SLUMBERJACK Interview - A Rising Musical Powerhouse
Meet Morgan & Fletcher the legends behind hard hitting super producers SLUMBERJACK! Over the past 3 years the duo have blown us away with killer tunes, and epic performances! We had a chat with the boys from Perth before they headed out on their 'Fracture' tour.
Futuremag Music: How did you move into music initially?
Fletcher: I always thought I wanted to do film when I was growing up, I was obsessed with it. When I was around 14 or 15, I started to realise I was more interested in the music side of things. I tried my hand at a few different programs but I ended up settling on Ableton. I’ve learnt my skills, like how I do everything through trial and error, and tinkering. When I met Morgan, he’d never really used Ableton before, and I didn’t know anything about music theory, so we helped each other out. We both have a deeper understanding of each other’s worlds, and I think it really reflects in our music creation. It’s nice having that dynamic to spread our skills across two people.
Morgan: As Fletcher said, I never really delved into production until I moved to Australia, because I couldn’t buy a keyboard. Luckily, I had a friend who lent me his guitar, because I was so close to being, “Like I’m out… I don’t want to be in music anymore.” I was inches from accepting my fate. That friend who gave me the guitar is very dear to me, they somewhat saved me. I remember going to a department store, and saw the DJ/ Production department, and I bought Logitech Express or something, I went home and just started recording. I didn’t know much about samples or loop packs, because most of my background is live music recordings. I was even recording my guitar with the headphone jack! It sounded really bad. After meeting Fletch we did a bit of a trade off, he taught me about production and a sense of musicality, and I taught him about music theory.
Futuremag Music: How did you two meet?
Fletcher: We actually met at a DJ competition. I think I won it in 2011, and Morgan won it in 2012. We were both sussing out the competition, and we decided to hang out a bit after that.
Morgan: Fletch pretty much summed it all up.
Futuremag Music: When did everything start falling into place?
Morgan: I think it happened both externally and internally. Internally, I think things started to come together when we hopped into the studio with Mr Carmack, when he came to Perth. He showed us the super secret production secrets. I’ll tell you now, there’s no secret! Just do what you want to do, don’t care what everyone else does. You do you. Externally, I think it was when Triple J started to support us, our single was on spot rotation, but it was that boost we needed.
Fletcher: For me it was the both our studio session with Mr Carmack, and the Triple J support. On top of that it really dawned on me when everything started to fall into place when we first heard our tracks being played in a club. A shout out to the World Bar in Sydney for sparking that life changing moment for me. It was the lovely Nina Las Vegas who played it, and gave us a shout out. We were both like, “Wow… we made it, people are actually playing our songs in clubs.” It was a big moment for us because people were listening to our music besides our mums.
Futuremag Music: Your most recent release is the Fracture EP, how did you meet Vera Blue, Sydnee Carter, and KLP?
Fletcher: Ahhhh, funny story! We love rocking up to people’s houses when we’re meeting them for the first time. That’s what we did with KLP, she’s lovely and really fun; we recorded some stuff with her and we hang every time we go to Sydney or whenever she comes to Perth. She’s super professional as well, she turns around stuff super quickly.
Morgan: With Vera Blue, we heard her on the radio, and we decided to go to her show, then we just hooked up. It happened so quick! She’s gonna be a superstar, she’s going to be huge in Australia, she’s going to be huge all around the world, she’s amazingly talented. We love hanging with Vera Blue, we just get along really well.
For Sydnee Carter, we met her at Singapore, we saw her at the, “Music Matters Conference: The Australian BBQ,” and we found out she was from Perth. We all hooked up when we were back home, went to the studio; we recorded ‘Afraid, Unafraid’ in one day, we smashed it out!
Futuremag Music: What can we expect from the Fracture tour? A little bird has told me it’s going to be out of this world!
Fletcher: It’s going to be an amazing show, we’ve already experienced the crowd’s response from Groovin The Moo. In the past, we used to DJ and played songs that we vibed at the time; yeah we played our songs but we played a lot of our friend’s music, and a lot of the stuff we found on the web. For the ‘Fracture’ tour we have 90% of our own stuff, this is really exciting for us. We’ve reworked all our studio recordings into live versions of our tracks.
Morgan: We also have a visual aspect that’s all our own. The visual side began when we decided we wanted at a live show, we decided it needed another component. We have the skills and the necessary know how to make it happen on our super PC. The live show was sort of tested at GTM, in one corner there was a death pit, which was sorta weird for our music, in the other corner there were people vibing and partying hard, then in the middle were people balling their eyes out.
Futuremag Music: If you could make a cocktail called “SLUMBERJACK” what would you put into it? To best describe you and your music.
Morgan & Fletcher: RUM!
Morgan: Rum, definitely rum and maybe something spicy, and minty.
Fletcher: It would be Asian influenced, it would be a spicy cocktail. You’re a bartender on the side, we’ll leave it up to you to create it for us!