Blush Response, the new album from the Australian trio Acopia, takes its title from a test in Blade Runner that measures emotional reactions. Moving right past crimson-tinged shyness, these songs are self-assured and insightful, with a humanity that grounds their sprawling dreamgaze sound. The Narm/Melbourne-based group melds pop, rock, and electronic elements with an idiosyncratic production sensibility. At times, it’s danceable; at times, it’s cloudy. Mostly, it’s stirring. We asked the band (Kate Durman, Lachlan McGeehan, and Morgan Wright) about their process, influences, and live performance, which North Americans can check out this spring. Read their answers, and listen to Blush Response, below.
You recorded and mixed your new album by yourselves—what made you want to stay in control of the process, and how long did it take to get everything right?
Morgan: How the record sounds is as important to us as the songwriting so we like to control and experiment with that. The choices we make in terms of the composition can also dictate how we want things to be recorded/mixed. Doing it ourselves means that our intention stays pure through the whole process and that it ends up exactly as we intended.
Do you find yourselves pulling more from similarly layered artists, or those with a more straightforward genre focus?
Lachlan: It’s hard to say—we never really go into making an album speaking about what we’ve been listening to, but there usually is a unanimous feeling towards how we want it to sound, production-wise. Those references will usually be more straightforward in their genre focus.
What’s the last thing that made you blush?
Kate: One of our fans at our Lisbon show recently bought us a huge box of Portuguese Tarts. That was very cute. I ate three back to back which was quite a hectic move.
With such a dreamy sound, do you actually remember your dreams? Do they influence you artistically?
Kate: Yeah, if I am lucky I will make a song in my dream, and if I am even more lucky, I wake up remembering it. I usually can if I wake up at like 4 a.m., and find the energy to sing it into my voice notes app and make it on Ableton later. It feels like a hack.
Blush Response ends with lyrics about having “the last word.” Do you see your music as a way of saying the things that often go unsaid?
Kate: I think often I am reflecting on old times when I had a lot less confidence in my voice, so maybe it’s a dialogue that I’d have if I was still in that time period? My lyric writing process is quite a stream of consciousness to be honest though, sometimes I don’t really know what I’m on about until much later.
How did you know that Scenic Route was the right home for you? What’s the best part of working with your label?
Kate: We became aware of them when we discovered Nourished By Time’s record that they released a few years back, Erotic Probiotic, and really loved it. And then, Marcus was the one that put Scenic Route onto our music, which is a really cool twist of events. Scenic Route are great to work with, and I think the best part is probably just that we are all very aligned, and that we really like the artists they release.
How do you want people to feel when they leave an Acopia show?
Lachlan: Emotionally and spiritually fulfilled.
Photo Credit: Jess Fine
