Presets for pleasure island
Last weekend the Presets played to 70,000 music lovers at Mexico's biggest festival. The weekend before that, they played clubs in Japan and China. Where to next?
The answer is, of course, Rottnest Island.
The ARIA Award-winning Sydney electronic duo, consisting of vocalist Julian Hamilton and producer Kim Moyes, will kick off the Rotto Live concert series on December 15.
Hamilton is a dab hand when it comes to islands - the Presets played Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay last year and he visited Rottnest as a child, so he's totally familiar with quokkas.
"Hopefully the quokkas won't be sunburnt or passed out drunk," he joked from his Sydney home yesterday.
The Presets' natural habitat is usually pumping festivals across Australia but Hamilton says their impressive live show can be adapted to any space, including Hotel Rottnest's beer garden.
This week the duo's third album, Pacifica, received an ARIA nomination for best dance release - the award they won in 2008, when they scooped six trophies, and 2009. Hamilton, who says the Presets have begun work on their next album, expects golden boy Flume will beat them to the punch this year.
"Flume is experiencing a way bigger thing than we experienced in 2008," he said. "It's really wonderful to watch as a music fan, so I think he's going to clean up . . . It's great music and, good on him, he's killing it."
When the Presets won the album of the year ARIA in 2008, it broke pop and rock's stranglehold on the major honour at the annual industry knees-up.
"Electronic music has slowly come of age over the years. We won it, then Empire of the Sun won it and I would imagine that Flume will win it," Hamilton said. "People don't think of it as dance music, it's just music."
