BALKO is Jack, Jeves and Ronan; an experimental rock band that dips it's collective toe into multiple musical genres. Hailing from Sydney's east BALKO have been tapping about for over 5 years now, releasing a multitude of E.Ps spanning the sounds of psyche rock, progressive rock, pop rock, noise rock, heavy metal, surf rock and folk rock, and also releasing their debut album 'The Shiny Underneath' at the start of 2022. Diving, once again, into the experimental basin, BALKO have released 'Beauty Bot' a 3 track instrumental E.P drawing from early 90's Talk Talk and modern day post punk/prog bands like black midi and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. 'Beauty Bot' was released in October via Psycon Fest Records. Keep your ears open, because there’s more BALKO to come.
1. How did you first get involved in music in any capacity?
We each got into playing music in different ways, but we all started quite young, and of course, we all enjoyed listening to music from an early age. Jeves started playing classical guitar when he was 9, getting lessons for a few years until he got an electric guitar and started playing on his own. Ronan was tapping away on the piano from an early age and moved on to playing drums, whilst also trying to master the challenging task of sweep picking on guitar. Jack started in primary school when he joined the school band playing trumpet, but once he graduated to high school found a desire to play bass so he could play with his friend who was learning electric guitar.
2. Previous musical projects?
. We all sort of approached being musicians in different ways. Jack played in an electro/indie type band with a few friends from highschool, they played 3 gigs. He was also involved in a sort of musical comedy duo around the same time. Jeves was just a lonely dude playing guitar at home for many years, until a very young BALKO came knocking and he joined right away. Ronan was playing in a few bands before joining BALKO in 2019. He was drummer for Clews, keys and synth player for FLTRS, and piano/keys player for his own shared musical project Clayhands (Jack and Jeves have recently joined Clayhands). Both Jack and Jeves have played many cover gigs and solo shows at very small bars and venues around Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs in the past. Jack also plays in another band called Repo Man.
3. First concert that you ever went to?
Jack’s first big gig was seeing Green Day during their American Idiot Tour where they came and played the arenas around Australia. Jeves also saw them later in his teen years, they were both big fans and like most young rockers they found themselves listening a lot to punk and rock, skate punk, metal, bonding over their shared love for those types of music. Jeves’ first gig was the Wiggles!
4. What's your writing process like?
Different all the time. It depends on the song. For example; a few weeks ago we wanted to track a bit of a choir with our three voices, on a new song we have at the moment, but we had nothing to sing. Jeves had some lines of poetry written for the end of the song and Jack had lyrics written for the verses, but we still needed something to sing for the choir part. So the three of us sat there for over an hour blurting out line after line of profound and equally brainless poetry. It was a lot of fun and we actually came up with some cool lines which we ended up using and then figuring out melodies and harmonies for it. But the process is different every time. Usually our songs at this moment are being plucked from long phone recordings of jams; we record us playing for a good hour or so, listen back to it at home to find bits and moments we like and then sort of piece it all together to form a song (that's how the song Beauty Bot was created). Sometimes we have full songs already written for the band, sometimes all it takes is a chord progression or riff someone comes up with and we all just start adding to it and playing it out for a while before discussing what we’re gonna do with it.
5. What other artists or songs inspire your music?
Our music is usually a conglomeration of multiple influences across multiple genres. We do have separate experiences through the music we listen to but it does all come to a point when we’re together, we tend to fuse our powers when we get into the studio room. Ronan has his inspirations with a lot of music that colors his drumming, production and the chord choices he likes to play on the keys. Jeves has his love for a lot of 70s prog and some guitar heroes, which can shape his input of any musical project. Jack loves a bit of Tool and lots of other bands that break the mold with timing and rhythm, you can tell by the approach he has to his bass lines in our songs. So naturally we do have a bit of a variety on the playlist we made! We can kinda split it into 2 categories. One side is the production aesthetics which comes out in the Kendrick Lamar, Mark Hollis side of the list, but the riffs and raw outlook are more inspired by the proggy and indie side from bands like Yes, TOOL and Modest Mouse. There are points throughout Beauty Bot where these worlds collide. We try as best we can to marry those two worlds, at least for this E.P! But nothing is set in stone!
6. What's the live experience like and your philosophy on playing live? Do you think the music live should be identical to the recorded version or should it be it's own thing?
Well that all depends on the band and it depends on the song. For BALKO we seem to be doing a bit of both; practicing songs to get them as tight as possible and as close as possible to how we recorded them, but we tend to change them up a bit if we have the right idea. Also, we just like to jam and improvise live. Sometimes in the past we’ve mashed up our own songs and slid certain sections into other songs, just for a bit of fun and exploration (maybe to just do things differently). It’s whatever you want to make of it. We do like to make sure we are nice and tight as a unit, just so the audience can go away feeling like they were well entertained!
7. Has the band toured?
Melbourne twice, we had a couple of shows there each time. It wasn’t exactly a tour but we had to get out of Sydney and see what playing in other cities was like. We’ve also been to Wollongong a few times, always at this one joint called Rad Bar! All of those shows were great, we really appreciate people’s desire to see live music no matter where you are. We’d love to play outside of Australia someday. Anywhere would be good!
8. What's up next for the band?
We have a few ideas of what to do. Right now we’re tossing up whether to make an album or another ep. We’ve been talking about it a lot, doing something a bit more acoustic/folk is looking like our next genre venture. Also, we have this one track, pretty much good to go, structured and tracked and all that. It could potentially be a single release or it could slide into something bigger. But whatever it may be, we just want to keep creating music! You never know how long any of this is going to last (anything is possible). Got to make the most of our time and release as much as we can, no boundaries, no rules, if we’re feeling good about the music then we’re going to give it a go.