SCK CHX and Jermango Dreaming are two sizzling acts out of Sydney inner west collective Yeah Nah Yeah, a spicy little cohort of musicians we’ve never hidden our love for. We’re pretty sure every single one of the six fellas running the joint are Happy Mag Launch alumni, through one YNY band or another.
Jermango dropped his new single Modern Day Living last week, and the CHX have the release of their newest Spinning Around set for this Friday. Ahead of a very tasty looking joint launch at a secret location, we shoved the lot of them in a room together to chat.
Ahead of their joint single launch, Yeah Nah Yeah exports SCK CHX and Jermango Dreaming get together to chat farms, keyboards and dream collabs.
SCK CHX interviews Jermango Dreaming
SCK CHX: Hey Jerm, big fans of what you are about. Your onstage presence is extremely relaxing and immersive, which really allows you to take shows further than stages and into places where some acts wouldn’t work. Where do you think is one of the best environments you could play your music in?
JERMANGO: Hey woah, thanks guys. This is a tough one, so many places come to mind. But I’ll narrow it down to two. Somewhere in space would be ideal. But more realistically a big old Australian farm. Maybe snowing? Just definitely not in summer. The heat sucks.
SCK CHX: How do you like fronting the band on guitar? What made you choose the guitar over say the keys, bass or bassoon?
JERMANGO: I feel most comfortable on guitar I guess. I don’t think it pulls away from my vocals whereas playing a keyboard I would focus on that to much, and same with bass and my favourite, the bassoon.
SCK CHX: You’ve introduced a lot of very cool bands to us over the last couple of years. Specifically from the Homeshake, Column/Infinite Bisous, Mild High Club sort of scene. Your music really draws from that stuff. How would you describe the sort of sound that these bands are making?
JERMANGO: Ah man, I am just as obsessed with the album A Year in Your Garden by Column as the day I found it. Homeshake I find quite similar but not so much Mild High Club. I guess it’s really emotional, soft drums (not so much new Homeshake) and slightly out of tune, warm, beautiful synths. Perfect music to make love to, fall asleep to and cry to.
SCK CHX: Please tell us more about your girlfriend, the Juno-60?
JERMANGO: Oh baby. My keys player Jay would always show me great synths and drum machines, and this one just stuck with me over the years. I watched heaps of Youtube demos and noticed a lot of artists I loved used one, and then my mate Alex brought one into the recording session of I Want You and Modern Day Living and I had to get one after that. It just has every sound I could possibly need in one easy to use unit. Nothing makes me more wet than giving it a slight wobbly detune with the LFO, and bringing the attack in nice and slow on a soft warm sound ahhh…
SCK CHX: You’ve rocked up to places in your ute pumping Bring Me the Horizon enough for us to know that you’ve still got a soft spot for heavy music after all these years. Does this influence your dreamy lo-fi sound at all?
JERMANGO: Haha RIP in the ute. Yeah I still love it, I find it evokes the same emotions as say, Infinite Bisous/Column for me. Even though it’s really heavy, at its core it’s generally really sad, but channeling the sad emotions makes me happy a lot of the time. I guess emo is short for Emotional right?
SCK CHX: What’s your favourite thing to do with when you’re chilling?
JERMANGO: Aww man the ideal chilling situation would be sparking a wendy while laying on a fur rug naked, in front of a fire with me one and only cuddled up next to me. Sipping on some wine, or scotch, spinning some mellow tunes. Yeah this is why I need a farm hey.
Jermango Dreaming interviews SCK CHX
JERMANGO: Ill start things off simple. Everyone is dying to know, where did the name SCK CHX come from? And how would you define a SCK CHK?
SCK CHX: Hey Jermy, good question. It stumps a lot of people seeing as we are three dudes. When we first started playing music together for this project, myself and Matt would draw our main inspiration from artists such as Patti Smith, Blondie and Nico. We spent a lot of time learning their songs and deconstructing the different elements, so when we eventually got Josh involved and got the project off the ground we decided that we were drawing so much from these sick female acts and found ourselves often saying how sick these chicks were and it caught on from there.
JERMANGO: Andy, you play the guitar in such a unique way. It’s loose but technical, heavy but still soothing. What guitarists do you look to for inspiration?
SCK CHX: That’s really nice of you to say dude. I really love the guitar work of Gary Burger who is the guitarist from a band called The Monks, so I tend to keep that in mind when I write lines, as well as more modern rock stylings from Albert Hammond Jr from The Strokes. I have also recently gotten really into Japanese girl punk from the ’60s and’70s, so I’m finding myself drawing a bit from bands like the 5,6,7,8s and Shonen Knife.
JERMANGO: Anybody who has seen you guys play will notice you swap instruments around. Why is this?
SCK CHX: We do this because we decided to play the songs on the instruments which we write the songs in. We like to switch it up at practice and see what flavours we can each bring to instruments that aren’t necessarily our primary ones. It allows us to experiment within our writing style and is genuinely just heaps fun to do.
JERMANGO: Take us through the typical SCK CHX songwriting process.
SCK CHX: We write in one of two ways really. Either one of us will bring a song or concept already written the other two and we will learn and adapt our own styles to the piece or we will just get together in a room pick up our instruments and play together until we come up with a sound that we will then build on until we can fully flesh it out into a track. We like to sit on them for a bit and give ourselves time to really think about what sounds would work best where.
JERMANGO: You guys recorded an EP at Parliament Studios earlier this year. Being in King Colour (Matt and Dives), how did you find this experience different from doing the KC EP there?
SCK CHX: The EP for us really took the recording process out of the bedroom/rehearsal room for the first time so it was a learning curve. We engineered the EP ourselves with assistance from Phan Sjarif at Parliament and spent three 14-hour days tracking (approximately three hours per night just hanging in the control room after hours dreaming about the EP being finished one day). We recorded the King Colour EP with no engineering or production responsibilities working with Phan, so we had to focus hard on pulling the right sounds out of our heads.
JERMANGO: You have been given a gift card that lets you choose any musician to collaborate with, dead or alive. Who would they be?
SCK CHX: We’d love to collaborate with Jonathan Rickman from the Modern Lovers or Jacqueline Taieb. Someone who could just tell beautiful stories over music. Or Brian Wilson during the Pet Sounds recordings.
SCK CHX and Jermango Dreaming will be performing together at their joint single launch on December 23rd at a secret location. Plus, this Saturday SCK CHX will be playing alongside King Colour at their Lost My Cool single launch at the Chippo, featuring Happy Mag’s very own Nic on DJ duties.
Grab all the details below:
Sat 25 Nov – King Colour Lost My Cool Single Launch – The Chippo – Event
Sat 23 Dec – SCK CHX/Jermango Dreaming Single Launch – Secret Location – Event
Look out for Spinning Around by SCK CHX, dropping this Friday!
