Modular People

February 4, 2011

Zonoscope is Cut Copy boiled down to their purest form, a suite of futuristic visions built upon primal rhythm tracks. It is at once their most immediate work to date but also their most sonically exquisite. "Take Me Over" perfectly encapsulates this, its chiming highlife guitars bouncing around tropical percussion reminiscent of an island holiday in a pop song.

Zonoscope was dreamt in the comedown of In Ghost Colours, the album which cemented Cut Copy as a global sensation. Their perpetual touring cycle found the band headline a stage at Lollapalooza, become the first Australian act to play Colombia since INXS, have fire marshals shut down an LA performance mid-set as crowds began to buckle the seams of the Henry Fonda Theatre and be raced to the Pitchfork Festival via police escort following a cancelled flight.

After over two years of exhilarating chaos, frontman Dan Whitford bunkered down at home to flesh out rough synth and vocal skeletons, before heading into the studio with the band to bring these textured grooves to life. Whitford describes the wonderland which he set out to create with Tim Hoey, Mitchell Scott and Ben Browning, "All the way along we had this weird vision of a tropical, jungle, tribal sound. A place or an idea that we wanted to reach with some of the songwriting; to explore a looping hypnotic trance and revise the whole palette of what Cut Copy was about."

Recorded over a six month period in a warehouse space the band rented in Melbourne and mixed in Atlanta by Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley, Deerhunter), Zonoscope paints a mesmerizing picture, conjured by a band at the height of their powers.

Tracklist

1. Need You Now
2. Take Me Over
3. Where I'm Going
4. Pharaohs & Pyramids
5. Blink and You'll Miss a Revolution
6. Strange Nostalgia for The Future
7. This is All We've Got
8. Alisa
9. Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat
10. Corner of the Sky
11. Sun God