Tame Impala – melted minds unite!

Tame Impala for a Friday afternoon Lunch – recorded at the 2016 Melt Festival in Ferropolis, Gräfenhainichen, Germany on July 15, 2016 by the ever-present West German Radio.

Tame Impala’s music is heavily influenced by late 1960s and early 1970s psychedelic rock. Parker has stated that he has a “fetish for extremely sugary pop music” from such artists as Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue. Parker also enjoys “fucked-up explosive cosmic music” in the vein of The Flaming Lips, with whom Tame Impala collaborated on the track “Children of the Moon”; the song appeared on the band’s 2012 collaborative album The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.

Combining these two things, the shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine have influenced Parker’s music with their contrasting mix of abrasive guitars and ethereal melodies. He has “always been in love with the wall of sound as employed by My Bloody Valentine” and tries to capture the same “melancholy, dreamy feel” with Tame Impala.  Parker has elaborated on achieving a similar sonic balance in his own music: “If I was singing, I wouldn’t be able to match the tone of the instruments, which is really crunchy. The instruments are quite sonically brutal, but the voice is really soft, and I think that kind of resonates with people. It’s kind of like My Bloody Valentine, where it’s really brutal sounding, but kind of beautiful at the same time”. Tame Impala live drummer Jay Watson has described Parker’s music as incorporating a “shoegaze-y guitar sound, but not played in a shoegazey manner”.

Electronic music is another significant influence on Tame Impala’s music. Parker aims to incorporate the structure of electronic music into rock instrumentation: “The way we do music, it’s organic, but it’s meant to be quite repetitive and hypnotic, almost in a kind of electronic nature. Using our playing as though it was a living sample”. A sound featured prominently on Innerspeaker is a pitch-shifted guitar tone that many mistook for a synth. Parker has explained his reasoning for such production choices: “I had a few obsessions when recording Innerspeaker. One was to make the guitars sound like synths and drums sound like drum samples and pretty much anything except guitars and drums. I’m obsessed with confusing people as to the origin of a sound.”He has described his dream collaboration as “probably [being] someone really, really kind of fucked up”, citing the electronic artists Aphex Twin and Squarepusher as examples: “You know, someone that would like scare me, but I’d be able to see how they do all their really insanely headcase stuff and I’d be able to learn from it”.

Parker was inspired to take up various creative endeavours at a young age: “I used to draw a lot when I was very young, and I used to get the most immense feeling of satisfaction from finishing a picture and looking back at it, even though I wasn’t actually that good. When I started playing music, I got the same feeling from making a song, even if it was just a few noises or drum patterns put together. It was all about the buzz from making something from nothing. Music always affected me greatly as a listener anyway, usually from listening to music in my dad’s car or listening to him play guitar”.

Lo-fi music is also a favourite of Parker’s, and he incorporated it heavily in the early days of Tame Impala, heard prominently on the Tame Impala EP. With the release of Innerspeaker, Parker went for a different approach to a lo-fi sound, aiming more for a more cosmic and sonic wall of sound, helped by mixer Dave Fridmann. Parker explained: “It sounds more cohesive, like an organism. It has a different emotion to it; it brings out a different feeling when it’s absolutely blaring at you. I love that sound.”

Parker has also stated that Supertramp, one of his favourite bands, are a major influence on the musical style of Tame Impala. Despite their difference in sound, he feels he is always somewhat “channeling Supertramp”. He has said that listening to the Bee Gees on mushrooms inspired him to change the sound of the music he was making on Currents.

Press Play and Get ready for the weekend.