Minuit wedded to their music

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Minuit's Paul Dodge has - once more - been told that his band stand out as unusual in the dance music spectrum. It's something which has always puzzled him.

"It's a concept I don't quite understand," he says. "Maybe I should go along to a Minuit gig some time and check them out. It would be nice to stand in the crowd and see what it is. To us, it's just us [Dodge and fellow keyboard player Ryan Beehre] doing stuff and Ruth [Carr] singing, and it's cool."

Ah, but what stuff ... and what singing. Carr's scattershot, stream of consciousness spoken/sung lyrics are a Minuit trademark, casting the band as different from pop bands with "proper" songs, or the many dance tracks which sample idle snatches of female vocals.

Her vocal delivery has been compared - understandably - with Bjork and Lamb's Louise Rhodes, but somewhat less predictably with Sinead O'Connor.

Meld such distinctive vocals with Dodge and Beehre's subtle breakbeats and cascading instrumentation, and Minuit are a threesome whose music instantly gains your attention.

Those who are hooked stay hooked, which has been a key to the band's gradual emergence into the mainstream.

Originally based in Nelson, Minuit started small and for several years stayed small. Away from the heart of the music industry, they set about establishing their own little cottage industry, playing the occasional gig out of town and selling self-made CDs after shows. The rumour mill soon suggested here was a band worth checking out.

"I think it's really benefited us coming from Nelson, for the reason it becomes a bit more word of mouth and a bit more underground," Dodge says.

"Then you had to tour - if you're in Nelson you can't play the same club every week, so you go to Christchurch, you go to Wellington - that's just part of the deal. Then you would leave those places - you'd play one night and go away - so you weren't in those people's faces. It was like this little mysterious context thing - something's going on with Minuit, I really like them - but then you don't see them for a while.

"I think it's helped our public profile because it was a slow-burn thing. I think a lot of bands are thrown into the limelight really quickly in Auckland because it's Industry-ville.

"There's a lot more expectations of a band and you're wanting to push it a lot harder, whereas for us we were able to get out of town, try something, and then go back to Nelson to sit for a while, think about it, and work on making it better. I think it helped us learn about how to be Minuit."

Overseas experience was another key component to Minuit's drive to succeed.

Dodge and Carr took a break from the band in 2000 and went backpacking for several months, ending up living in Kosovo.

After nine months in Pristina and seeing what Europe had to offer, the pair were determined to come back, set up shop in Beehre's Nelson studio, and write new material.

"We knew we had this music thing within us and we just had to get it out," Dodge says.

"What we were seeing overseas, I saw the potential for Minuit to fit into that. The stuff being produced in New Zealand is totally as good as anything overseas."

The pair's OE had the effect of toughening up Minuit's sound. Whereas early on the band had several interesting ideas which became mislaid due to lightweight execution, Minuit circa 2003 is a much tougher proposition.

Debut album The 88 sees Minuit's sound expand to fill the space available, and then some. The beats are harder, the sound is fuller and heavier, but retaining the quirky musical asides which make Minuit special.

"Making the sound harder was the intention," Dodge says.

"We've always liked that grittier, heavier darker side to music - it's got a lot more emotion. We first got into electronic music through Tricky and Prodigy - there's an edge, a humanness, and a realism to the music.

"Our writing now is becoming more what Minuit actually is. For a while there we were trying to emulate various things in the electronic scene but now I think we've honed it in. This album is, I think, pretty much what Minuit is. It's captured the live set from the past four years and set down what this band is going to be."

The band will now be a full-time proposition, Dodge says. The trio have recently relocated from their beloved hometown to Auckland, a move he calls inevitable.

"Nelson is our home town and we'll always go back there, but moving to Auckland was something we had to do for the music.

"It's where the industry is, there's lots of opportunities, and it comes down to economics as well - if you want to play in Auckland, after three plane tickets from Nelson there aren't many gigs which pay for themselves."

Minuit have also shifted responsibility for getting their music out to the people. The 88 is released on independent label Tardus, an arrangement which allows Minuit to keep alive the essence of the DIY spirit they began with.

"There's a lot of things we had to hand over to a label because it's all about networks and contacts," Dodge says.

"It was getting too big for us to handle by ourselves. Like any business, you need the contacts and the people with the skills to get done what needs to be done, which is get our music out to as many people as possible."

Performance

Who: Minuit, dancepop trio with debut album 88

Where: Sumo, Galatos, 17 Galatos St, Newton

When: Tomorrow night

- NZPA