If half of you wants to go clubbing until you regret it, but the other half of you wants to sit at home with a cuppa and a good read, locals Astrocolor will meet you wherever you find yourself along that continuum.
The band mixes electronica with jazz, along with other genres; DJ/producer Neil Cooke-Dallin says each performance is different, depending on how strictly he wants to follow a set list as well as other factors involved with being in a six-person band.
“Depending on the booking and who’s available, sometimes we can have fewer members or more members, but [Rifflandia] is one where we get to have everybody on stage, which is always the most fun.”
Cooke-Dallin says playing in Victoria—his hometown—is always exciting, and that the audience seems to thrive most with more members on stage.
“We have the largest fan base here, you know; people go out of their way to come to our shows who follow us pretty closely,” he says. “It’s always great to play for your people.”
Cooke-Dallin says Astrocolor came together as a result of two groups merging: funk band Weird Party and techno act Righteous Rainbows of Togetherness. Between those two groups, Astrocolor started to take form, jumping from jazz to a Friday-night dance-club soundtrack.
“I hear all this return to late ’90s and some of the Ninja Tune-style sounds. I’m plenty old enough to know what that music sounds like,” he says with a laugh.
The band was formed during a creative weekend in the studio when Cooke-Dallin decided to put Weird Party and Righteous Rainbows of Togetherness “in the same room at the same time”; the two groups jammed together for hours.
“I could take the samples from that and basically remix all the golden moments into tight little numbers,” he says. “It started out as a concept, and that concept has just worked really well and got the ball rolling, and we’ve ran with it ever since.”
Cooke-Dallin thinks of himself as a producer of music rather than a DJ; no matter the title, his time spent in the studio lends itself well to taking the stage.
“Just for the ease of performance, it works well for me to run it more or less like a DJ set,” he says.
There is often a setlist when the band plays, but sometimes they rely on spontaneous creative inspiration in the moment.
“We can fly back into full DJ, or I can loop little moments when they’re working and the boys can just start live jamming over top of the looped moments,” he says. “It’s an easy way to keep the live performance really versatile.”
Astrocolor (at Rifflandia)
10 pm, Saturday, September 16
Various prices, Phillips Backyard
rifflandia.com