Fabulous Diamonds on Myspace

MP3: 1:53

Video: Live at Super 8 fundraiser, Melbourne, Jan 20 2007

From Three Thousand:

Fabulous Diamonds make avant garde music humbly disguised as pop minimalism. A counterpoint to all card-carrying local ‘art’ groups, this restlessly inventive Melbourne duo is without doubt the genuine article; truly experimental, defiant of glib categorisation, advanced and yet totally stoned-sounding. Split published by new labels Mistletone and Nervous Jerk, this highly anticipated debut 7″ is ten glorious minutes of rhythmic disorientation, concrete tones and glowing wormwood dub – all doused in so much delay as to sound like ink absorbing into blotting paper.

Like a set of lab experiments, the tracks are named simply by their duration. Side A has two woozy, singing affairs on it; the nocturnal crawler, ‘1:49′ (known as ‘Whiskey Soda’ by fans), and the ‘Tattoo on breadknives’ one (also a live favourite). It is an edge-of-midnight sound with buggy sax, enchanting voice and stroboscopic organ. Side B has a bright vox acapella, delayed sax over echoey cowbells and jazzy piano smoking rocks of white. Yep - it’s pretty high stuff, and the last track is a sound collage. As important now as Melbourne’s Little Bands were in the ’70s, or as good as Implog in the ’80s.

- Mark Gomes

From Mess + Noise:

Borne out of a tradition that lies somewhere between classic dub, experimentalism and post punk, Fabulous Diamonds foreground a style (unique) and substance (intriguing) that come together in a hypnotic frenzy. Assembled amidst high levels of delay, this Melbourne two-piece creates a truly bewildering mix. On the melody side of things Zlatic brings the unconventional approach practiced in his previous musical happenings (Oh! Belgium) to both the saxophone and chording of electric organ exhibited here, creating a sound that sits awkwardly with Nisa Venerosa’s elegant vocals.

It’s an awkwardness that befits the duo, constructing a compelling, evolving array of sounds to match its audience (likewise compelled). Coupled with unrelenting and creative percussion, Fabulous Diamonds are ultimately a band who capitalise on idiosyncrasy. ‘1:52’ opens with trademark FabD: a repetitively entrancing rhythm that persists throughout the meet n’ greet of sustained saxophone, sporadic piano and Venerosa’s enthralling vocals. It’s the hit you’ve been waiting for throughout this post post-punk mêlée we live in. Fabulous Diamonds present a world drenched in discordant jams stemming from a parallel universe of sonic intensity, one that picks up on the heritage embedded in post-punk, but recreates rather than rehashes the influence. From a debut, who could ask for anything else?

- Eliza Sarlos

From InPress Fragmented Frequencies:

Melbourne duo Fabulous Diamonds describe themselves as hypnotic acid dub, and it’s quite apt as there is something incredibly narcotic about their grooves. It’s very sparse stripped down music; drum machine and organ with the occasional off-kilter sax or vocals swamped in a sea of delay. There’s a real DIY feel to the music, recorded direct to tape with minimal overdubs. There are some strange similarities to Beach House but these two are very much on their own trip. They’re also playing at Toff in Town with weirdo folk troubadour Kes and Bad Tables on the 6th July… It’s great to see the vinyl back.
- Bob Baker Fish

From The Age:
EG Recommends
FABULOUS DIAMONDS

This duo, who have been hypnotising Melbourne audiences with their heavily delayed post-punk/dub sound for a couple of years now, launch their debut release, a vinyl single with five nameless tracks. They are supported by spooky psych-folk wunderkind Kes and Bad Tables.

From Rave magazine:

JAKEB SMITH talks to JARROD ZLATIC aka DIAMONDS from Melbourne experimental indie duo FABULOUS DIAMONDS.

Zlatic is in the library when I call him, which we agree is not the best place to conduct an interview. I hang the phone up for the moment and return to YouTube, where the band have posted a video of themselves, live at The Bus Gallery in 2006. The clip showcases the spacious rhythms of drummer Nisa Venerosa, as well as the saturated delay of Zlatic’s saxophone playing. It’s indie DIY 101.

But the internet (especially YouTube) is generally ignorant of (or unfriendly towards) anything that places artistic merit before technical skill, and the comments on this page are no exception. MastAcooDood seemed a little disgusted, “uh . . . what . . . the . . . fuck. bad tone, not really adhears [sic] to any form of music or theory”. Littledrummerboy666 was more confused “you guys don’t make any sense. You know you don’t sound like music right”.

I call Zlatic back a little later and ask him what he thinks of the comments.

“I completely understand, it’s on YouTube and people who are obviously really into saxophone are like looking up saxophone on YouTube and they’re expecting to find proper saxophone playing and they’re presented with a pretty clunky approximation of it. I don’t blame them, of course I don’t agree with them. I think it’s kind of cute that they took the time to bother slagging me off.”

It raises the classic indie question: how much formal skill does an musician need to create valid music on an instrument? I figure Zlatic is probably the best person to ask.

“I don’t think ability, lack of or copious amounts of, really come into it. It depends on the individuals approach. I’m not particularly instrumentally dextrous, I’m competent, but I’m not particularly skilled. So how I approach it is what comes into it,” he starts, but then stops, lost. “What was the question? Sorry, I’ve got a short memory,” he laughs.

I take the opportunity to rephrase the question, asking rather, how the saxophonist approaches playing an instrument.

“You can’t really answer that question, it’s kind of like you’re presented with an instrument and you’ll look at it and hit it in the way that you know to. You might have a little riff that you play on the piano and it might take you three or four months until it becomes something and it will be completely different from that. It’s always having a nervous energy and tinkling along and eventually things come out. Other times we’ll just be jamming and something will click, it’s just chance I guess.

In that case, does Zlatic understand musical theory?

“No, not at all, I don’t really know any theory as such. I know what keys are on the keyboard, but that’s about the basis of it. I listen to a lot of music that comes from a lot of theory, a lot of free jazz stuff. It might sound like noise but it’s actually people knowing what they’re doing and there’s a lot of thought that goes into it as far as musical theory side of it [but] I don’t know what that means.”

InPress interview:
IN THE ROUGH

Local duo FABULOUS DIAMONDS are fast making a name by thieving sounds their parents hate and turning them into a new brand of psych noise, CHRISTINE YOUNG finds when she talks to JARROD ZLATIC.

Jarrod Zlatic’s hands and soul have been connected to an instrument for as long as he can remember. It all started in Prep with keyboard lessons. As a teenager, involvement in a high school community radio station naturally progressed into guitar and drum lessons as well as playing the saxaphone and electric organ. “When you’re 14, you just wanna try all sorts of things so I decided I wanted to learn to play guitar,” he says. He formed his first band, Oh! Belgium, at the age of 15, before the group broke up two years ago.

Zlatic says his early ventures into playing music weren’t really due to a musical upbringing. He explains, with a sense of humour, the extent to which his parents have informed his musical leanings. “My dad used to go to a lot of the punk gigs which happened in the ’70s in Australia and he always had good CDs. Neither of my parents play any instruments. My mum doesn’t even listen to music and thinks the kind of music I make is pretty bad so I wouldn’t say I grew up in a musical family, per se.”

The 21-year-old has since joined forces with Nisa Venerosa (originally from Sydney) and together they are Fabulous Diamonds. The pair recently released their debut recording - through Mistletone Records and Nervous Jerk Music - which is a self-titled 7″ EP featuring five tracks. These tracks are represented by their duration rather than a textual title. This is an indication of their unique relationship to music production that’s a process of moments and improvisation.

Zlatic plays keyboard and saxaphone while Venerosa adds some sultry vocals to the eclectic mix that includes strong percussion segments. The result is a combination of psychedelia and reggae - a kind of acid dub. Fabulous Diamonds’ sound is filtered through an effects pedal but Zlatic doesn’t view their work as obviously different.

“I’ve never seen us as doing anything particularly different. If you happen to play an electric organ or some drums through an effects pedal, it just means no matter how you play it something else comes out of it because if you play drums or organs through a delay box you kinda get multiple rhythms, which press against each other, so by the very nature of the effects, they create something.”

Zlatic says experimenting and improvisation is the key to Fabulous Diamonds’ creative process. Unlike so many musicians, he doesn’t rattle off an obligatory list of influences. “We just picked up some instruments and started playing them. There’s nothing directly influencing what we do. I mean, there’s certain things like trying to see what we can do with drums and effect pedals and putting everything through that. I’m a bit like a magpie in the sense that everything I listen to, I hear something I like in it so I wanna take it away to build my own nest.”

As for the improvisation, he says they keep going until it feels right. Of course, it’s not an exact science or process but more a case of finding and doing what feels good. “An improvisation might be playing the same two notes for 20 minutes, that’ll be fine. It’s something that just happens, it’s not something you can say, ‘This is when this happens’, and you’ve gotta record it. Everything has a natural feeling.” This way of working means they are constantly recording home demos in order to refine the improvised sessions.

Fabulous Diamonds are currently working on a 12″ release through Siltbreeze Records in the US, which records bands like the Dead C and Harry Pussy. “It’s been releasing a lot of Australian bands recently. Like our friend’s band Paeces is getting released through them and that’s how we found out about them, so we’re working on a recording for that at the moment.”

From The Brag:
Shiny Murky Futuristic Acid Dub
by Richard MacFarlane

“WTF!!! Dude I am a Sax major in University and that is not sax playing”.

That’s a comment left on a YouTube video of Fabulous Diamond’s Jarrod Zlatic playing saxophone. You might say that this internet user has missed the point of the Melbourne two-piece’s sound. They’re all murky and tribal, myriad instruments fed through delay pedal: drum machine, melodica, organs, vocals, all blended into a spooky soup of musical brilliance, a vichyssoise, perhaps, even if it’s a cold soup that I don’t care for too much, I find Fabulous Diamonds hypnotic and engaging and I can’t help replaying this new 7″ of theirs.

The notion of DIY is relevant for their sound and approach. Nisa doesn’t have any musical training, but Jarrod has some.

‘We just thought it would be a good idea for her to just start playing drums and signing. I’ve had some training: I got up to about grade 3 piano when I was younger, had some guitar lessons when I was 14, but I’ve never had a saxophone lesson. I can’t play it; those YouTube comments are sort of completely right in one respect but completely wrong in another sense’.

Minimalism plays a big part but it is the influence of dub music that is most evident. Dub has always focused on the simple, though, and Fab Diamonds don’t try and clutter it too much in taking queues and forwarding it. There’s certainly a fair bit going on in their futuristic brand of dub but it’s restrained.

‘I’m a bit like a magpie in a way; picking up lots of different musical bits and pieces. With dub, I don’t really own that much but I love it, the aesthetic ideas and the concept of it. I listen to a lot of post-punk as well, especially stuff with a big dub influence like The Slits or The New Age Steppers. The sonic space that dub has is reverberous and mysterious and tangible and hazy; I really like that. A lot of our newer material has sounded a bit more like house music in a way. There’s an element of progressive electronic coming in, a tribal sort of thing.

‘Delay pedals have featured in every project I’ve been in, exploring the possibilities and different uses of it. There are infinite possibilities with whatever you want to plug in to it, as opposed to say a distortion pedal or wah-wah, which are more purposeful or practical. I love those, too, but I think you can get a lot more creative with the delay’.

I’d only ever seen them play live until hearing this 7″ and it’s surprising how well the immediacy and innate feel of their sound can translate to recording.

‘The live shows are only spontanious up to a certain degree. Everything is still a song, it’s just framed differently in a live set. We’re never entirely sure how they will turn out live but we always have a skeleton idea. It wasn’t that hard to get this to come across when recording the 7″‘.

Still, it was only done on 8 track. It’s not that this was limiting for Fabulous Diamonds, in fact, it’s probably helped get the primitive, tribal edge their sound has. But making it lush and layering sounds is a key concern for Jarrod.

‘I’m having issues with production at the moment. We’re recording to half-inch reel-to-reel tape and its only got 8 tracks. We’ve already filled all those tracks up with instruments on each. I like the production side of things because you can build up the sound and make it really lush. I’d love to go into a 24 track studio because it would be great to play around with the sound in a lot of depth’.

From Drum Media:

Your music is?
Our music genre is ever-changing. post-punk, dub, psychedelic and techo are being thrown around at the moment.

Which acts inspired you to produce your own music and why?
Jarrod and i are really into different things and some similar things. one thing we can both agree on is brian eno. as to whether he has influenced us….?

Whats your wildest ambition for your music?
We are not the ambitious types but we will definitly be touring overseas hopefully next year and have many future release plans.

Why should we come and see you?
Because we are amazing and the supports are amazing and it will be generally good vibes all round.

How do you find the local live scene?
The sydney music scene has come along way in the past couple of years thanks to kids like chooch putting on all ages gigs and running venues and starting amazing bands.

Whats your greatest rocknroll moment?
We’re not rock’n'roll.

From Time Off magazine : live review
SLY HATS, KES, FABULOUS DIAMONDS
The Troubadour: 24.06.07

It’s almost criminal how small a crowd appears at The Troubadour tonight for the performance of three excellent Melbourne artists. Minimalist duo Fabulous Diamonds take the stage first, and begin clanging through the first song of their enchanting, unobstructed set. Repetitive drum patterns lay as the basis for fractured keyboard lines, echoed chants and spiraling saxophone flourishes that serve more to texture the songs than to follow melodies. The rhythms still permeate this haze of sound that is created, and over this Nisa Venerosa and Jarrod Zlatic add simple and effective lyrics. It is the simplicity that is key to the undeniable charm of Fabulous Diamonds, a mystical appeal that demands attention.

Kes is another artist with an abundance of charm, here tonight launching his solo record The Grey Goose Wing. The alter-ego of Melbourne musician Karl Scullin, Kes is captivating as his tall, thin frame emerges from beneath a mane-like crop of hair. He yelps and howls from the bottom of his lungs over layers of guitar lines - his stunning, almost child-like voice works perfectly beside his non-linear folk tunes. Scullin says practically nothing to the small audience, and quietly traipses around the stage in search of something he never finds. This unfortunately spells the end of the short, albeit captivating, performance.

The evening is completed by another excellent solo act Sly Hats, a project of Crayon Fields frontman Geoff O’Connor. Sly Hats encapsulates all of the reverb-laden prettiness of O’Connor’s regular band, but adds some husky drum machine patterns and subtle elements of lounge and surf. The music is based around a single guitar, some whirling organ and O’Connor’s soft, calming voice. It perfectly befits the dim, sullen Troubadour setting. Finally, Fabulous Diamonds vocalist Nisa Venerosa joins O’Connor on stage for a few songs from his record Liquorice Night, including the wonderful ‘Windy Harmony’.

- PAUL DONOUGHUE