Civil Civic at Urban Spree / Friday, 28.10.2016

This month, Dawn of the Dance will be presenting a seductively disquieting bill at Urban Spree featuring Australian instrumental post-punk/electronic rock duo Civil Civic. The electronic soundscape masters return to Berlin to promote their newest release, ‘The Test’, their second full-length studio effort at conjuring that signature sound of theirs — an impeccable cross-pollination of modular-synth electro-pop and cheek-vibrating space noise.

The return of Civil Civic will be a relief to many who have waited patiently since 2011’s epic debut album, ‘Rules’. Concocted from the intrinsic production skills of Aaron Cupples and Benjamin Green, the Melbourne duo have spent the last four years honing their special recipe of colourful instrumentals from their bases in London and Barcelona, respectively. This first offering is a taste of what’s to come, a smorgasbord of aural delicacies made to take the listener on an unforgettable journey.

Although they were both involved in the notoriously robust and competitive Melbourne band scene, Aaron and Ben never met in Australia. That happened later, 2009 in Europe, when Aaron flew from his new home in London to Barcelona. He stayed at Ben’s apartment for 3 weeks and they invented the Civil Civic sound.
It was a blind date.

In March 2010 Civil Civic spawned their debut release, a cassette EP titled ’1′. The flagship track (a noodling, brawling avalanche of noise called ‘Less Unless’) ripped through the blogosphere and straight to number one on the Hype Machine charts.
Hello Civil Civic.

The follow up single, ‘Run Overdrive’ was supported by a European tour and garnered further praise from a bewildering variety of sources, from the most obscure music blogs to NME and The Guardian. Next was a 7″ on Too Pure called ‘Lights On A Leash’, a track named by a fan after winning an overwhelmingly popular song naming contest run by the band. Their debut album ‘Rules’ was released in November 2011, garnering yet more praise from both the music press with it’s weird mix of teeth-grinding intensity, pop triumphalism and party-on abandon.

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As well as packing in all these releases in their first 2 years, Civil Civic have been tearing up the European tour circuit, reaping a reputation for delivering the goods live. Though the packed out underground sweaty club is Civil Civic’s spiritual home, the band have also graced many festival stages. Including headlining the main stage at Leige’s Microfestival and tearing it up at the prime 1AM slot (between Spiritulized and Squarepusher) at the legendary French ‘La Route Du Rock‘. (Civilcivic.com)

Instrumental post-rock is great to wander around to, pretending you’re in a film, but it rarely brings the party, and more often than not the movie soundtrack of bands like 65daysofstatic become overly dramatic and then boring. It’s probably because Australian duo Civil Civic’s third ‘member’, The Box, is a massive drum machine, and that they often play zapping synths that their lyric-less music remains fist-pumpingly fun and also ATP credible. Their movie music is for a film that consists only of scenes where a spaceship is fleeing a star mid-supernova. It’s a triumphant, loud sound. (Loud and Quiet)

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“The extended outro [of their featured single, ‘The Hunt’] is intended to mock both good taste and the laws of physics, something that comes naturally to a band that ooze majestic futurist prog, epic math-rock, electro-goth, post-rock, glacier-sized chillwave or just simply, ‘post-everything’.

Like a celestial shaft of aural light beamed from unknown futures or a diamond-cutting laser first illuminating and then slicing to shreds the darkest corners of the subconscious, CIVIL CIVIC create a musical experience that is totally immersive. Like musical synaesthesia, theirs is a visceral experience to be smelled, tasted, explored, survived. They sound like no other.” (Soundcloud)