SILVER LINING
Despite storm-shortened Toronto show, future looks bright for Tash Sultana,
As a one-person band used to juggling myriad instruments and loops and pieces of gear at the same time, Tash Sultana is remarkably adept at reacting to adverse situations as they materialize.
Tuesday night’s Toronto deluge ultimately proved too much for even her to handle, although she put up a good fight. After a sudden first lashing of rain prompted an abrupt clampdown on the 23-year-old Australian singer/songwriter’s sold-out open-air date at Echo Beach about 20 minutes in — not because Sultana necessarily wanted to stop, but because one of the power packs driving her many racks of gear was getting wet and threatening to send a mighty (if not fatal) shock her way — she gamely picked up the thread with a dry “Well, that was f--ked” when the storm had subsided, only to have the weather turn truly biblical a couple of tunes into the resurrected set. Once it started raining in every direction all at once and there was ankle-deep water everywhere at Ontario Place, it was time for everyone to flee.
Oh, well. Sultana will be back before long. The gender-fluid multi-instrumentalist has been playing to steadily larger and larger venues since her incomparable solo-performance acrobatics — and piercingly human electro-pop songs — started making the rounds on the internet a couple of years ago. Radio isn’t even aware of her existence, and yet she could sell out the 1,400-seat Danforth Music Hall last year and the 5,000-capacity Echo Beach this week. (There’s no telling what might happen now that there’s an actual album on the way. The accomplished, genre-hopping and hook-resplendent Flow
State arrives on Aug. 31 via New York’s Mom + Pop Records, currently home to the likes of Metric, Sunflower Bean and fellow Aussie Courtney Barnett in the States.
The Star sat down to talk to Sultana backstage shortly before her set.
It seems like things have happened very fast for you, but I know that’s rarely the actual case.
I went from being a young adult to an adult pretty quickly. But it hasn’t happened fast. My whole life I’ve worked towards all this stuff and it’s the whole rest of my life that I’ll continue working at it. It’s just that people have acknowledged it. People think “Oh, she’s come out of nowhere” but I didn’t come out of my f--king mom yesterday. I’ve been around for 23 years and I’ve been doing stuff with my time.
Did it take you a while to work out the live setup you’re using these days? It’s pretty impressive.
There wasn’t really anything to work out. It just kind of happened the way it was supposed to. I couldn’t afford to have band members at the time, so I just tried to do it all myself. And I saw other people looping stuff and thought “You know what, if you just use this and this and that there and this here, you can have this instrument, this instrument, this instrument and this instrument and it can be a never-ending thing.” ... What I’m physically doing onstage with the setup that I’ve got is not cutting the cake, so we’ve decided to actually build it ourselves — design the software, design the rig ourselves, because you can’t buy the equipment. When did you first get an inkling that music was going to be central to your life?
Forever. I got given a guitar when I was really young so it started from there. I just always played music ... I didn’t plan to, like, launch off into the world the way it’s happened. I think some people do. I think some people have that concept in their head, where they’re, like, “I’m gonna be famous.” That is not the way that I designed my life. My way was “I’m gonna play music.” And I would have done that, whether I was busking for the rest of my life and I would have done it if I was playing in pubs for the rest of my life because that would just be a figment of me. So when did you get an inkling that this was getting a little bit bigger than you might have anticipated?
I think when the shows kept selling out, because obviously people were telling their friends and stuff. The word was getting out there. I didn’t pay someone $15,000 to go and service my music to the No. 1 radio stations in the world and, y’know, prostitute my way to where I’ve gone. I don’t know if people do that, but I didn’t do that. Some people might do that.
I just did me and it happened the way that it happened because that was the way that it was meant to happen. It didn’t happen from me sitting on my arse and doing nothing. It happened from me working my f-king arse off and doing everything I possibly could. The hard work wasn’t the ‘before’ stuff. The hard work is when you get it. You’ve gotta maintain that. You’re not rising to it, you’re there and you’ve got maintain that s--t. Because, y’know, you release your second album and people are, like, “Yeah, she’s not that good anymore. It’s not as good as the first one.” You know that thing? It’s stupid. Did you have a vision of what you wanted to do with your first record?
I didn’t have a record, so really whatever I had in the bag was what was going to come out in the studio. The second album’s gonna be harder because it’s not my back-catalogue s--t that’ll be cemented onto vinyl. I’ve gotta write all of it. Some of these songs that I’ve recorded on Flow State are a couple of years old but I just hadn’t glorified them like they needed to be, so now I have. I also wrote a bunch of new songs and I also wrote the album in a specific way, that it goes in a flow, with mixmatching. But it works. It’s an album. It’s not singles. Was it tough taking what you do onstage into the studio?
I multi-track everything so, obviously, I can’t do live looping because with live looping you can only have so many “sends” coming in and out, and in the studio you can pretty much have unlimited. So for some of the songs that are more produced, they were multi-tracked and they took me ages to f--king do. Some of them were, like, one take — like, a lot of the guitar soloing on there is one take — and some of the stuff, like “Harvest Love,” I recorded in my lounge room. That’s not even in the studio.
“Pink Moon” was in one take, but the ending took me awhile. “Big Smoke” took three days of guitar takes from the start to the finish because I didn’t play to a click for a lot of it because it doesn’t need to be on a grid. It’s purposefully like that. And “Mellow Marmalade,” that’s one take, and then I did some little overdubbing sh- over top of that. You’re trying to condense your live show into headphones and it’s really hard to do when you don’t have 40 subwoofers under the stage and a whole rack of monitors firing at you and then your overall, general presence onstage pumping it out. You’re trying to get that and put it in f--king headphones. Does the live thing just run on muscle memory for you these days or is there always the danger that things could go horribly wrong?
It always goes wrong so I’m not scared of it anymore. It’s just like if you really f--k it up, you just go “Whoa, all right, I f--ked that up. This is live music. I’m starting it again.” And I’ve done that so many times because it’s truthful. It’s not a backing track. Some people think because they can see a laptop onstage — which is actually for RF referencing for my in-ear monitors — that my monitor engineer is clicking tracks and playing them, which is f--king hilarious. And some people think that I’m a DJ. So you’ve got all these uneducated musical critics talking whatever bulls--t about what it’s all about, and that’s just not the f--king way it is. It’s just live looping. It’s actually not that complex. This is just how I’ve designed my live show.
The actual Flow State album tour starts in September, and that’s when everything changes a little bit. I’m changing my setup a little bit, introducing some new things, some different things, like a live drum kit that I’ve worked out how to loop. We’ve just decided that we were going to build a lot of stuff because I’ve been using a lot of generic equipment and now we’re using software, Ableton and MIDI that we’ve designed. It’s just taking pretty much me, performing as me onstage, but with studio-quality sound. Which is where it needs to be, I think. I would think playing bigger stages demands the odd upgrade. You hear more. You want more. And you need more. But also, just my general knowledge of soundscape — I want to hear stuff that way that I hear it in the studio onstage. It’ll never be exactly the same because it’s live, but it can be pretty close. And for it to function the way that it needs to function for the purpose of me, myself and I, we’ve got to do it ourselves. So it’s pretty challenging. It’s been a ballbreaker.
But we’ll do it. And it’ll be the only one in the world of its type. So it should be pretty f--king cool.