Doing Things By Halves

Dave Scanlon, bass and violin player with post-rock sonic beauticians Halves, remembers when he sat down with Tim Czerniak and Brian Cash and made the masterplan.

“We sat down on a bench in Ranelagh and said ‘here’s the kind of band we want to be in,’” he recalls. “We designed the band. Here’s what we want – a, b, and c. And we listed bands we liked and how we wanted things to look. It wasn’t just about music. We wanted everything we put out to look a certain way, and sound a certain way, right down to the website and the visuals of the gigs. We wanted to present a package and an overall sound and vision thing. We had a very clear manifesto about the kind of sound we wanted and the kind of thing we wanted to do, which not many bands in this country were doing.”
You see, prior to this, they’d been in another band with no plan. Brian met Dave where they worked in Xtra-Vision on Baggot Street, and asked him to join a group he was in, of which Tim was also a member. And that had been a bit crap.
“We were all over the place,” concedes Dave. “A bit of this, a bit of that. A bit pop. And it was a matter of finally picking something that we were all really, really into, rather than just hedging our bets or trying to appeal to daytime radio and falling between lots of posts.”
All they needed was a manifesto, just like the Marxists, the Futurists, and Martin Luther. That’s when they got good. Pretty quickly, they were joined by Tim’s brother Ellis and a cottage industry was born. And as Dave has suggested, the remit goes way beyond just music. The day before the interview, the band spent a while having a morning of craft and design.
“Brian does the bulk of the artwork,” explains Ellis. “We all help out, but he’s the designer. We spent yesterday morning sewing the sleeves, putting the booklets and CDs into them and checking the elastic to see if it would break, and then yesterday evening we wrote a song. So it’s half sewing circle and half music with us. We do everything ourselves, or within our network of friends and family. For the first EP we had my wife, one of the lads’ girlfriend and another of the lads’ mom sewing and cutting ribbons. And we’re also very lucky to have friends to help with visuals or sound, or to give us loans of gear, or giving us advice with PR or stuff. We’ve a network.”
That DIY approach extends to their recording process.
“The spine of the songs was done live in the studio last August,” says Dave. “And then the rest of it was done from then until the last day of last year. The additional recording was done in various spots all over the place. I drafted in my brother and sister to play strings in my parents’ music room in Waterford. We recorded things like glockenspiel and other guitars in stairwells and bathrooms and bedrooms. Tim and Ellis have very accommodating parents, who allowed us to go record in various rooms in their house according to acoustics or availability. Our old cello player lives in Sweden, and we sent over a poem to recite and she recorded it and sent it over to us. It’s in the background of the last song. Then we got it mastered by a chap in Sweden, who also mastered a band called Jenifer Forever who we like. So there were a lot of Swedish influences. Globalisation – it’s the way forward.”
And going global is all part of the plan. I had the pleasure of first seeing them at the Eurosonic festival in Groningen in Holland; soon they’ll be playing at London Calling (guess where that is) and most excitingly, they’ve been asked to perform alongside the likes of Mogwai at the Transmission festival in Austria.
“The days of the great golden hand coming to pick you from obscurity and babysit you are long since gone,” he asserts. “Any band waiting for that to happen is deluding themselves frankly. We don’t believe in waiting around. So we’re also starting to deal with the broader music industry, in that we have a distribution deal with Cargo in the UK and Europe. We’re not actively sending this out to every label under the sun, but there are a few we’d love to work with, and it’d be great if that happened. But as much as we can, we’re trying to do it ourselves. And we wouldn’t really want to do it any other way.”