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Sonicanimation.
 Sonicanimation fans, you are being lied to. Not about the duo calling it a day, which is unfortunately true - but don't believe their website when it claims that Adrian Cartwright has taken on a job feeding marmots in East Chile.
"Yeah, that's Rupert [Keiller]!" he laughs, referring to his partner in dance. "I've got a few things on the go: gonna go and work with a few producers here and there, to get an idea about what other people are doing. I've got a few ideas of things that I want to do [that are] just completely different from Sonic. More organic, I suppose."
On the imminent end of the band, Cartwright speaks reasonably and without any real emotion. "Rupert and I have been talking about it for a while, and we sort of wanted to start thinking about doing other things separately. We thought eleven years was long enough. We just thought we'd call it quits 'cause it's hard to think about other projects when you've still got one on the boil that takes up a lot of your time. We were both talking about it last tour, and we thought let's do the album 'Eleven' and do the tour and finish it at the end of the year. We thought if we start with a clean slate and finish Sonic off, then we can start thinking about other things."
'Eleven' is the Sonicanimation greatest hits album, also featuring a disc of remixes done by others. Its release is being supported by a national headline tour, with the possibility of summer festival dates on the horizon. While the album title refers to the eleven-year existence of Sonicanimation, there is a rock or metal connotation to that word. "Lots of people have said it's a metal term; I've never really thought about it like that. It is kinda fun, and it's funny knowing that now."
It also makes sense for a group that took a more rock-influenced approach to making dance music. "I think you can't not have that in Australia because the way you serve you time is you play live, whereas in the UK and America you don't necessarily do that. You put an album out and if it goes well then you start to wonder how you're gonna play it all live. And you get that rock'n'roll feel from playing pubs, because there's not a lot of venues - other than raves - that you can play dance stuff that don't have people that are into rock going along to as their local venue."
They've also toured with some of the biggest dance acts in the world, and found their approach was somewhat different. "It's kind of nice to have that, putting it into dance music as well, like some people have termed it 'rocktronica' and there's a few other awful names: 'digi-rock' I think was the worst one, sounds like an electronic didgeridoo or something crazy like that!" Cartwright laughs. "Our roots were with 'normal' bands so we always wanted that sort of aspect to it as well."
Sonicanimation were one of the first dance acts I genuinely liked, having listened to rock and metal growing up. Cartwright understands this. "A lot of the Jupiter lines that Rupert, for example, has written - they're analogue keyboard lines, which are the lead lines in a lot of our dance stuff - a lot of them are based on a sort of lead guitar section in a rock track, so it's almost metal in some places as well, I suppose: [there's] that sort of feel about it."
As this is their last ever tour, expect it to be one for the fans. "I think that we're gonna put so much into it, it'll be quite exciting. It's hard to explain really. We'll probably do just about every song anyone knows," chuckles Cartwright. "We'll chuck 'em all in there! It'll probably be a long set..."
Wade Howland
 | 'Eleven' is out now through Inertia and Sonicanimation play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Thurs 1 Sept. |
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