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Music

Tooms Will Soothe Your Troubled Soul

Listen to Sam Gill of Naysayer & Gilsun's new Simple Tactics EP—mood music for the 21st Century.

To quickly recap, TV was launched commercially as a broadcast medium in the 1920s, sending and receiving sound and images. MTV used the technology to create a minor revolution in the 1980s with its network of music videos and reality shows. And then there's NGTV. In the late 2000s it was conceived by Melbourne's Naysayer and Gilsun as a hybrid of dance music, film and pop culture, past and present. Sam Gill is one half of the duo, and when he's not constructing the next audiovisual experiment with Luke Neher he's making a very different type of sonic experience under the recording name of Tooms. It's described as a "late-night, can't sleep project" and "the sound of sleepless anxiety soothed by digital decay—mood music for the 21st century." In other words, the perfect antidote to information overload. And Tooms' latest EP, Simple Tactics, sounds exactly like this:

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Thump: It feels like Tooms might be a significant departure from the processes involved with your work in Naysayer & Gilsun. How do the projects relate to each other?
Sam Gill : The two projects are more like agreeable siblings than distant cousins, thankfully. Almost all of these tracks either began as experiments I made for Naysayer & Gilsun that went awry, or as creative palette-cleansers when something I was working on for Luke and I was just doing my head in. The more I revisited them, though, the more I had a clear vision of how I wanted the final product to come together. In terms of difference, I find it hard to detach myself from both projects to give a decent answer, but simply put: these are very personal moments for me. They weren't made with any clear goal in mind and, in the process, have become like vivid postcards from the days I made them. Not all of them are rosy memories, but they're at least very clear to me now.

We read that on an earlier release you'd used some pop inspiration, specifically a Nelly Furtado song, as the starting point for a certain track. Can you discuss where some of these sounds arise from?
Almost everything I've written as Tooms ends up having major pop elements littered throughout the final product, but generally in a really indirect way. Twisting and turning vocal samples from huge pop acts allows me to pump a strange sense of familiarity throughout the track, without ever specifically referencing the source. I enjoy splicing them up in a way that makes them indecipherable, as if they're speaking a language you've never heard, too. Somehow, in my head at least, those two factors add up to the creation of these strange figures that drift in and out of the tracks like lovely demons.

The Simple Tactics EP From Tooms can be purchased via Bandcamp. For more music from Sam and Luke's label, check out Bossman Records.