Interview: Grecco Romank x SPECK Comics / Misheard Records - Kiriata Me Puoro - An Animation And Music Festival

Forging connections between some of Aotearoa's most imaginative musical talents and local video-making virtuosos, Kiriata Me Puoro - An Animation And Music Festival is taking over Tāmaki Makaurau's Double Whammy this Saturday. SPECK Comics / Misheard Records founder and curator of this weekend's extravaganza, Liam Hansen had a chinwag with Damian Golfinopoulos and Billie Fee of boundary-obliterating electronic dance trio Grecco Romank, exploring their own enigmatic origins, "being the thing you want to see" and the kaupapa of the fest. Also starring Silver Scroll Award winners Lips with animated visuals by Maya K Templer, and dream-pop / psych / soundscape duo 花溪 Flowerstream with animated visuals by Spencer Hall, show your support for this innovative cross-platform event by heading along — brought to you in collaboration with Strange News Touring...

Kiriata Me Puoro - An Animation And Music Festival
featuring...
Lips, with animated visuals by Maya K Templer
花溪 Flowerstream, with animated visuals by Spencer Hall
Grecco Romank, with animated visuals by Simon Ward
Saturday 16th November - Double Whammy, Auckland
Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

Liam Hansen (SPECK Comics / Misheard Records): It's always been strange trying to describe your genre. Grecco has done a very good job at bridging all of the gaps of music in New Zealand, because it's both very dancey techno stuff, while also being very alternative and almost punk. I don't know if that's just because it's a bit more of a band setup when you perform live, as opposed to a DJ sort of thing — was that an intentional choice when you started the project?

Damian Golfinopoulos: It was unlikely that we were ever going to do something that was smooth listening, but it just felt like a reasonable extension to do stuff that was hard, heavy, and fast.

Billie Fee: It's very much a musician cliche to say "we make music we want to listen to", but that's basically what happened. Damien has a background playing in some crazy musical acts and as an audio engineer, and then Mikey has a punk background as a drummer in lots of different bands. I have a classical singing background, so the whole thing was always going to feel like a bit of a genre mash up, no matter what.

DG: There doesn't seem to be a reason why you have to limit things within a specific field. You can have very aggressive industrial music that then will have an Italo disco section with operatic singing — that sounds fun. That's what I would like to see.

You've only been active since about 2020, 2021, and yet you've already kind of, like, almost, taken over the scene. How long has this project officially been in the works for?

BF: We wrote our first song right before the first big lockdown. We put it out and we were like, "no one's going to want to hear us singing about waterboarding as a kink. This is going to be crack up." We didn't really have a grand vision, or certainly I didn't.

DG: There were just some shapes and forms and sounds and feelings that I had been grasping towards some in some way. When I realised that Billie was a fantastic singer, I was like "I'd be too stupid to not bring that into what I'm doing". Then Mikey, he's known as a drummer with acts like Drab Doo Riffs and The Bib Kids, and his drumming was good, but I wanted to see him behind a microphone. I've always loved bands where there is more than one singer. When they come together, when they split apart — that gives you a bunch of different modes and ranges that you can play with.

Do you all work together on songs at once?

DG: It all happens at once. I'll doodle a musical idea down, or Billie will hum a melody, or Mikey will suggest a direction. But like, everything that happens is a car crash, or an ugly lasagne.

BF: There's a lot of variation in the way that we write, and that was very true for the first two albums. I think we're in a bit more of a flow now. We know that we work best when all three of us in the room together, which is not maybe all the time a very efficient way to write, but it just is so much more fun. I'm not the kind of person that can, like, sit in a room and write a bunch of lyrics, or write a melody just by myself.

DG: If these guys can make me laugh, or just go, "No, no, stop, stop, that's great!" then that's an indication that it's going good. Or if I play something and these guys are whooping or nodding in approval — it's our tiny little echo chamber high fiving itself. Then you take it out there and see if people react to it. We've tossed some songs aside that didn't quite work and were a little bit weird — you use your crowd to kind of figure that out.

I'm curious as to what songs in the Grecco discography got counted as too weird.

BF: Oh my god, we've been laughing for many, many years. Our first album, we wrote this song called 'Red Broth', and it never got past the demo stage because it was so cooked. It was all about women poisoning men in ancient Greece or something. It was just really bizzare.

DG: But done as a gothic disco number — you'll hear it eventually. The other one was 'Whiteware', which is, it takes a gqom kind of beat, and then it is about whiteware [laughs].

BF: I sing a Tchaikovsky romantic song over the top. So it's like gqom, which is this beat style that comes from South Africa, with this 1800s Russian classical song, and then us, just saying things we thought were funny, like, "KFC, JFK, KFC".

Even then, a lot of the stuff you've done so far has been, like, fucking decently mad. I hope that you aren't getting to a Radiohead 'Creep' point with 'Piss Baby'. It's a fucking great song. And it's very easy to sing along to — I think Lucy from Dick Move put last years Others Way performance of the song in UTR's 2023 Favourite Music Moments.

BF: I think she described it as being from the blood rave scene from Blade, which was probably the best compliment anyone's ever given us.

DG: The shorthand description of us is "the music playing in the bad guy club." That's what Grecco Romank is.

BF: The villains are always the coolest ones, man.

You mentioned before putting lyrics into the song that were kind of funny. I's not like Grecco is a comedy band — it's just fun, really. Are you trying to make people laugh, or are the bits all within one sort of strange vibe?

BF: When things make us laugh in the studio when we're writing something, we will give it some weight. I think there's nothing wrong with being a little tongue in cheek and being a little funny. With 'Piss Baby', I am not exaggerating when I say that is a protest song about there not being enough public toilets anywhere. It is funny, we fully intended it to be funny, but there is always an angry, kind of punk energy to what we write.

DG: We're a comedy band in that the things that we find funny are really dark bits of gallows humour. We're not going to laugh at dumb shit. It gives you a freedom by occupying that mode — by pointing a finger and laughing at something, and doing this performative decadence thing, you have the freedom to not be taken seriously. Which seems like it might be a juvenile way to approach, something that could be serious, but I find that it's a bit more effective and memorable, and it would simplify any message you might have.

BF: Literalism is not interesting to any of us. Our lyrics are also very rhythmic, like if something has a good musicality to it and sounds cool — even though the meaning isn't even obvious to us initially. We'll always kind of choose that over anything.

Coco Solid 'Slow Torture' feat. Disasteradio (2016) - directed by Simon Ward

Onto the gig on Saturday, Kiriata Me Puoro. I'm very glad that I managed to link you guys up with Simon Ward for this — that combination immediately made sense in my mind. Had you been familiar with his work beforehand?

DG: When I was making fringy music in Auckland in the 2010s, Simon was just a legend. All the videos he made were inspirational. He sort of was the New Zealand king of VHS. His sense of humour and the acts that he worked with were all just super inspiring. We're super excited to be working with him. I wanted to turn a question around to you, Liam, about the impetus to do SPECK. What's your elevator pitch for it? What brought us to this point?

Oh man, what a twist! I mean, SPECK originally started as an anthology zine with a similar ethos of bringing the comics community in Aotearoa together — which people had done similar before. I guess I just wanted to do it at a slightly smaller scale, because there's other really brilliant comic magazines like Battle down in Ōtepoti and Funtime Comics in Ōtautahi. I guess SPECK had a bit of a specific theme in mind of combining alternative music and punk scenes with spec-ulative fiction, hence the name. That also goes in a sense of bringing weird art together with cool music, or cool kaupapa, which you see a lot in work that inspires me like Invader Zim, which I've got a fucking tattoo of, or things like that. Which is also what brought me to your guys work, since it has this weird sci fi element to it.

BF: It's dystopian cyberpunk, for sure.

DG: Why do you think so many mediums are is siloed, why don't we have more stuff smashing together?

I think if people are given the opportunity, they'll be very willing to do it. At the very least, in Aotearoa, people are scared of talking to each other. You might be someone who's very involved in the music scene, and then you see someone who's got a new opening at Studio One Toi Tū and go "oh, they seem super scary and cool, and I wouldn't want to talk to them." And then other end that person is like "I'm just making these weird little exhibitions, and it's all super chill while these people are being rock stars". 90% of the time, both of them would be very keen to work with each other. So Kiriata Me Puoro is a development of the SPECK project — we've already done gigs, for our issue releases at Wine Cellar. But it's always been a project that's meant to bring members of the wider creative community of Aotearoa together.

BF: It's an interesting thing of people not wanting to talk to each other, when New Zealand is so small that actually were perfectly positioned to be talking to each other. Everyone is actually really nice and very keen. We should all be on the same team.

You guys have a bit of history in doing visual arts. Has it been fun to work with another visual artist and see how they will approach your music

BF: Yeah — I'm a designer, Damien is a painter and filmmaker, and Mikey is a conceptual artist who went through the whole Elam thing. Our aesthetic is a big part of what we do, and we're always thinking visually. Having someone else's artistic eye on it will be very fun and probably quite inspiring for us, because there's probably stuff that he'll see in what we're doing that we haven't seen before.

DG: It's refreshing to have those little spurts of distance growing in the mix for you.

A lot of your set will be new material. What is your plan for the foreseeable future for Grecco?

DG: This ties in exactly with what you're doing, as we're putting a book out.

BF: Our next album will basically be the book. We wanted to do more physical media. We've done a vinyl with Moral Support for our last album Wet Exit, and before that Red Tower was put out as a cassette (both of which you can buy on our Bandcamp). We wanted to do something that was a bit different and that you didn't need any other technology to appreciate. So you'll be able to get your download code for Bandcamp, but you can also flip through and read the lyrics. We've got lots of contributions from different artists, both visual and written pieces. You'll probably see some lyrics that didn't make it into any of the songs, that are just our weird jotting down of stuff.

DG: There's this sort of non-linear joy in flicking through the pages and seeing the textures and the found photographs, and some of the artwork that other people are bringing in, or nibbling at the essays and prose that's going to be in there. It feels satisfying to know that, like, our music can help be an excuse for us to now do this other project.

There's so much to be said for the impact of print. Of course people have been able to experiment with it, since it's one of the oldest mediums of art — but I've gotten it with SPECK and various different magazines works. I hate the phrase coffee table books, because it feels like it undersells it, but it is nice when you can pick up on any different page and read it in any order for a completely different interpretation of a song, or an idea — especially since it seems like your book will be almost inviting the readers into the creative process of Grecco.

DG: It'll be nice to make a beautiful object. We're hoarders and collectors, you know?

BF: With the contributions from other people, it'll be an archive of this moment in our in our community.

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