A career musician since the 1970s, Greg Manson makes a return to Brisbane with his new, ambient-music project Hypnolia.
After a varied musical career in bands ranging from psych to blues to didgeridoo-swamp-funk, Greg is back with his new, Krautrock project. “Krautrock came out of Germany in probably about '68, '69, went right through to about '76, '77.
“It's bands like Can and Faust and Neu! and Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. But it was very obscure, it never really got that name until later. When it was actually happening it didn't have a name,” Greg says.
It's a genre he's incredibly familiar with, playing in a Krautrock band himself as a teenager. “We were a Brisbane band, we played in some houses and I think we rented Hammet Hall once and played to nobody. We were just a young band, we were 16, 17, and the sort of music we were doing nobody wanted to know about so after a couple of years we all left.”
It wasn't until a chance show with legendary, psychedelic outfit Gong brought Greg back into the cosmic-music realm. “This popped up and I thought, 'I'm gonna go back to it after 40 years away'.”
Hypnolia is an attempt to remove the percussive elements of psychedelic music and return it to the Berlin school of Krautrock. “We're sort of going back to the traditional stuff because a lot of this music, it was originally sort of ambient, trippy stuff.
"Tangerine Dream came and played Brisbane in 1975, and at the time the University of Queensland was the only place where the Queensland Police couldn't go, so people could actually sit there and smoke a joint and watch the band. There used to be some incredible gigs there.
"The traditional sound of that period was very analogue. Since the advent of dance music everything has got beats in it and we're trying to go back to the original ambient aspect of it.
“Everywhere you go you're assailed by beats, and personally I get a bit tired of that because a lot of it starts to sound the same after a while. We're just trying to introduce a different vibe and some people like it, some people don't. It's a different headspace."
After nearly 50 years of playing music, Greg recognises the changes in the music industry and emphasises the importance of live performance with Hypnolia. “We practice live, it's geared to be live and we structure it so that it's a live performance as opposed to something that is constructed over a lot of time at a studio.“What we do is interact with the immediate, it's organic. We're doing it, we're playing it, right there, so it's never the same thing twice. We have rough ideas of where we're going and a rough idea of what sounds we're going to use but it's... not improvised, but interactive.
“It's live, because the last 20 years people have grown up with the expectation that they don't have to pay for music. The connect between the physicality of music in the sense that you have a piece of music in your hand, you study the artwork, that's gone.”
Written by Brendan MacLean
Hypnolia plays The Bearded Lady 25 November.
