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Concord Dawn.
 In
the past five years Concord Dawn (Matt Harvey and Evan Short)
have become one of New Zealand's highest profile and most respected
dance acts. Slamming head first into the drum'n'bass scene with
their impressive, hard-as-nails anthem Morning Light, the pair
has infiltrated the UK-centric scene, the album has gone platinum
in their home country, and any respectable drum'n'bass DJ has
at least one of their tunes in their box. Even after an awful
experience whilst last in Adelaide, Matt Harvey is a very friendly,
chatty guy, and is looking forward to coming back in April.
But first, a little history. "Evan and I have known each other since we were 11 years old," Harvey begins in a thick New Zealand accent. "We went to the same intermediate school, and we were in a band, and we played rock and roll songs at school assemblies and that. Then we went to different high schools, lost contact for a while. There used to be a thing with the North Shore where all the kids from the schools would go and do a big choir, orchestra, that kind of thing. My school would host jazz bands, and I was in the top jazz combo and Evan was playing guitar. He saw me and said "you're still playing the drums, you're pretty good these days, but are you into the heavier stuff?" So I started playing with him again... then that band split up, and we didn't see each other for a couple of years." But then fate brought them back together at audio engineering school. "We both had bits and pieces of equipment - synths, samplers, effects units, and both had something the other one wanted. So then we linked up, put our equipment in the same room, and we both dug each other's tunes."
Harvey was introduced to drum'n'bass in about 1997. "I was at an outdoor all trance party, and a mate of mine who was playing. We'd made friends a few months before, he did some of my tattoos, and we played the Star Wars card game together," he laughs nervously (the pair are big Star Wars fans: Concord Dawn is the planet upon which the suddenly orphaned Jango Fett was rescued by the Mandalorian warrior Jaster Mereel as a child, as music editor Andrew P Street shamefacedly explains). "I had been listening to trance all night and was kind of bored of it, and he came on and played drum and bass and I was wasted and it was wicked and that was it, I was head over heels!"
The unique fusion of sound on 'Uprising' includes guests Tiki from Salmonella Dub and Skribe (and, er, some Slayer samples). Harvey thinks NZ radio has had an impact on the way they construct their music: "Student Radio in NZ is really strong, they play a very broad range of music during the day, and a whole lot of specialist shows at night. We grew up listening to that, because commercial radio is quite cack. But both of us come from diverse backgrounds," he adds. "Evan used to play in heavy, heavy metal bands, and I used to play more emo rock, more poppier sort of things, and also jazzy hip-hop crossover sort of thing."
Harvey also thinks the nature of New Zealand's live scene is an important factor. "I've known people for nearly 10 years, a lot of guys playing in the big hip-hop bands over here, guys who play dub, guys who play in rock bands, guys that are house or techno DJs. So if you want to catch up with your mates for a quiet drink you tend to go out and get exposed to different kinds of music. If you spend all your time listening to drum'n'bass you can still write really good drum'n'bass, but you're never going to write anything innovative. All the tunes that we've done that have gone on to become quite big have usually contained something different. We've done stuff that's contained a rock guitar, done stuff with Evan singing that's Trancey but still quite hard... To make waves you need to be doing something different."
The pair are huge in their home country, but as Harvey explains, "We're moving to Austria next year. We're going to knock out another album - well, finely craft and hone a beautiful album", he corrects himself, laughing, "tour that, then head over. It's a lot less expensive a city to live in than London, with things like rent and food and beer and that; and it's really central to both West and Eastern Europe. We're both taking our girlfriends, so it means we can take trains instead of flying and we can take them around. It allows us to spend three or four days in places, take our laptops and just soak up the atmosphere. It'll probably only be for a year or something, and then move back here to New Zealand.
"Anything we do apart from NZ is a bonus. We've got enough gigs and sell enough records here; we could save lots of money staying right here. Going overseas is us being greedy really," he chuckles, "well, not greedy, just trying to make things bigger and better. It's not exactly a holiday, just a chance to go seeing different things and eat some weird sausages and drink some different beers. I think if we lived in London for a year or so we'd eventually get... not worn down, but we'd be in the same boat as a lot of other people writing drum'n'bass."
Julian Cram
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'Uprising' is out now through Inertia. Concrete Dawn tour in April.
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