy-trance or electronica performer can add to the crowd’s enjoyment of a set by incorporating real-life analogue instruments?
P: I think it does almost automatically just because they have to make physical movements and people can see that some guy pressing a button is no big ticket. It gets back to that primal thing, like someone grinding their hips on stage back in the fifties causing a revolution: people still want to see that type of thing. I saw a video of Lab4 a while ago, where you have two big dudes who pander to the crowd and they love it. They put their hands in the air and the crowd goes wild That’s all they have to do to get a response? It’s a joke.
T: You’ve managed to put on so many outdoor events where a lot of other crews have come and gone. How?
P: Because we do it by the book. We get permits for everything. We didn’t initially, but we do now. We work very closely with all the various authorities for years now, like the CFA, the Police, the SES, the council and the Ambos. We’re not squeaky clean, I mean we’re putting on events that are meant to challenge people and we try to do things that are a bit outrageous and getting permits for things like fire shows were serious challenges. It’s very hard to do but we put a lot of effort into doing it that way.
T: Your advertising and marketing has always been a little bit different to other crews. Is there any particular reason behind that?
P: Well we’re doing this because we like it, and part of the enjoyment is creating something interesting. Spiro and I don’t agree on everything, but one of the things we do agree on is that we always try to create something new and exciting, both for ourselves and for the people that come. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve survived; we’ve made and lost serious amounts of money, had venue changes and all manner of disaster you can possibly imagine but we’ve still tried to put on interesting things that appeal to a range of people. It’s not about making people dress a particular way or act another way; the events should always appeal to a huge amount of people, particularly people who may not already be into techno.
T: How large do you expect future Earthcore gigs to get?
P: Pretty big. In fact, bigger than the millennium gig…. I mean the millennium one wasn’t actually that huge in numbers, but in terms of what was on offer; it was spread over 7 days…. we’ve done our share of 5 or 7 day events and they’re just absurd. They’re fun, but not for us when we’re running them. I don’t think we’d like to do another one that big unless there was a 2 day break in the middle.
Published in Rabelais.