Feature - Game Of Drones

Published in The Saturday Paper, August 6

Feelin' Kinda Free

The fledgling sport of drone racing has pilots viewing the course through cameras mounted on their stripped-down, supercharged craft. SAMUEL J. FELL meets the US champion, in his home town of Brisbane.

  

Like a bat out of hell, the little X-shaped machine, small propellers mounted at the end of each four arms, shoots off into the distance. In a matter of seconds it’s no longer visible to the naked eye, although you can hear it, buzzing through the trees at speeds of up to 140 km/h.

It suddenly reappears from on high and like a demented magpie at the height of nesting season, it swoops, pulling up at the last minute and executing a series of barrel-rolls, ripping past the two of us standing on the wooden deck of a house on a hill in Ormeau, just south of Brisbane. It banks sharply, a left turn, and darts back into the bushland, again invisible.

Chad Nowak

Chad Nowak, standing beside me, is the one controlling it. Via a set of goggles, he sees what his machine sees courtesy of a small camera mounted on its nose, beaming its feed directly back to him. A large silver remote controller hangs from a lanyard around his neck, the machine operated by almost imperceptible movements of his thumbs on the two small joysticks. He brings it back towards us, slowly now, and lands it expertly on the wood next to my left foot, removes his goggles and grins at me. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of first-person-view (FPV) drone flying.

Nowak is the current US National Drone Racing champion, having won the inaugural event last July in California. The Australian is the poster boy for FPV drone flying, a rapidly burgeoning aspect of the growing drone industry, including competition racing. Having flown line-of-sight remote-controlled vehicles and fixed-wing gliders since he was 14, the now 37-year-old is in high demand at events around the world. A year and a half ago, he was mixing automotive lubricants in a factory. Today, he has sponsors, fans and a reputation as one of the world’s top drone pilots.

“It’s just something so different,” he says when I ask why drone racing has become so popular in such a short time. “When I go flying out in the park and I’m just flying around, people [see it and] go, ‘Oh, it’s a drone’. Their reaction would be no different if it was a foam airplane or something like that.

“The moment I put the goggles on them though, they go, ‘Wow!’ It’s the same reaction every single time. And that’s the best way to explain it – why it’s taking off is because of that wow factor. It’s like playing a video game, it’s like the pod racers in Star Wars; it’s that extra dimension that we haven’t been able to access until now.”

Eliminating the lag time between drone-mounted cameras and the vision in the pilot’s goggles has been the game-changing improvement. Simon Jardine, head of drone consultancy company Aerobot, has been flying drones longer than anyone in Australia. His company provides advice and builds and modifies custom machines for the likes of the military and Surf Life Saving Australia. “Right now, technology is racing forward at such a pace, it’s hard to keep up,” Jardine says. “We can fly further, [we can fly] behind obstacles, with zero lag, so it’s instant: what you see is what you see.”

“You have to have zero latency,” agrees Paul Dumais, referring to potential delays in video transmission. Dumais is an aerospace engineer currently building a new prototype for Aerobot. “They’ve gotta be able to send a signal via a video transmitter wirelessly on a 5.8 gigahertz frequency, to his goggles, with zero latency. Or as little as possible. Because if you’re doing 140 kilometres an hour, a couple of milliseconds [out] – you’re hitting something.”

Jardine, Dumais and I are talking in a park in Byron Bay. I’m handed the goggles and Jardine flies his drone while I see what it sees. The speed and manoeuvrability of the stripped-back machine is incredible; it’s easy to see how you’d come unstuck if the feedback to the goggles was even a tiny bit out.

Nowak's Drone

Drone racing and freestyle has, in the past 12 months, become big business. The inaugural event Nowak won was a relatively small affair, but since then the profile of this fledgling sport has grown almost as fast as the accompanying technology. In March this year, in Dubai, the World Drone Prix offered a US$1 million prize pool. This year’s US nationals in August have partnered with American sports cable channel ESPN. The World Drone Racing Championships will run in Hawaii in October. With money and interest growing rapidly, inevitably so are the politics, as a number of organisations jostle for control of the sport.

“Unfortunately, [these bodies] are all just sitting there arguing, and all the pilots want to do is race,” Nowak says. “We’re going, would you guys stop fighting and just let us have some fun?”

As a result, Nowak and a handful of other top pilots have begun to distance themselves from the organised racing aspect, preferring instead freestyle flying for its own satisfaction. “It’s kinda the same as skateboarders, they go out there and they make those videos,” he says, grinning. “You’ve got the rebels that just wanna make the videos and lead the lifestyle, then you’ve got the guys who wanna go to the competitions. I’m the guy that just wants to be the rebel and lead the lifestyle.”

Nowak has just returned from the US where he’s been filming episodes of Rotor Riot, a YouTube-based series not unlike Top Gear but with drones instead of cars. He and a handful of other pilots head to different locations such as abandoned warehouses, woodlands and even shooting ranges,  and put their machines through their paces. Everything is filmed and uploaded to an audience of 35,000 subscribers.

YouTube has proven an incredibly important medium for these drone pilots – Nowak’s channel has 17,228 subscribers; American pilot “Mr Steele” (Steele Davis) has 26,361; and “Charpu” (Carlos Puertolas), the “godfather of FPV”, has 55,28. It was the popularity of his channel that had Nowak invited to the first drone nationals and attracted his sponsors.

Drones today are more and more common, being utilised for a variety of purposes from aerial filming to shark spotting. For a number of years, hobbyists have been flying line-of-sight drones – that is, kept in sight of the operator, without a camera and goggles – including some piloted via an iPad.

These racing drones are different. Their construction is stripped back to only what is necessary to maximise speed and efficiency. The technology is dazzling. Dumais talks to me about 32-bit boards, electronic speed controllers, and software like Baseflight, OneShot and Cleanflight. Jardine is flying a Warpquad 6-inch on 25 volts – it weighs around half a kilo, flies at a 55-degree forward angle, and can hit speeds of up to 140 kilometres an hour, with but a five-minute battery life. Of course, their performance is only going to get better.

"In the very near future, perhaps before the end of the decade, the FPV experience will be hyper-realistic,” says Dumais. “Like you’re actually flying in the drone, but on acid. It’ll be the combination of high-end computer gaming to provide insane virtual reality tracks, superimposed over real physical terrain." The sky is the limit – but only physically.

 Saturday Paper Website here

Record Review - Stoney Joe

Published in the Shortlist section of The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5

Stoney Joe

Fuel For The Fire

Head Records

Stoney Joe’s third long-player is an interesting beast. Essentially a collection of dark night country (banjo, double bass, mandolin, various acoustic guitars), the band have continued with their penchant for sparse electronica, adding to this time honoured genre a modern bent.

This is my first encounter with the West Australian quartet and so initially, the addition of “a vintage 1980s synthesizer”, and to a lesser extent the melodica, seemed alien and out of place. After repeated listens however, the quiet drones and extremely minimal beats they create add a rather beguiling extra layer to the group’s four-part harmonies, the plunking of the banjo, the sharp shimmer of the mando. It’s most evident on tracks like No More Roving, Broken String Theory and instrumental opener Green Gums. The fact it’s not overdone is the reason it doesn’t become intrusive.

Still, to my mind, Stoney Joe are at their best when stepping back in time. The harmonies overlaying acoustic guitar on Holy Waters are fantastic, the banjo-driven Use Your Mind and Hammerfall are pure hoedown, all holler and hoo-ee. Rising Water is a combination of both, one of the strongest tracks on an album which definitely begs deeper exploration.

3/5 

Samuel J. Fell

Cover Feature - Bernard Fanning

Published in the July / August issue of Rhythms magazine (cover feature - excerpt)

FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN

While BERNARD FANNING’s new album stems from a feeling of unease, it blooms as one of the songwriter’s strongest releases. He talks to SAMUEL J. FELL

It’s a Monday afternoon. Late autumn and sunny. It’s crystal clear and the air is sharp, cool in the shade courtesy of a light breeze but warm in the sun, brightening the scene; makes the grass seem greener and the surrounding shrubs livelier despite the fact there’s been no rain for a month or so.

Bernard Fanning sits on a day bed, leaning against the wall of his small studio, up on a hill above Byron Bay. You can see it down below, spread along the coastline in among the trees against the water’s edge. Out in the bay itself is Julian Rocks. It’s so clear you can see the whitewater breaking around their base. The lighthouse sits atop Cape Byron, slightly to the south, the sunlight glinting off its tall, white walls, standing guard over the most easterly point in Australia.

Fanning sits taking it all in. It is, as I’d mentioned to him when I’d first arrived, a view you’d not get sick of. He agrees and during the couple of hours we spend sitting out here, we both periodically gaze out over it all. It’s calming. Serene. Seems to me to be a perfect place to put together a record.

Fanning, in light blue jeans and black jacket, hair hanging down to his shoulders, flipping across his face, grey stubble, pale skin, is in good spirits. He smiles a lot and his laugh rings out across the green, sloping garden, occasionally startling lorikeets playing in the trees hanging over the driveway to the side. I’m always wary prior to speaking to prominent rock stars, well aware they could be completely consumed by an inflated sense of self-importance, nothing more than preening posers.

But Bernard Fanning’s not like that. Sure, he’s a prominent rock star, he fronted one of the most iconic Australian bands of all time in Powderfinger. His solo debut, Tea & Sympathy, was incredibly successful, five-times platinum. But he’s just a guy with a wife and kids, sitting here having a chat about music, about the state of the world, life in general. Just shooting the breeze like any of us.

Inside the studio, producer Nick DiDia is tinkering. Occasionally, music drifts out from the open door around the corner, soundtracking certain parts of our conversation. “It’s shit, isn’t it,” Fanning says at one point as he looks out across the Pacific. He laughs again. I do too as I follow his gaze. “Yeah,” I say. “Terrible.”

                                                            ***

Bernard Fanning’s new album, his third solo effort, is Civil Dusk. It’s the first in a two-part series, the next being Brutal Dawn, slated for release sometime next year. Civil Dusk was written in part in Kingscliff, a small coastal village a little further north, and partly in Madrid, Spain, where his wife is from. It was all recorded here, aside from the demos, in this little space on top of a hill overlooking Byron.

“Civil Dusk, the term actually comes from civil twilight, which is a photography term,” he tells me. “It’s when the sun has gone down beneath the horizon. Scientifically, I think it’s when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. But pretty much everything is still visible, but not in direct light. And it looks different. So that idea, that metaphor…”

He trails off at the end of that sentence and switches focus to the term brutal dawn, which we both agree is the perfect name for an album by a Norwegian death metal band, but the sentiment is clear. Civil Dusk is about things not being quite as they seem, or quite as you remember them, and they’re about to change. Perhaps to be revealed once more, in a different light later on, under a brutal dawn.

I ask him if, as a person, he’s a worrier, if he’s prone to anxiety. “Oh yeah, totally, I’m a real worrier,” he says candidly. The reason I ask this is because in the bio that accompanies the new record, he’s quoted as saying, “Each day, I wake with a feeling of unease.” It’s a line which ties in with the idea behind the record, the civil dusk preceding a brutal dawn.

“Yeah, doesn’t everyone?” he asks with a laugh when I read that quote back to him. “It sounds a little too depressing. I don’t mean… it’s unease, it’s not full-blown anxiety. It’s more like, I’ve got shit to do, lots to do. As an artist and a human being. Firstly as a dad, the basic stuff of making breakfast, getting school lunches ready, you know. Making sure everyone’s got two shoes on when they leave.

“[But] it’s a combination of everything. When I’m writing, I don’t sleep very much. I wake up a lot of times at night, and often with the last idea I had before I went to bed, kinda ringing in my head. And it’s pretty annoying, and pretty annoying for my wife. It’s hard to shake when you have an idea that you haven’t abandoned yet, that you haven’t managed to go, ‘I’m not gonna keep going’.

“And what I mean by that, that’s a completed song as well. It’s not like, ‘That song’s finished’, it’s ‘I’m not working on that anymore’. Because inevitably, a few months later, you’re gonna find holes in that idea and go, ‘Fuck, I wish I’d done that’.”

I venture that this is the lot of the artist, that no matter what you do, you’ll never really be satisfied. Or at least you’ll think you’re satisfied, only to realise a little while later that you no longer are. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have this momentary satisfaction,” he says. “Anyway, the anxiety thing, I don’t want to play that up too much… it’s more because I usually get up first in the house, at around 4:30, and I read the paper. And that usually starts that feeling of unease, just reading about the state of the world.

“And that impacts a lot on the way that I write.”

Despite this assertion, Civil Dusk isn’t a record populated with songs dealing with literal world events. It’s not an album that bemoans the state of the world, not in a direct sense anyway – Bernard Fanning, who in the past has been very vocal about, and supportive of, a number of pertinent social issues, isn’t setting out to preach to a world he sees as wrong, or broken. Civil Dusk seems to be more about a feeling and a state of being, as opposed to presenting like a list of injustices, set to song.

As well, these feelings are framed through a series of love songs, whether happy or sad, disguised somewhat – the meanings are visible, but not in direct light, the songs civil dusks in themselves.

Another strong thematic vein that runs through the record is the idea of decisions and their resulting consequences. “I guess that’s another symptom of age and being forty-something,” he muses. “Looking at decisions I made when I was in my 20s and things that I thought were a great idea at the time. I mean, I’m in the unfortunate position… of having a lot of the things I’ve said, recorded, when I was in my 20s and maybe not at my smartest.”

He laughs again. “So, things like that. But also looking at that in the wider sense, how are things like, even on a personal basis especially, Powderfinger breaking up, how that has impacted on me and other people around me, stuff like that.”

“I don’t really want to be drilling down into the detail of what the songs are about, because I don’t really like doing that,” he then says, changing position on the day bed. “I want people to have their own discovery of songs, they have that thing where they… it’s what I do, put myself in the position of the author, pretty much all the time, when I’m listening to music.

“If I can really relate to it, then I can sing that song with a real kind of verve, it resonates with me. Otherwise, it doesn’t really impact… I like people having the opportunity to do that themselves, without it being all explained and spelt out to them. I mean, you don’t really need to do it anyway.”

“The future's suffocating on an echo from the past.” A line from ‘Belly Of The Beast’, the final song on Civil Dusk. One could interpret that in myriad different ways. It’s a strong line though, one of the strongest on the album. It sums up the civil dusk, the decisions and resulting consequence. It’s powerful.

Fanning laughs again, and I sip from my cup of coffee which is cold now, and light a cigarette, moving over to a sunny patch on the grass. We both look out over the ocean and we’re silent for a bit.

                                                            ***

Record Review - Seratones

Published in the Shortlist section of The Sydney Morning Herald, July 15.

Seratones

Get Gone

Fat Possum Records / Inertia

Released on the legendary Fat Possum label, which this year celebrates 25 years, the debut cut from Louisiana quartet Seratones doesn’t waste time getting to the point. The punk aesthetic of Chokin’ On Your Spit kicks off a record which brings together not only three chord thunder but a slew of roots influence befitting a group based in the thriving music town of Shreveport, a crossroads of sorts for blues, country and soul sounds – Get Gone is a mish-mash, and it works extremely well.

Produced by Jimbo Mathus (Squirrel Nut Zippers, North Mississippi Allstars, Buddy Guy), the album is for the most part a high-octane affair, vocalist AJ Haynes’ voice a velvety beast capable of New York grit ‘n’ spit, howls and croons, the perfect foil to the ever-changing sounds she’s riding over. Guitar, bass and drums provide same, easily handling the punk (Chokin’, Sun), the garage rock (Trees, Don’t Need It), seamlessly slipping into hazy evening mode (the title track) then finishing with the slow and dreamy Keep Me. It’s a record which covers a lot of ground with scruffy aplomb, a new rock ‘n’ roll sound.

4/5

Samuel J. Fell