Cassette Kids - Tape It To The Limit
It’s a great time to be in Sydney indie rock group Cassette Kids, with an EP through Sony BMG and a national tour in the works. 3D’s Carlisle Rogers spoke with frontwoman Katrina Noorbergen on the eve of a massive string of shows.
Between the banshee screams of Young & Restless and the programmed pulse of Blondie lie the Cassette Kids. Fronted by sparky, spunky Katrina Noorbergen, this Sydney quartet has just released a catchy mini-album, We Are.
You’re probably already familiar with them through radio-jammer Forwards Backwards and single You Take It, infectious little pop songs that consist of Katrina’s awkwardly confident voice over rhythmic, angular guitars.
“There are two songs on there that we had already recorded at a different studio,” Katrina says, referencing the above two underground hits. “We wanted to include them on the mini-album because they were still quite relevant and they would show people where we came from. We did the other five songs in the Sony studios, which was really cool and fun to be in that kind of environment. We hadn’t really seen that many buttons before. We really worked with dynamics. The Cassette Kids writing process is always a lot of experimenting and practicing hours of noise until someone does something that we pick up on.
“We got our friend Jono Ma from Lost Valentinos to come in and throw some ideas around. It was a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to going through that same process over the course of six months as opposed to a couple of weeks.”
Around for nearly 18 months, the band has come a long way very quickly.
“Since we formed Cassette Kids, we’ve had this philosophy that we would gig as much as possible and say no to nothing,” Katrina says. “We just got out there and gigged every week and tried to fit it into our ordinary working life. It started picking up more and more and we got to go on some good tours. It’s grown exponentially since we started because we had that attitude that we are just going to go to the city and play as much as possible and get the name out there.”
For the band’s first national tour, they decided to do it in a bus, instead of the usual game of musical airports. This apparently involves the band giving daily updates from the road before soundcheck.
“We wanted to do something fun and get our audience involved. We are going to broadcast from the tour van once a day. I think that kind of stuff will be interesting for people to see and it will be fun for us too. I’m not really looking forward to 13 hours of driving, but we’ve got a cool van so it’s all good. And we want to do our first major tour old school and on our own. I think we’ll probably forfeit the drive to Perth, we’ll probably fly there. We’ll get to hang out a bit and it will feel like more of a real tour.”
WHO: Cassette Kids
WHAT: We Are through Sony BMG / Play Oxford Art Factory / Libertine Ranch, Wollongong / Beach Road Hotel / Transit Bar, Canberra / The Mean Fiddler
WHEN: Out now / Friday 7 November / Friday 14 / Wednesday 19 / Thursday 20 / Friday 5 December
MORE: myspace.com/cassettekids