In what arguably shapes as a defining moment in the evolutionary journey of Dunedin music, long-time musical collaborators Jurgen Sinclair and Boris Schmidt will next week give their funky jazz-fusion digital music project corporeal form.
The pair, who have maintained an online presence as Hazmat Monkey for a couple of years now, releasing YouTube videos and an album on Bandcamp, are playing at Yours Cafe on Thursday.
"We have, of course, jammed our songs informally to audiences of maybe one or two, but this will be an incredible extravaganza with multiple musicians on stage, cool projector visuals, lighting, and audience interaction and fun," Sinclair says.
"And balloons."
The band will expand to a four-piece for the night, including "old friend" of the band Paxo8, who will support on keys.
"I guess the core line-up of the band will be myself on the trombone, Boris on the drums and Paxo8 bringing the juicy synths. And then other contributors to the musical mayhem will involve some vocals provided by long-time friend of the band V-effekt 3000."
Hazmat Monkey’s debut album landed in January last year, chronicling both music the pair had been culturing for some time and more spontaneous emanations, all of which mashed an eclectic vegan casserole of musical influences.
"At some point we wanted to put a lot of it together and we just decided that one summer we were going to make the coolest album in the world and it was going to knock everyone’s socks off," Sinclair recalls of those heady sun-drenched days, jamming and sampling in DIY recording spaces.
"The music is very hazardous and jazzy," he says, weighing each word with great care.
"It has influences from a lot of places, but possibly so many places that none of them would be immediately obvious to anyone listening. The biggest influence is the Los Angeles funk-fusion jazz that we listen to, which borrows its aesthetic from a lot of Nintendo 64-era music. So, lots of beeps and boops and it is sometimes intentionally goofy.
"Groups that inspire us include Dolphin Hyperspace and Outside World. They play stuff with lots of electronic noises and it is often very goofy but has quite wild chord changes and also ripping jazz solos."
The solos that feature in Hazmat’s work draw on the work of multi-Grammy winning American saxophonist Michael Brecker, he says.
"So, very chromatic and almost atonal jazz solos over very goofy Nintendo-ish music."
The gig will also be V-effekt 3000’s first outing under that moniker.
Sinclair describes the flow-meister as an up and coming SoundCloud rapper.
"Who doesn’t yet have any songs on SoundCloud, but we are sure that the sounds will be very good once they are publicly available."
Multimedia elements of the show will include projections created with 3-D modelling software, something Sinclair says is also popular with the LA music scene the band follows online.
They will also be premiering a video that has been in the works for a long time featuring Tio Rinto, "a bear and fine gentleman and long-time friend of the band", who Sinclair says is running for president this year, without being any more specific.
"So we will be running a short promotional video."
Despite all the work that has gone into the gig, Sinclair says they don’t know when they might play again, as the band members, all originally from Dunedin, are now scattered across the motu.
"Some of us have travelled far beyond our origins in search of crispier jazz.
"We are only able to put on this gig because everyone just happens to be in the same place for a short amount of time, so we very hastily found ourselves a venue and we are just going to make the most of the time of everyone being in the same place."
Both Sinclair and Schmidt will be performing in their customary monkey masks and yellow hazmat suits. What lurks beneath is as opaque as much else about the band.
Asked what manner of primate perspires beneath all that plastic, Sinclair at first seems to cast doubt on their simian DNA before recovering himself.
"You definitely didn’t hear me say that. No, we are real authentic monkeys, come along for the real authentic monkey experience."
The gig
- Hazmat Monkey play an all-ages gig at Yours Cafe, Moray Pl, Thursday from 8pm. Doors earlier.
