Collaboration usually ends in one of the creative parties pulling the other into their world. It’s difficult to find a balance that aptly utilises the talents of each while maintaining their own individuality.

Venus II, the collaborative project between Canyons’ Ryan Grieve and Eagles & The Worm’s Jarrad Brown doesn’t suffer from that imbalance. It’s truly a fair representation of both of their talents coming together with Ryan’s electronic influences colliding with Jarrad’s rock roots. The result is a Primal Scream, New Order-leaning debut that delivers nostalgia while still reaching towards the future.

Inside Your Sun is the record and it’s one of the most ambitious local releases of the year. It’s big, rhythmic, groovy and climatic, delivering mind melting moment upon mind melting moment. To get inside the weird and wonky minds that made this album what it is we got on the phone with both of them and pulled apart the album’s many elements.

How are you feeling now that the album’s out?

Jarrad: Yeah, I’m really really happy about it. It does honestly feel amazing. We had our Melbourne show on last Friday and it felt really damn great to launch it and just have a heap of friends there as well. It’s all those things that make you feel...I guess, connects what you’re doing in all those ways. Yeah, it went great. It feels unreal.

How does the live show feel for you guys because your album feels like it’s designed to come alive in the live arena?

Ryan: Definitely. We’ve worked really hard to get the live show together and make it really exciting and a true representation of the recorded material. It felt really good to...like I said, we’ve done a lot of hard work to get it where it is. We’re feeling really great with how the song sound. We’ve adapted many of the songs and made them sound, in our opinion, better than what they sounded like on the album so it’s come together in a really exciting way.

So often people talk about how after they finish an album and play it live they want to go back and tweak things. Did you feel like that?

Jarrad: Nah, I don’t feel like that. I think that’s kind of the cool thing about any creative process. All those loose ends and things that you can’t change, they’re the things that make it unique and special. There’s nothing about that process that I’m like, “I wish I had of done that differently”. To play devil’s advocate, I’ll say we have had conversations about maybe doing things differently but the most interesting thing about what you do is your process and the unique features of it. As the live show diverges from an album recording more and more of those things happen. Personally, I find them my favourite things about making music and being in a band.

Do you already have the fever to go into the studio and make more stuff?

Jarrad: I’d always like to be in the studio a little bit more to be honest. Ryan and I get into the studio often-ish. Even when we’re rehearsing we are working on new things and recording a little bit of new music. That’s what happens when you have a strong electronic aspect, the studio blends into everything you do a bit more.

Both of you come from different backgrounds in terms of you, Jarrad with rock and you, Ryan, with club music. Do you share similar influences?

Ryan: Heaps actually. We both come from growing up as teenagers playing in rock bands so I love all sorts of music in - rock, country, soul, jazz. As does Jarrad. We’re just music lovers and we appreciate music of all sorts. It’s not just like I love dance music and Jarrad love rock music and we decided to experiment and see what works. We’re taking little bits of sounds to create something unique and a mood. It’s a reference to all music and all genres.

Jarrad, did your preconceived notions of what you could sound like change when you started working with Ryan?

Jarrad: Yeah I guess I’m most surprised about how I see my own music. When I look back to a few years ago to when me and Ryan first met to where I’m at now, I see a real divide between the ideas of what I wanted and where we came to. I don’t know if I can describe all that tangibly, it’s more of a personal thing but certainly when I started making a record I thought it would be cool to work with someone else and this vague idea of dance. That type of thing over the last few years has developed and become more real and a horizon that I can see and be a part of. When I started thinking about this record before Ryan and I met, I saw something that wasn’t a realistic idea. That’s always the way when you begin a project, you don’t have the full thing realised.

The album sounds really cohesive but there are also moments when you’re mixing a lot of genres and the tracks have their own individual personality. Were there songs you thought might not fit in the context of the record?

Ryan: When I started work on it I definitely had that thought to make everything as cohesive as possible because I have been guilty in the past with Canyons of jumping around too much between genres and moods. I was very aware to try and make it all live in the same world and for it all to come from the same place. That was a big challenge with the record. There were a lot of songs and a lot of playing on all of the songs. I had to strip a lot out, replay some stuff and reshape things to create a bit of a unique space for it all to exist in.

Jarrad’s voice is obviously something that ties it together really beautifully but was there a sound, instrument or production technique that assisted?

When we began, when Jarrad and I very first met he’d sent me all of the Eagle & The Worm studio sessions. The thought had been to give the stems to be and then for me to add some electronic elements into what was already there. That was going to be prove to be a really hard, pretty much impossible task to get the results. We had to go back and re-record instruments with the view in mind to build it from the ground. That’s the only real way to get it to sound like a legitimate mix of genres and mix of electronic and live sounds - when the electronic element is in there from the very beggining. That’s the thing that’s made the record really work in that sense as jumping between dance, rock and indie. That’s a nice observation. 

Words by the interns' Sam Murphy. 

Inside Your Sun is out now.