Dark sounds on the dancefloor

Dark sounds on the dancefloor

There’s an air of mystery surrounding Canadian dance outfit Azari & III: it’s a rare band that has already released its debut album on a major label yet is still without a Wikipedia page.

With the members of the group adopting stage names to further cloud the quest for information, this writer was nervous a chat with one quarter of the group, producer Christian Farley (aka Azari), would be a painful affair, every line of questioning met with monosyllabic answers in order to preserve his band’s mystique.

Thankfully, this wasn’t to be. Lunching on a St Kilda beach during the band’s recent Australian tour, Farley was eager to talk about everything from his love of old music to the shock many of Azari & III’s fans express when they learn the outfit hail from Toronto, not an uber-cool underground techno mecca like New York or Berlin.

“A lot of people don’t realise how many Canadian artists are out there, or that they’re actually Canadian. But over the past couple of years, Canadians have really been dominating the Grammy Awards. Australians are getting out there too — the colonies are fighting back,” he joked.

It seems that rather than bothering with a backstory, Azari & III — Farley and fellow producer Alphonse Lanza (aka Alixander III) plus singers Gasaida (aka Starving Yet Full) and Fritz Helder — prefer to let their art do the talking.

They broke through last year with the addictive ’90s house-infused single Reckless With Your Love. Just don’t call them a retro band, a tag Farley deflects with a mixture of weariness and good humour.

“I look at it like this: do you still wear jeans? Of course. Jeans are never going to go out of style.

“When it comes to art, I think it’s just a categorisation thing — they call you ‘retro’ so they know where to put your CD in HMV. Is rock and roll retro? Maybe it is. To me, it could keep going in circles,” he sighed.

“We like to buy up old vintage equipment to make our music, and we look at it like it’s an old muscle car — they’re made out of steel and built to last, unlike new cars which fall apart.

“We like our music to be like steel!”

While Reckless may be the standout track on their self-titled debut album, it’s another song — Hungry For The Power — that caused the most controversy. The dark, politically-concerned lyrics were married to a video so explicit in its depictions of sex and violence that it had to be censored for YouTube.

“Maybe we’re just dark people. We’re not trying to keep to dark topics, and we’re certainly not thinking ‘Ooh, dark is in right now’.

“But we don’t have that gospel, joyful feeling that you hear in a lot of the Chicago house sounds we’re compared to — I think that puts us in a bit of a different category.

“I don’t really know where this darkness comes from, but I definitely do notice it in our sound. Maybe I need to see a shrink!”

INFO: Azari & III (Modular) out now.

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