Set Mo

Releasing one track a month is not the usual release schedule for a new album. But Sydney-based producers Set Mo – aka Nick Drabble and Stu Turner – don’t mind doing things their own way. We caught up with the guys as they prepare for their first US tour in June.

 

Success: Throughout 2018, you’re releasing a new single on the first Friday of each month. It’s a delicious mixed bag of tracks. Why this approach?

Nick: We’d spent much of 2017 writing music when we weren’t on tour; really spending that time focusing on the actual writing process and getting as many ideas out as possible. We then had like 30 or 40 demos, all in varying states, from really rough sketches  to fully formed songs.
Stu: There was everything from like really slow jam kind of stuff up to pretty underground kind of clubby music, so we thought, if we drop this all at once, people might get a bit confused and not connect with the things that are a little different from what we normally do. 

Nick: It’s also just the way people tend to consume music these days as well, you know. People used to go out and buy a physical album and then you’d put it on in your car or your home, and you’d listen to it over and over and you kind of fall in love with the whole body of work. People don’t buy physical CDs anymore; they just check New Music Friday on Spotify, or Apple Music playlists, and that’s how they consume music. Today, people tend to fall more in love with songs over albums.

 

Success: You’ve just made us feel a bit nostalgic for the days of buying a CD and playing it in the car for three weeks straight… 

Nick: Totally.

 

Success: We’ve been listening to Nightmares; that’s a really interesting piece. The lyrics really resonate too, communicating the feelings that surround anxiety. 

Stu: We wrote that over in Europe, in London actually. We met up with a singer, Scott Quinn, for the first time that day, at the studio. We got to talking and the topic of anxiety came up really quickly. It’s interesting because it’s not something we’d really spoken about before, but it was just like, “boom, this is the topic that we all connect with”. From there, and it was a really natural, very quick session where we had the bones of the song, and wrote it down in just a few short hours.

Nick: Scott’s a crazy writer. He was really good at wording these metaphors of different scenarios that people might be anxious in, and by the time we’d done the backing we turned around and he’s like, “Cool, here’s the first line”.

 

Success: The video for Nightmares is powerful too – it really visualises that feeling of anxiety.

Nick: We worked with a very good friend of ours, James Chappell, who directed the clip. We’d been really keen to do something together for a number of years.

Stu: We met him in pubs before we were even doing Set Mo really, we were just DJing local gigs around Sydney and he was a bartender…

 

Success: He was a bartender?

Nick: We were just starting our music careers, he was kind of starting his video career. Now he’s gone on to shoot these clips for Armand Van Helden and Skrillex! James has a particular kind of style – it’s a bit darker and scarier and moodier. Stu and I were definitely feeling positive about the song [Nightmares] and the potential it had. We got back [to Australia], played it to him and he fell in love with it.

 

Success: You’re off to do your first US tour in June.

Stu: We’ve spent a fair bit of time in the States, but never gone over there and played shows, so it’ll be great to go and play in different cities and do different places and just see how the music connects over there.

 

Success: We’ll be sending good vibes. Last question, what does Set Mo mean? We’ve been running through ideas of what it might be…

Stu: Ooh, tell us.

 

Success: Well, we were thinking ‘set’ like DJ set, then ‘mo’ maybe motion, movement, moustache. Actually, we have no idea.

Nick: So, it’s one of those silly things that when Stu and I were first hanging out and DJing a bit together and separately, we both had kind of dirty moustaches at the time. One night a guy looked at us, swore, and said, “That is a set mo.” And we didn’t quite understand what he meant, and then the dude standing next to us was like, “I think he’s implying your moustache is well-set.” And we just found it hilarious. So we kind of ran around calling ourselves Set Mo, not thinking that it would ever be a long-term thing, and here we are now.

 

Success: Oh, we were half right! But it has nothing to do with DJ sets.

Stu: Nah, just dirty moustaches. 

 

To dive into Set Mo’s mixed bag of tracks, follow them on Spotify or find them on Facebook and search #SetMoTAM (which stands for Track A Month).