The Cat Empire create controlled chaos

The Cat Empire on playing live and preparing for their first concert in Dubai at Zero Gravity

The Cat Empire are landing in Dubai. The six members of the Australian based band met when they were teenagers and budding jazz musicians. As soon as they started to make music together, they wanted to create a sound everyone could dance to. And so, The Cat Empire was born.
After fifteen years of making music and eight albums, it's hard to define the band's style. They are about mixing genres, taking elements of improvisation from jazz, the easy flow of reggae, the rhythmic aesthetics of funk, adding hip-hop beats and a little bit of everything else that sounds good to them.
Harry Angus is trumpet player, lyricist and one of the two singers of the band. He spoke to City Times about the band's musical process, the digital revolution and performing in Dubai.
You'll be performing in Dubai for the first time. How do you feel about that?
It's our first time playing in the Middle East and I really don't know what to expect. I think Dubai is such an interesting city, the way it seems to have grown so quickly and the way people have come from all over the world to be there. It's really a new experience for me. I'm interested to see what the crowd is like. I mean every crowd is different but there are always similarities. People generally like to dance, people like to listen and that's all we need.
What is it that you enjoy about performing live?
There is a way you can perform where you're prepared but you don't know everything that's going to happen. It's about improvisation and controlled chaos. For me, the best kind of performance is one where something unexpected happens and that's kind of what I live for as a performer.
Tell us about your last album, Steal The Light.
Steal the Light was an album where we tried to really concentrate on the rhythm and the beat of the songs and kind of getting that great feeling. But we also tried to make an album that, rather than sounding like a whole bunch of different countries, it just sounds like a sound of the whole world in every song. We just had fun and wrote some melodies and didn't try and be too clever.
Tell us about your upcoming album. I know that there's something in the works. Any release dates?
It's not quite finished yet, we are putting the finishing touches. It's going to be a great record, not too different from Steal the Light, very similar vein. There will probably be a few singles out before too long. It will come out when it's finished basically.
What sort of sound would you categorise yourself as?
These days I just say that we are music to dance to. We do whatever makes you dance. Back in the day, we took a lot of pride in having a lot of different identifiable genres in our sound. I think over the last 15 years we've kind of moved away from that towards trying to create just one sound, which is our sound which includes flavours of different things but is a unique and universal sound.
I don't know what you'd call it except party music. For me, the most important thing is improvisation. Our band is all about taking modern musical forms and exploring the possibilities of how you can improvise them when you play live.
How do you write your songs? Is it a trial and error process? Or is it more organic?
The songs start off not that different to how someone might write a song just strumming it on a guitar. Chords and words and lyrics and melodies, but what happens with the band after that, is it goes to all the musicians who are playing the song and they kind of make it their own in terms of putting it into our kind of context. I mean I could write a really simple melody and throw it at my band and they will make it sound amazing.
How important is social media plays in the life of your band or any musician trying to create music right now?
We've been around for a while and we've seen the whole change from a CD based music industry to a file sharing industry and then the whole social media thing came along.
A lot of our early success as a band was due to the fact that people were able to burn CDs and send them to their friends.Social networking is a great way for people to mobilise around music that they like.
I think we are particularly bad at that kind of online media stuff. We've never been a band that looks awesome in photos or makes cool videos. For me, you have to be in front of people to be a band. But I think it (social media) has helped us. At the end of the day, people always want to go see live music and to share that experience with everyone else.
The Cat Empire will be performing at Zero Gravity on October 1. For more information visit: www.0-gravity.ae