TAME IMPALA’S ‘SPIRITUAL HOME’ ON THE AUSSIE COAST
AFTER RECORDING HIS band’s seminal 2010 debut album, InnerSpeaker, at Wave House — an oceanside studio three hours south of Perth, Australia — Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker recalls telling a bandmate: “‘If I ever make any money on my music, I’m going to buy this place.’ ”
Just in time for the album’s 10th anniversary in 2020, Parker fulfilled his pledge. During lockdown early in the pandemic, the urge to “create my own perfect world in the area I was stuck in” struck him. So he called an acquaintance to inquire about Wave House, where he had also recorded parts of Tame Impala’s third album, 2015’s Currents. “Oh, it’s kind of falling apart,” the acquaintance told him. “Hearing that triggered me,” says Parker. “I knew I needed to buy it.”
Soon after, Parker made an offer on the 50-acre property, situated next to Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park and the Indian Ocean, to its original owner, American expat producer Ken Eichenberg. Since its founding in the 1980s, the far-flung compound has attracted acts such as the Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim and The Waifs, and it is infamous among locals for the multiday, sex- and drug-fueled raves it hosted in the ’90s.
“It’s so funny: When we get a painter or plumber out to the house, they usually come in and are like, ‘Oh, shit. This place?’ You can see it in their eyes they are having flashbacks,” says Parker with a laugh. But when he first came to the studio to create InnerSpeaker in 2009, he wasn’t familiar with its past. “For me, this was just a sanctuary,” he says. “I was in love with it.”
Before coming to Wave House, Parker usually recorded his music alone, in cramped, noisy share houses. But he had just signed a deal with Universal Music Australia’s Modular Recordings, and for the first time, he had the budget to record somewhere other than his bedroom.
First, the company urged him to spend two months in Los Angeles and do sessions with big-time producers, but Parker balked at possibly losing his creative autonomy. He begged them for just a “shack by the beach” where he could work in isolation — nothing fancy.
Ultimately, his team booked him at Wave House — a major upgrade from the shack he had requested, though one that was falling into disrepair. To combat a leaky roof, he “had to put pots and pans out to catch the water droplets from falling on [my] gear,” he says, an issue that remained when he bought the place in 2020.
He also had to lug in his own equipment. By the time Parker arrived, Wave House’s downstairs studio had been mostly disassembled so the house could be rented out for weddings, events and bachelor parties. Plus, that recording space didn’t have the same views of the ocean as the living level above. So Parker splayed out his own guitar pedals, keyboards and tape machines in the family room to record. “Because I was watching the waves crash in the distance as I was making music, I’d record a few seconds of something and think, ‘Ah, this sounds heavenly,’ ” he says. “That’s kind of the double-edged sword about recording music in beautiful places: Everything you make sounds beautiful.”
He wonders aloud whether the effect of breathtaking scenery on music-making is actually good or bad. “Does it make it worse because you’re not trying as hard? Or does it make it better because you’re more satisfied with it?” he asks. “I think, ultimately, Wave House made InnerSpeaker better and really influenced its sound. It’s quite simple and spaced out because I didn’t feel the need to cram it with too much production.”
Upon release, InnerSpeaker quickly established Parker as a musical innovator, and in the decade or so since, Tame Impala has headlined Coachella and received four Grammy Award nominations. Eichenberg accepted Parker’s offer on the compound without pause, despite receiving higher bids from property developers over the years because, Parker believes, “Ken was waiting for someone to come along and take on the legacy of the place.”
Parker now calls Wave House his “spiritual home,” despite noting that he’s not a spiritual person generally — the place is just especially “magical” to him. “I’m even thinking about burying some of my things out there,” he says, referring to a pond on the property that’s no longer up to code, which local officials have asked him to fill with concrete; he wants to leave some personal artifacts in the sealed pit to commemorate his time there. “Maybe the kick drum I used on InnerSpeaker?” he muses.
Whether or not he proceeds with that kick-drum burial, Parker’s connection to Wave House was already immortalized through two of his defining albums. He plans to create much more music there in the future and dreams of a day when the studio is revamped and he can “bring artists [he’s] working with out there,” to give Wave House its rightful renaissance.