Written by Katie Bordner Tuesday, 25 April 2006 04:15

“What I’d really love is for our fans to have dance tapes during our show and to go home and have sex tapes after our show.”

 

 

Everything that is available to read about The Presets leads one to believe that Julian Hamilton and Kimberly Moyes are disturbed souls. Garnished with masks, a Princess Diana T-shirt, and accordion, they seem to be a bit over the edge.

But that’s what they’re aiming for. More drama than a 14-year-old girl with braces and blue eyeliner, these adult men aim for action. Lettin’ loose and having fun are the cares and concerns of the Presets.

“I guess that music’s fine if it wants to be all sort of deep and meaningful and make you really think about something,” keyboardist Hamilton says. “But I guess the music that we do is primarily for dancing. It’s more for the hips and less for the head.”

That might seem odd coming from two men who studied theory and music performance at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, Australia. Yet, despite vast changes in, well, every aspect of life and music, they seem to find a connection to classical music.

“Mozart and Bach were the pop music of their time,” Hamilton explains. “A lot of the sounds Mozart was doing at the time were really fresh, new, and exciting. He was a real revolutionary trying to do different things. We’re trying to do the same today.”

Class lesson in music theory (according to the Presets) number one: Keep it fresh. Class lesson number two: Make it fun.

“I think [our music is] primarily intended for fun and dancing, a good time,” Hamilton says. “What I’d really love is for our fans to have dance tapes during our show and to go home and have sex tapes after our show.”

Maybe that’s what every dance-floor musician goes for, but never before has it been so bluntly laid out. But then again, if the masses started manufacturing their own dance and sex tapes, Ron Jeremy and Michael Jackson would both be out of jobs…um, never mind.

The Presets describe their sound as “all killer, all dance floor filler,” with inspiration coming from everywhere. The first song on Beams, “Steamworks,” is named after the world’s largest gay sauna in San Francisco. Hamilton describes track nine, “Girl (You Chew My Mind Up),” as a song with good energy, “but we’re just happy to finally have a song title with brackets in it, like Backstreet Boys’ ‘Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).’ They are in good company!

The synth-heavy music is peppered with absurd lyrics and sounds that can only come out of a machine drenched in cranberry and vodka. Nonetheless, it’s got the potential energy to kinetically shake your ass off. And Hamilton and Moyes want to be right there with the crowd, having the time of their lives.

“A lot of electronic acts, a lot of dance music acts, onstage always end up looking like a couple of German engineers or something, kind of standing behind their machines, not really getting into it in the same way that a rock band would,” Hamilton explains. “When we do a show, and we see a crowd is usually going off, jumping around, dancing, and they’ve got big smiles on their faces; we try to reciprocate that. I think a crowd really feeds off that energy—you know, jumping around, making fools of ourselves on stage.”

Their first U.S. single “Are You the One?” is heading for dance floors and pelvises everywhere. What would their classical predecessors think of their antics and music today?

“Hopefully, they would have loved it,” Hamilton replies. “Hopefully, they would have danced.”