Katching Up With The Resin Dogs
By: Matt Innes
Resin Dogs have been a proud staple of the local and national music scene since releasing their ground-breaking debut album, ‘Grand Theft Audio’ fifteen years ago.
Combining sampled beats with live instrumentation and vocals, ‘Grand Theft Audio’ epitomised the burgeoning Brisbane hip hop scene and is considered a seminal record. For Resin Dogs core member and turntable maestro, DJ Katch aka Andrew Garvie the album conjures more mixed emotions.
“I don’t really look at it like that,” he says. “To me, going back and listening to that record gives us a bit of a cringe factor because of the way we recorded it. There wasn’t laptops where you could have 48 or 96k sound through an interface; we were using 1MB floppy disks, maybe a sampler with 12 seconds.
“Back then we did a lot more chopping and there’s definitely a lot of ground-breaking stuff that went into putting that record together, but it wasn’t as obvious to a lot of people. Being sample-based music and then recreated as a band; there wasn’t too much of that happening, not that I saw and especially in my travels.”
Since then, Resin Dogs have become mainstays of electronic hip hop, boasting a steady output of both studio material and until recently, live performances, with members branching out into other various musical projects.
“We did an EP at the end of 2013, ‘Still The Beats’ which featured an artist, Dialectrix and Hau who does ‘The Hip Hop Show’ [on Triple J]. So we did that with some remixes as well but we hadn’t been doing a lot of shows because we’d been working on other projects; Dave [Atkins] was working as the drummer for Wolfmother and others, and I was just DJing a lot and hanging out.”
It should come then as a resounding delight to their loyal fans to know Resin Dogs are in the process of reconstructing and reinvigorating themselves, including more live shows and even a new album.
“We’re just slowly getting the right combinations together,” Andrew explains, “seeing what works, what we can do and what we can’t do. Because there are a lot of older songs we used to play live that we don’t really have access to those certain files to recreate, so there’s been a lot of working out what we can and can’t do.”
As part of this second coming of sorts, Resin Dogs recently hit the stage at Valley Fiesta in their hometown of Brisbane. “It was good but I didn’t realise how unfit I was,” Andrew laughs, “just trying to mentally keep up with what’s going on with such a huge presence on stage again.”
As for a new album, Andrew assures us it’s not far off and the band are currently in the process of narrowing down which songs will make the final cut.
“There’s definitely another album there, it’s basically been sitting there for a while and we’ve just been trying to find the right combination again of what’s working. There are some local, interstate and overseas artists who are all compiled for the record and it’s more breaking it down to what we really like and getting a good track-listing of solid stuff.”
Stay tuned to MADCAP Records for more.