Pnau - Take the Journey

If you’ve ever heard any Pnau records before their latest release, disregard any pre-conceived ideas you might have concocted before having a listen. As Nick Littlemore puts it, Pnau is kinda like having their very first album, again.

With a Pnau experience, they aim for the audience, whether live or otherwise, to receive a performance that engages the senses. A turn away from the ‘cheesy, happy, hardcore bull****’ that has become what Nick sees as the Australian rave scene, the album is a return to the ways of the past. The core concept of the latest record is to link music with imagery and colours, with the boys trying to bring back a psychodelic atmosphere and transcendental music to the scene.

This album draws inspiration from the old rave setting that tripped out the boys in their youth, with the aim to deliver the audience to the “ultimate other place” in music says Nick. They attempt to bring back to life memories of adventures as teenagers going to decrepit warehouses when they would not just listen to music, but escape to a different world. The intense emersion into sound and acid imagery that Pnau have created is with the hope of bringing this generation of youth back to the transcendental, psychodelic music of their past.

The whole experience is seemingly spontaneous and yet every detail has been previously explored to the tiniest detail. The guys have no one definitive process of creating their music, it differs depending on where and who they are working with.

The band likes to keep it in the ‘family’ with the collaborations on their latest album all ensuing from friendships. Nick established his relations with Fabian Feadz through the online craze of MySpace and has often used the site as a tool to make connections with other musicians.

Like most of the tracks on PNAU, the song ‘Wild Strawberries’ (Done with the help of Fabian) was created from an intense rush of inspiration and then later the two Pnau boys re-examine their work to their ideal of perfection. “And then there’s other songs that we worked with a friend of ours, Michael G Franchesco, who’s in a band called Van She, and over the course of two weeks we wrote seven different ideas and we wrote everything as a side note at the same tempo… at the end of those two weeks we put all those seven different ideas… basically seven different songs, all into one computer session and we pieced the best bits of all those bits together to make one song and that song became ‘come together’”

No one could argue that there’s no pride in the music of Pnau. Every single sound is contemplated and its purpose considered as the music is created by Nick and Peter. Nick likens the experience to building a house, with every layer being defined by the one previous. PNAU is not an album that you just listen to. To truly understand and appreciate their music you have to fully immerse yourself in the positive experience. This latest release by Pnau is an attempt to get down to the basics, to try and find the most direct channel to reach their audience and to really give them the ultimate musical journey.

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