Two Armadillos play live at secretsundaze closing party

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  • Martyn, John Heckle and residents Giles Smith and James Priestley will DJ at the series' final party of the summer.
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  • Two Armadillos will play live at this summer's final secretsundaze party in London, taking place on September 30th at Oval Space. Two Armadillos is Martin Dawson and secretsundaze co-founder Giles Smith. They've been making records for the better part of a decade—including a three-part debut album from last year, Golden Age Thinking—but have never played live until this summer. The party will mark their first live set ever in the UK. As always, Smith will also DJ with fellow resident James Priestley. Making up the rest of the bill are 3024 boss Martyn and former Breaking Through artist John Heckle. The party is happening at Oval Space, the Bethnal Green club that opened over Easter of this year. It wraps up secretsundaze's 11th season of summer parties in London. We caught up with Smith last week to chat a bit more about the party and the new Two Armadillos live set:
    How's this summer been for secretsundaze? Really great. Good energy at all the parties. The weather's been a pain in the ass and a constant worry obviously, but it's been great. We had Little Louis at the second party, we've always wanted to get him. We had a good one in Peckham, although it was raining, which affects turnout a little bit. When did you first play live with Martin Dawson? We actually did the first one at Watergate the other day. How did it go? It went really well. I was a little bit nervous about it... We work separately, I'm in London and he's in Berlin. We came together a week before the set to rehearse, I was slightly panicking but it came together quite nicely in the end. Martin's doing more of the jamming, I'm running off Ableton and controlling the flow of the tracks and the timing. Martin's jamming on keys, putting in the melodies into the tracks. But it's baby steps, not trying to reinvent the wheel, it's a learning process. Was it a bit intimidating to jump into something new after all these years? Yeah, yeah. Actually I have to say, doing the soundcheck reminded me of when I first started DJing—it doesn't matter how much you play at home, nothing can prepare you for your first live gig: loads of people shouting and a much louder sound system. So it reminded me of my first DJ gig, like "wow everything sounds so different." So yeah I had my apprehensions, but we're taking it kind of easy. We've done this album Golden Age Thinking in three parts, so it's really performing a lot of the tracks on the album. I don't know if it connected with everybody in terms of the three separate vinyl releases. Doing triple vinyl is very expensive so we decided to break it up, I'm not sure if everyone got the fact that it was an album, but that's OK. It was meant to be that each A-side was more of a dance floor track, the B-sides were a bit deeper, but you could still play them out. We've written a few more for the live set that are more exclusive at the moment. Will this be a long term thing? We'll see how it goes. With most things I do in my life, it might seem like we're organized, and we are, but I really just do what feels right, so yeah I'll just see how it goes and play it by ear. But I could see it developing, [with] so many possibilities and options and different ways to develop it. But I'm not thinking in a "how long" kind of way. Obviously we'll be writing new music, and that always inspires you to go play, as it does with a DJ, although actually as a DJ I don't like playing my own records very much, I just always felt strange doing that.
    Tickets to secretsundaze 2012 closing party are available here on RA.

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