Next month, Sydney/ LA-based electronic-folk duo Atlas Bound will make their live performance debut at This That festival in Newcastle.
With their latest single, ‘Landed On Mars’, gaining more than 800,000 plays on Soundcloud, the duo are ready for the live arena.
Speaking with one half of the duo, he mentioned their anticipation of making this transition to performing live. “We’ve been holding off for quite some time to play live gigs,” one half of the duo, Adrian Kalcic, says, “so this will be our first sort of real, official, live gig in a sense, so should be exciting.
“Our music's pretty laidback, so it should be good for the timeslot we're playing, we're hoping it sort of suits the afternoon.”
This laidback atmosphere will extend across the entire festival as it sprawls across the Newcastle Foreshore and plays host to a huge line-up of Australian bands including: Birds Of Tokyo, Sticky Fingers, The Jungle Giants, The Kite String Tangle, Tkay Maidza, Carmada, Asta and many more. In addition, This That consists of more than just music: artisan markets run by Newcastle’s leading boutiques The Follower and Hunt & Gather filled with creative wares, performances and interactivity.
This That will also start a foodie revolution a with wide variety of food from local restaurants and internationally renowned food trucks paired with local craft beers. Atlas Bound are ready to embrace every aspect of This That. “I haven't been to festival in a long time, so we're looking forward to seeing everything.
"It's the first festival we're gonna play at so we're excited to see what goes on... really excited to see all these new acts that you constantly hear on the radio and see how they perform live.”
After the festival, Atlas Bound are ready to kick it into high-gear, with plans to play more Australian shows, a relocation to America and an upcoming EP. “We’ve actually pretty much finished writing [the EP]. It's taken us a while, we've been writing it for quite some time.
“We wrote one maybe a couple of months ago and totally scrapped that, threw it away, started again, so I think we've got something we really like now and we feel like it's the first body of work we're putting out that will show who we are as a musical act. So yeah, really excited!
“As far as release date goes we're not 100 per cent sure yet but hoping to get it out by the end of the year, we're planning on putting a single out soon in the coming months before that EP. It won't be a lead single from the EP, it'll just be another single to keep stuff flowing.”
While their music has been compared to contemporaries such as James Blake and Glass Animals, the pair is looking to the past to bring new influences to their future works. “The EP that we're putting out is a lot more jazz influenced. We've always sort of enjoyed listening to older tracks like Nat King Cole and Etta James, stuff like that, so we've been trying to sort of bring elements of that back into what we've been recently doing.”
This That takes place at the Newcastle Foreshore 31 October.
