700 Feel and No Nomad chat.
Following on from their remix collaboration where 700 Feel reimagined No Nomad’s ‘I Get Scared’, the two acts from opposite sides of Australia interviewed each other on their music, influences, and directions for the future.
No Nomad: Where are you guys right now? Day been good so far?
700 Feel: Currently sitting in our backyard at our place in Marrickville… it’s a nice sunny day after a week of straight rain and we’re both definitely having a good one so far
No Nomad: What was the last album you listened to?
Juan: Promises by Floating Points, London Symphony Orchestra, and Pharoah Sanders… easily one of my favourite albums of all time now.
Jonny: Half God by Wiki. Love the new direction Wik is heading in and Navy Blue really killed the production on this one.
No Nomad: What led you two to forming 700 Feel? How did it all start and come together?
Juan: We went to high school together and I (Juan) was a couple years above Jonny so I’d see him here and there but we didn’t interact much back then. He became best friends with my brother Jose who started bringing him around our family’s house. We just connected through similar music tastes and the fact that we’ve just always made music. This led to us fucking around making random stupid beats in my bedroom, which led to us moving out together, which led to 700 Feel. Everything happened very naturally; from our sound to our logo to all of it..
No Nomad: Can you tell us a little bit about your debut full-length from late last year?
700 Feel: We look at that album as a photograph that captures the energy from a very specific time and place in our lives. A time and place that we’ve definitely grown a lot from… like it took us around 2 years to put the whole thing together and put it out… the stuff we listen to and make now is completely different. We’re still super proud of it and it’s still, at its heart, very 700 Feel but just wait for the new stuff we’re gonna release soon… the remix we did for you guys was just a taste haha
No Nomad: Coming to the remix, what were your initial thoughts when you first heard I Get Scared? Did the ideas start flowing straight away or how did you approach putting it together?
700 Feel: Yeah honestly, I think as soon as we heard the track, we knew we could do something cool with it. We didn’t exactly know what it was necessarily gonna be but we knew it’d be cool just cause we’re both instantly really big fans of the track… We’re both always listening to music and we always go through phases with different things so I think we always just pull from whatever is catching our ear at that current moment and find a way to 700 Feel it up. This time it was a bit of Flying Lotus and a lot of Chopped and Screwed. We thought it’d be interesting to do those scratched, slowed, pitched-down, crossfader glitched techniques in that sort of wonky electronic context. I think we did alright haha
No Nomad: You seem to have a super diverse pallette of influences and sounds of your own, but are you guys jazz fans? Any particular jazz or jazz-leaning artists you dig?
700 Feel: Yeah we love it and have always drawn inspiration from it. Even though the music we make isn’t necessarily jazz, we’ve always fucked with its ethos of improvisation and exploration. I mean one thing that brought us together was our mutual love for Flying Lotus and he’s always been the most diverse and always has that essence in his music. It’s also (in our opinion) the most exciting shit coming out of Australia right now with bands like Godtet, Tangents, Hiatus Kaiyote, etc. Other than that, nowadays we love all the new guys fusing jazz with electronic music… Big shoutout Kamaal Williams, Yussef Dayes, Kamasi Washington.
No Nomad: Congrats on the FBi award nod for ones to watch! What's in the pipeline for 700 Feel in 2022 and future?
700 Feel: Appreciate that, it definitely feels good to even just be recognised among all those other talented artists from Sydney on that list… As far as the next year goes, we’ve got a couple of singles/remixes on the way but I think we’re gonna spend more time playing shows and honing our live set. We’ve also got a second album in the works so stay tuned for that.
No Nomad: Got any music recommendations of stuff you've been digging of late?
Juan: Big shoutout to Kelman Duran who makes crazy interesting reggaeton and ambient music. I still love listening to his album 1804 KIDS when I’m driving my car at night
Jonny: Been non-stop listening to ‘The Ethics’ recently. Shit just makes me happy.
700 Feel: How are you guys doing over there? How did you guys cope with the pandemic?
No Nomad: We’re really well! We just had our show at The Bird on Saturday night and it was a really nice night. We’ve been so lucky over here in the west. In a lot of ways, it’s almost like the pandemic never really hit us. We had lockdowns and restrictions, but they were a lot less severe than elsewhere. There were a lot of times where we were still playing shows at nearly full capacity, whilst the rest of the world was a whole different story.
700 Feel: How’d you guys form the band? And what’s the jazz scene/ general music scene like out in Perth?
No Nomad: Austen and Ryan met at a party in 2018 through mutual friends and started yarning about music, we seem to remember an argument about The Beach Boys haha Both of us had been wanting to get some people together and we each knew Clancy, Drew, Cameron and David so then we all met up and started jamming and writing some stuff. The music scene over here is pretty great. There’s a handful of venues where new acts can play pretty early on and find their feet, so it's really lush ground for new projects. There’s also a lot of diversity in styles over here, so it seems like you get some really cool mixes of people and genres and influences and they can all sit together on a lineup and everyone digs it. Being small means there’s a lot of crossover so lots of acts will share members, and it leads to a really supportive community. But being small also has its drawbacks like smaller audiences and limited opportunities.
700 Feel: Who are some of your influences for your sound?
No Nomad: We’ve got a real melting pot. We all have different musical backgrounds so that’s led to a real jumbled mix of the stuff we all listen to or play in other projects, like Cameron is studying jazz but Clancy’s other project Smol Fish has some pop, indie, and folk elements. We think the mix comes out in our music; getting asked ‘What sort of stuff do you play?’ is always the worst question haha But we’ve found common ground on jazz acts like Bill Evans, Nina Simone, and the nu jazz thing that’s been bubbling around lately. We’d say people like D’Angelo, Portishead, Stereolab, J Dilla, and Hiatus Kaiyote too.
700 Feel: Did you guys have any expectations on what we would do and what we’re your first thoughts when hearing the remix?
No Nomad: We had no expectations at all. When we came across your music we became fans and when the idea of doing a remix came up we had trust that what you’d come up with would be tight. And when we first heard it that trust paid off because it’s so sick! It’s a whole new direction from the original, such a fresh departure and the pitched down vocals and new groove are just insane to hear. Crazy to think of the transformation from when we first recorded it which was tracked live as a band, to the final remix now!
700 Feel: What are some of your favourite bushwalks around Perth?
No Nomad: The Sixty Foot Falls trail in Banyowla Regional Park is great because its only an hour or so long, you get some sweet views and the abandoned quarry it goes by is pretty cool. It just so happens to be the design on our new tee shirts too haha
700 Feel: Any goals you guys have for next year? And do you guys have any plans of playing in Sydney?
No Nomad: We’ve got some new tunes we’re really keen to record early in 2022, and that’ll probably spark discussions around what sort of format or how we want to release them. We’ll probably be playing less shows as a few of us will be busy touring and playing in other projects, but that will also mean we’ll have time to write and record some more so we’re pretty excited about that.
700 Feel: Any tracks or artists you guys wanna recommend to us? (Whether it’s jazz-leaning or not)
No Nomad: Definitely check out Makaya McCraven, Dry Cleaning, and Miryam Solomon!