by Chris Liberato (@chris_liberato)
Dippers was born, somewhat inadvertently, when Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch’s plan to tour the US and record a third Thigh Master album was stymied by Covid. Locked down in Queensland, they suddenly found themselves with plenty of time for songwriting on their hands and in a different headspace about the type of music they wanted to create. Instead of moving forward with a new Thigh Master record, they decided to “blank the page” — to borrow a phrase from their addictively hooky debut LP Clastic Rock — and experiment with a new sound: one that amps up the nervy, stop-start energy of their previous project, adds a dramatic Robyn Hitchcock-esque curl to Ford’s voice, and lets loose with loads of winding, lattice-like keyboard melodies.
“That’s a huge difference to Thigh Master. Dippers has all this keyboard and piano playing, all these synth melodies. They’re everywhere in different ways,” says Ford of the instrumentation’s omnipresence in the project’s sound. “It’s unlocked a lot of paths that we can go down if we want to.”
I invited the duo over to my house for a chat during their recent US tour, in between shows in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Drinking iced tea and petting the dog, Ford and Tulloch talked about the process of making Clastic Rock, the freedom a sampler has given them in the live setting, and using a thesaurus to drill down more precisely on certain feelings.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Chris Liberato: I wanted to ask you about playing shows as a two-piece. You’re touring the U.S. as a two-piece right now, obviously, and I saw some footage from your recent Sydney show where you were doing the same thing. Are you interested in doing the full-band thing at some point?
Matthew Ford: We're not really looking to form a band at the moment. We chose to do it this way for viability. It feels like touring as a band our size, we know we're not going to be making much money, so the flexibility of it, being able to play in different environments… This setup's just more convenient.
We tried it as a full band and I think we were trying to recreate how the songs sounded on the record, which led to a lot of frustration. Finding the right people to play with is tricky because of the cost of living and things like that. You have to pay people to play if they're not creatively invested in the project.
Innez Tulloch: Also, with Dusty [Anastassiou] and Dan [Ford], we had a pretty special creative relationship, where there was an understanding of how each other works. Very free and easy. That's just hard to find again.
MF: All of us had been playing music together for so long [in Thigh Master] that we just knew what the formula was. We would hop into a room and I would be like "Here's the song," play through it twice, and then hit record. I think that the Dippers stuff is a bit more intricate, so it takes a bit longer to teach people things. So it feels like you aren’t moving forward because you're trying to teach people the same songs that you were just recording for two years. An album cycle feels like a three- or four-year process if you do it that way. I guess there are a few answers in there.
CL: So Dusty and Dan weren’t the ones you tried the band thing with?
MF: No.
IT: They're both really busy. Dan's a visual artist and has other projects. He's a producer. And Dusty has Dag and Permits, as well as his art practice.
MF: Going on tour is a huge commitment and people understandably want to make time for their primary projects. We had ring-ins who were acquaintances of friends of ours play as the rhythm section on our last tour in March, but it didn’t really feel worth the extra work and logistics, and the two of us getting COVID during that tour and whatnot made us realize just how risky it can be financially.
CL: Have you run into any difficulties playing the Dippers songs live as a two-piece?
IT: Oh yeah!
MF: Yeah, the evolution of the live set has been pretty funny, but also a really great learning experience.
IT: Initially, at the end of our last tour, we played a couple of shows just the two of us and that was great because it was like, "Oh, we can actually do this!" So when we got home to Australia it was like, okay, now let's figure out how to actually do this so we can play shows here. So we dubbed the recordings onto a four-track cassette.
MF: The drums and the bass from the record…
IT: And the first show we tried to do that, the tape had slowed down on the car ride over so everything was out of tune and it was just like, "Oh, this is not working!"
MF: Well, it did work, because we could speed the tape up, but we realized how precarious it was.
IT: Yeah, and the next show was like "Oh, this sounds terrible through the PA." There was something wrong. Anyway, we just decided to get a sampler, which led to Matt programming the beats and me redoing some synth parts. Learning how to do things this way has been good to help cement where we want to take the project next.
MF: It sheds a different light on the songs as well. I think it shows how amiable they are because they still work in a non-rock band setting. And that feels pretty freeing, to know that you can do something in a different way than is expected from a typical rock band.
IT: Yeah, I feel like some of our peers have gone a similar route. I don't know if you've heard of V, but they’re incredible like goth industrial music. V plays bass live with the same sampler and a headset mic. It's so awesome to watch live. And there's Hot Tubs Time Machine, who are doing a similar sort of thing with Marcus singing and Dan using a sampler and live instrumentation.
CL: Oh yeah, I love those guys! I wanted to ask you about the third Thigh Master record, which ended up not happening. I read that you were planning to record it during a US tour, but you had to call the whole thing off when Covid hit. I’m curious about who you were planning to record that album with and where.
MF: That was going to be with Scott Bomar, a Memphis producer, at his studio Electrophonic Studios. Zac from Goner had set it up. We had an album's worth of songs to record and we were going to have a few days off in Memphis in between shows, so we thought we’d make a record while we were there. I think Scott mostly does soul recordings, but he's also done some of Jack Oblivion's albums.
We were going to record the album as a two-piece because, at that point, Dusty and Dan weren't free to tour. We were going to tour with two people from the US.
CL: Who was that?
MF: Our friend Maddy Gardner, who has a project called Composer 4. He lives in Memphis. And his friend, Quinton, the drummer in Tire. They were going to be touring with us, but we were going to make the record ourselves.
It's kind of funny because then the pandemic happened and I just didn't have that much to do when we moved back up to Queensland for a few months. So I started writing a bunch more songs, and none of the songs that we were going to record in Memphis ended up on the Dippers album.
CL: I was going to ask about that. So those Thigh Master demos are just sitting on a shelf somewhere?
MF: Yeah, sitting on my phone in voice memos.
CL: Do you think any of them might become Dippers’ songs at some point?
MF: A couple of them might, but I don't know if some of them would work for Dippers. Also, it was a few years ago now, and I’m in a different headspace about the type of music that I want to create. Maybe down the track, I'll reuse the ideas. Most of the time I don't write lyrics until we're at the recording phase anyway, so right now they're just chord progressions, riffs, and basic structures.
CL: At what point while you were working on the Dippers songs did it become clear that this was going to be a different project than Thigh Master?
MF: Once we started recording them properly. The process was very different [than Thigh Master], the fact that it was just the two of us. Everything felt very different even though it's still rough, guitar pop or rock or whatever you’d like to call it. But we were experimenting more with ambient music and soundscapes – we never really did that with Thigh Master.
CL: Is experimenting with soundscapes something you've wanted to do for a while?
MF: I did a bit of improvised electronic-ish music throughout my time in Brisbane. But never really in a band context, or something that would get released on a label or anything. I made a couple of tapes to give to friends and that kind of thing. Dusty and I had played a couple of duo shows doing improvised stuff. But I've never really given it enough time to sit down and actually think about what I was creating.
IT: During uni, I was creating a lot of soundscapes and experimenting a bit, and I had some random solo shows and a duo with my pal Owen where we played a show or two. But yeah, nothing was ever released or too serious. During the COVID times I was starting to get back into it in solo mode, as it was really meditative and soothing.
MF: I was wanting to try my hand at more recording and producing, so I’d recorded a couple of the pieces Innez had written, and after that we realized we’d really like to explore it [experimenting with electronics] a bit more.
CL: Gotcha. I read that there was a first version of the Dippers album that you scrapped. Is that right?
MF: Yeah, in a way. The first time we tried to record it, I was using a tape machine that we’d brought up from Melbourne to Queensland, and something in it stopped working about a quarter of the way through tracking guitar. When we moved back to Melbourne we started again using a computer to record instead of tape. We did a first round of demos, not realizing they were going to be demos. We just thought that we were recording the actual album. But then we got some better gear after we'd done the first round of all of these songs. And we were like "Ah, we should use this stuff because we want it to sound a little bit better.” It’s like slightly more hi-fi, even though it's not really very “hi-fi" in the scheme of things.
CL: What software did you use to record it?
MF: We used Reaper at first, and then we used a program called Luna the second time around.
IT: And the stop-start all the time kind of bled into the recording process as well. We were doing a lot of rewriting and re-recording like saying to each other "That's not quite right anymore, Like, that drum part is not fitting there anymore. Or this bridge needs moving.” So it was kind of a songwriting experiment at the same time as being a recording session.
MF: Yeah because you're not sitting in a band context and playing through the songs with the band. You're playing the parts that you think would sound good with the song and then listening back to the mix frequently. And, like Innez was saying, just realizing that something didn't quite work so you record over it again. So I guess we ended up recording over things like two or three times to get the final result. But it was the kind of a thing where we didn't start a whole new session of the song, we were just scrapping and then adding parts to the original session file of each song.
CL: Patching in to replace what wasn't working?
MF: Yeah, exactly.
CL: What about your influences for Dippers? Did you have anything in mind that you were going for sound-wise?
MF: Yeah, I think that instead of wanting the songs or album as a whole to sound like our influences or a band, I was more focused on the production style of the instruments. For example, I wanted the Big Star guitar sound. I'm a big fan of the guitar playing on those records, the way the riffs are interplayed with chords, and how much clarity in the guitar sounds there is between those elements on those records. We never really got there in the end, it was too tricky between my limited knowledge, the sonic limitations of our spare room, and the gear we had.
IT: I think that we were listening to a lot more folk music at the time too. And coming back to more ambient stuff because of the times, just wanting something calm.
CL: Anything in particular?
IT: [To Matt] What is the one with the leaf on the cover?
MF: Oh the leaf album. Yeah, I always forget the name, but we can send it to you. [It was Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, they confirmed later]
And the Flaming Tunes album [by Gareth Williams & Mary Currie]. Innez had just gotten into it, so it was getting spun a lot. I hadn't heard it for ages.
CL: Oh cool, yeah, that’s a good one. Going back to the recording process for a second, in the 2SER interview you did recently, you said that making this record made you realize that the recording process is your favorite thing about making music. What is it about recording that you enjoy so much?
MF: Well, I feel like this tour has changed that a little bit. I think that I'm also enjoying the, not flexibility, but the freedom in playing live. The fact that you can change what you did on record a little bit, keep evolving or stripping a song back and doing things with it. There are parts in the show, a lot of the guitar parts especially, where we’re improvising things.
CL: Yeah, it seemed like there was a lot of improvising last night, especially during the last few songs.
MF: Yeah and coming back to us playing as a two-piece and using a sampler, putting the songs through this different lens has been quite enjoyable.
But I feel like recording is where you come up with the most ideas, because you have the time, especially at home. You’ve got time, peace and quiet and you're feeling quite introspective, not being watched by people. Because even in a proper studio setting, the time situation stresses me out or I feel self-conscious. If I'm not getting exactly what I want, I have to think about how much time I’m spending trying to get there. Recording this album, we definitely could have kept trying to make things sound better or kept expanding on certain things.
IT: On that last thought, though, I think it's important to remember that it is a recording of a time.
CL: That a recording is not definitive?
IT: Yeah, and so knowing when to wrap it up is important. Like, “OK, that’s enough of that!”
CL: Yeah, definitely. And so, did you make a conscious decision to do more improvising live, or is that something that just kind of happened naturally?
MF: I think it was about wanting to include some of the elements that we had done on the record, because most of the soundscapes were improvised. We would sit in our living room at home with a 4-track and just play for however long the tape went and then use snippets of that. That’s how the two “Looking For A Sphere” pieces came about. I think we wanted to involve that improvised element in the show, using the resources that we have. It's kind of limited with just the two of us. We can't go straight to this one particular synth setting, for example, or recreate the sound that we had improvised on originally. I would like to be able to continue to do more of that once we keep figuring out how it works. We've never used a sampler before this project.
So I guess there's just more preparation involved [in the live show], which kind of comes back to enjoying the recording process. It was pretty fun creating the beats for the songs for the live context – the bass and keyboard parts and everything. It's like a recording project in itself.
CL: Yeah, I can see that. Can you tell me about your live setup?
MF: Yeah, so we have the sampler and we recorded programmed drum beats for the length of the songs. And then we used either the original bass from the record or re-recorded a synth with that beat, and then put them onto the sampler, so it plays those songs through. And then I play the guitar and Innez plays a synth keyboard and controls the sampler.
CL: What synth are you using?
MF: It's a Nord Lead 2X.
IT: In Thigh Master I would buy a fifty-dollar keyboard off of Facebook Marketplace and make it work. So this was a bit of a step up!
MF: Yeah, I think that's a huge difference to Thigh Master as well, Dippers has all this keyboard and piano playing, all these synth melodies. They’re everywhere in different ways. It’s unlocked a lot of paths that we can go down if we want to.
CL: Were there any happy accidents that happened during the recording process? Like, did anything happen that you weren't expecting, or are there any moments that you're especially proud of because you had to work through things to accomplish them?
IT: Aww, yeah absolutely, because I hadn't played keyboard or synth to this level on a record before, and the songs are a lot more intricate with those little changes and little timing differences. Matt had quite a clear idea of how he wanted the song structures, so I was pushing myself. I mean, they might not sound it but they're a little bit tricky when you're trying to come up with the parts to go along with them. There were certainly times when I was just like, "No, I can't do this tonight! Let's come back to it tomorrow!"
But yeah, there was one moment where Matt did this guitar solo at the end of “Takings From The Bar" and it was freaking genius!
MF: [Laughing] That was fun, yeah! It was the last piece to finish on the album and the last song for the album as well. I was just like, “There's something missing from this” and then just plugged in and played the guitar solo over the top and it just elevated it.
IT: Yeah, that was great! And I think also having Dusty and Nicky [Minus] and Nicole [Thibault] come over and do their parts. Dusty was just putting that wah guitar on things. It was like "How did you know to do that!?"
MF: Yeah, he had a wah pedal. I was like "That looks like way too much fun!" He was rolling on the ground while he was playing this alien guitar for “Recurrent Sight.” And him bringing his funky presence to things was good because he understood that we were going for a whimsical vibe on some of the songs. He's just so good with that kind of stuff. And yeah Nicole’s trombone playing. I had those sounds in my head for so long, so it was very satisfying to hear them come out of the speakers. And Nicky Minus had never played on a recording or in a band or anything like that before.
IT: So they just came over and we were like, “ Okay, in this part we're just going for a psych freakout.”
MF: Yeah, “Just go for it, just wail away”
IT: And it was like "Whoa, that was it!"
CL: Have they been playing music for very long?
MF: I think they learned the flute in school, that kind of thing, and started picking it back up again as something to do in the COVID times.
I think that both those sessions – we had one with Nicole, and then one where Dusty and Nicky both came over the same evening – were really great. We had just come out of lockdown, so being able to reconnect with people in that way was a real treat.
CL: Yeah, that’s great. Something else I wanted to ask you about are the lyrics. I'm curious about the kinds of words you use, Matt. It's like you're just throwing out all these vocabulary words that I haven’t heard in ages, all these scientific and psychological words. What’s the inspiration behind some of your word choices?
MF: So a lot of it is about having a melody in my head that I want to use for the lyrics and trying to map that out with words and syllables. I'll use the thesaurus a lot to create a line using the word that fits at the end of the line, or where I need a certain amount of syllables. I'll be like, “Okay, I want a word that means something like this word. Let me use a thesaurus and if I can't do that.” I'll research a topic, even for just what I want to use in that one line.
CL: Researching a topic for a line… what do you mean by that exactly?
MF: For some of the psychological aspects and words like that, I'm thinking about an experience that I had and what I was feeling and I'm like “I don't actually know what someone would call that.” So I try to learn what that feeling or what that process is, maybe the basic psychological term for it, and incorporate that in the line. Does that make more sense?
CL: Yeah, definitely, thanks. And by the way, I really connected with your explanation of “Recurrent Sight” which is about the coping mechanism you came up with for dealing with certain neurodivergent trials and tribulations. Knowing the subject matter of that song, I’ve been wondering if you’re writing about similar things in other songs, like “Drop To Inoperant” for example?
MF: Yeah, that's just about shutting down, like becoming completely introverted from out of nowhere when you're in public.
CL: Very relatable.
MF: Yeah, just like retreating inside yourself.
CL: I found out fairly recently that I’m neurodivergent as well, so I feel like that’s why some of the lyrics are really resonating with me. I’m recognizing a lot of my own experiences in them.
MF: That's really cool to hear because that's probably the only aspect of things that I really like to share, so that people can piece things together the way that they want to experience them. Like, if you’re someone who likes to dive into lyrics, who listens to them actively, that's what they're there for – not necessarily to be a story about what I experience, but to be more metaphorical and able for people to relate to in multiple circumstances. Or have multiple meanings depending on who you are. That's why I don't like to go too far into what exactly they mean because a lot of them, even down to a word that I use, might intentionally mean a few different things. I try to use ambiguous language so that people can contextualize it how they want to.
CL: That’s definitely what I’ve been doing.
MF: Ah that makes me really glad. I think that [the neurodivergent part] is the one part that I do want to share, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do that without making it like that's my one identity, and that's what all of my songs are about. Because some of them might not be, or they might have particular parts that are, have one verse about it and then another one might not.
CL: Yeah, I get that. I also wanted to ask you about all the acronyms and abbreviations in the lyrics. Would you be up for sharing what some of those stand for, like NT in "On the Bend"?
IT: Neurotypical.
MF: How did that end up there?
CL: I think the lyric is like “Mask a face like an NT's lie.”
MF: Yeah that is neurotypicals.
CL: Oh interesting. And what about “S.I.M.”?
MF: (Laughs) So that stands for Somewhere In Mississippi. But I found out later that it was a ZZ Top song title. That song is about experiences I had with religion when I was a kid. For both of those reasons, I kind of wanted to make it a little bit cryptic.
CL: It’s definitely cryptic, with the imagery of the people in the robes and all.
MF: The grownups in the gowns. The gowns being like a pastor's robe.
CL: Oh right, of course. Well before we wrap things up, I just wanted to get your thoughts on the next record. How do you think it might differ from this album? What direction would you like to take things in?
MF: I think there will be more contrast between the traditional rock-style songs and the improvised soundscapes and ambient tracks. Maybe changing up the production as well, because I think [on Clastic Rock] we were trying to figure out how to make things, get to a point where we were happy with them and it sounded like a band. Whereas I think that I'm at least probably less interested in doing that for this project, just to be able to make things happen a bit quicker. Because I do a lot of writing on the guitar, and it takes so long to get to the point where I can start working on completing one record. There’s also the fact that I'm going through the touring part of the album cycle at the moment and it takes a long time when you're trying to record something that's got a lot of instruments on it, and requires more people, more musical input than from two people.
IT: Yeah, one of our friends was asking us the best way to release things quickly at the moment and I really don't know. People release songs all the time, it doesn't need to be an EP. Should it just be digital? I don't know what that will look like, whether we go with smaller releases or something to help speed things along.
MF: Yeah, we'll see. I would just like to get through the backlog of things that I have on my phone and get them out there in some way. I’d prefer to release an LP because I like collecting records and tapes. I think when we get back we'll probably just start working on [more recording] rather than trying to do more touring for the album and things like that. It’s like what we were talking about before: recording is really enjoyable for us.