Cloud Ice 9 were one of the most interesting bands we saw at Jerkfest last year. Their hard-to-define music is punctuated with unexpected moments. Delightfully wonky, unfolding like a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, each note rearranging itself into new, mesmerising patterns creating a brand-new galaxy for listeners. Their output is immersive and explores the relationship between sight and sound with limited information about them out in the world, beyond their music and videos—until now. We chatted at length with vocalist-guitarist Jordan, and guitarist Reis. They have a great approach to creativity and life, we think anyone could get something cool out of this read. 

REIS: I’m nursing some heartache.

Awww, I’m sorry to hear that.

JORDAN: Things have been up and down. In Melbourne, at least, we’ve been out of lockdown for a year and a bit now. So that initial exciting time of being free and enjoying each other’s company out in the big bad world has sort of simmered down a little bit. It’s gotten a bit more about recalibrating and figuring out one’s general approach to life and your trajectory [laughs]. There’s been lots of changing and fluctuating, mostly for the positive. A lot of people are stressed—money-wise, job-wise, and life-wide. It’s all a little bit turbulent at the moment.

REIS: Definitely. I’d say that there isn’t a single person that I’m dear friends with that is financially secure at the moment. But maybe that’s a reflection on the kind of people we hang out with [laughs]. The general sense of optimism post-COVID has just been crushed by this impending recession and the rise in the cost of living—the whole shebang. As people doing the kind of things we do, a little bit out on the fringes, those waves are definitely felt a lot harder. 

JORDAN: But by that same token, I feel like it’s times like these when it feels like the best things kind of come to the surface and to combat that. Winter is coming, I feel like it’s the best time for people to actually generate interesting, positive things to kind of cope and help them manage.

REIS: Easy for you to say, mate. You’re fucking off to Europe! It’s going to be so hard for you.

[Laughter]

JORDAN: I’ve done my time. I wanted to do some writing and some soul-searching. I’m going to Poland, where my family’s from, and I’ve never really been before. Mostly just to explore and take a break. Spend some time being very present and focusing on where am I going to sleep, what am I going to eat, how much money does this mean in my pocket. Be a lot more day-to-day for a couple of months.

Are you both from Naarm/Melbourne? 

REIS: The short answer is, yeah, We both grew up in Melbourne for the most part. 

JORDAN: I was born in Sydney and moved here when I was four.

REIS: I was born in Turkey and my family came over when I was young. and  have gone back and forth a couple of times. For the most part, Melbourne has been home.

How did you get into music? 

JORDAN: Pretty differently, I guess. Different ages, different times. I’m turning 29 in a month.

REIS: I’m 28.

JORDAN: We went to high school together and lived together for a while afterwards. I got into music pretty young and was learning different instruments. I went to art school and got spat out and felt pretty dejected by it all. It was then that I moved in with Reis, when we were around 23. That’s when we really started making music.

REIS: I was definitely a big fan of music. I picked up a guitar when I was 21. I had a very different musical upbringing to Jordan. Only from punk and hardcore, that level of accessibility, got me to think about it in any sort of serious way. Then I just played in a band and just went from there. It definitely took over my life in a way that I really didn’t expect [laughs]. 

JORDAN: That punk accessibility thing, and what Reis had going, was really inspiring for me. Because, like I said, I was feeling dejected and confused about going to art school and getting chewed up and spat out.

Reis would be in the shed, making music on Audacity with iPod earphones and just really winging it—DIY-ing it. That inspired me to get back into doing things in a way that feels very organic. It felt free from any things you might think you need: the right gear or a sound engineer or this and that. Which can all get quite paralysing because it’s not really always feasible.

REIS: Earlier than that, Jordan literally showed me how to hold a guitar and play chords. I learned so much from being around this guy. What I do would be very different if it wasn’t for him.

JORDAN: Our first project was called, Dingo and Rocco. That was born out of Reis letting me stay at his mum’s house when we were younger. We started playing acoustic guitars together and started writing weird, chaotic love ballads.

[Laughter]

REIS: We’d be busking out the front of the IGA. 

JORDAN: We’d get $20, say, ‘That’s a hard day’s work,’ then go across the road to the pub and get a pint. 

When we were living together in our own place, it became more experimental and bigger. We had a big barn full of Hammond organs and a lot of weird junk we found at tips shops.

REIS: We had a pirate radio station [laughs].

JORDAN: We were experimenting, and Cloud Ice 9 started to form, around 2018 or 2019. It was a fair bit before any thing tangible really came together.

When you first started hanging out, what were the things you’d bond over? 

REIS: Knowing each other in the high school days, I guess, just puberty blues. 

JORDAN: We liked weird things. When we lived together, we had this huge, sprawling property in Brunswick West with all these sheds; we had heaps of room. Reis had a van and we’d go pick up a lot of weird gear. We had a huge VHS collection too; we were really obsessed with watching old weird tapes.

The experiment and play surrounded with all these different toys, like broken organs and old pump action pianos, and even balloons in microphones of heaps of delay. We just love to play. We bonded through that musically. 

REIS: It felt very insular. It felt like a very small world that we just kind of carved out and spent a lot of raw hours nutting out the details.

JORADN: I liked that it felt like we obviously didn’t have big musical inspirations; what we were doing was far removed from that. Just play and experimentation—that felt like a nice organic process. It inevitably started to take a form. Saying that, we are both very obsessed with Alan Vega and Suicide, and some of those old heads.

REIS: I was watching this interview with Vega where he was talking about some of his sculptures that he’s made, and he has the approach of just making something to make something. I wonder about those kinds of people that are completely unaffected by what’s going on around them—to have such a strong sense of what you’re doing is right. That doesn’t just come with music; it comes with fucking everything. Knowing people that even a salad they’re making is art—it’s a bit much for me, but I like having those people around.

JORDAN: They’re more into the entity and context of the art than the art itself a lot of the time. We both grew up on Brian Jonestown Massacre. I really felt like that was more about that ‘schiz’ dynamic that Anton had orbiting around him. It was more about the life and the headspace and the dysfunctionality of it all—that was more fascinating. The strange creative humans navigating a contemporary civilisation and what comes out of that. There’s a lot of Brian Jonestown Massacre music I could take or leave, but I feel the whole context really adds to it. The same is true for a lot of artists that do inspire us.

When you started Cloud Ice 9, was there anything at all that you had in mind for the project?

JORDAN: It took a long time. It was me, Reis, and Jim in that shed in Brunswick West. It was more about getting stoned and making music that almost wasn’t music. Literally feeling it out and then trying to make sense out of complete nonsense. It slowly formed into actual songs. The songwriting was mostly inspired from books and film. Musically, that stuff was quite intuitive. 

Conceptually, I was obviously reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut at the time and weird sci-fi stuff. I wanted to write music from the perspective of aliens that had come to Earth, and sort of celebrating the apocalypse. Natural musical influences from Suicide and outside of rock came to the surface too. Essendon Airport.

REIS: Definitely all of that. I felt like when we were starting it, we didn’t really have much of a vision of what it was going to be. For me, it felt like it was a really strong anecdote of a lot of the music that was around that we didn’t identify with—kind of how formulaic a lot of it was. It’s funny because I feel like a lot of people have said to me, ‘Cloud Ice 9 is so weird!’ But I think it’s fairly tame.

JORDAN: I always really liked bands that didn’t really sound like anything else. I grew up on the Gorillaz. Demon Days was the first CD I ever owned. Maybe I can break it down a bit more now, but at the time, it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. It crosses so many genres and has that world-immersive thing that you do feel like it’s its own entity. I don’t know if Cloud Ice 9 is there yet, but I would love it to create its own world and sort of be able to touch on certain things but retain a certain element of its own thing.

REIS: Ben Wallers and the Country Teasers is a definite influence of that—being reminiscent of something you’ve heard before but completely different.

REIS: Something gone wrong. 

[Laughter]

People keep asking us what bands we loved most at Jerkfest this year and the ones that resonated most were you guys, Red Hell, and Essendon Airport. Then people ask, ‘What do they sound like?’ That’s hard to answer because you all have created your own thing. I believe that you have succeeded in creating your own world.

JORDAN: That’s sick. So nice to hear. We’re about to put out this album of live takes of improvisations that we’ve been recording and archiving over the years. We’ve got hours and hours and hours of nonsensical jams, essentially. No tangible vocals really. We’re casting a wide net. We’ve been playing for a while, and it only feels like in the last year or so, it’s starting to get a bit of traction.

I’ve been describing it as country sci-fi to people/jazz gone wrong. I like that you can’t really describe it. There’s a lot of bands that sound like a lot of bands around where we’re playing. It’s nice to be a bit different, but I guess we also don’t want to become the ‘weird’ band [laughs]. We want to also write good music!

REIS: I don’t think it ever has mattered what we want, it’s just what we do. 

Jhonny, who I do Gimmie with, mentioned that Cloud ice 9 sounds wonky. 

REIS: Yeah!

[Both nod in a agreement]

JORDAN: I like it when music is kind of a walking pace. I like when the beat is like, dun, dun, dun, dun. It kind of gives it that off kilter thing. 

REIS: Recently, we have a real point of contention in the band, as to how slow to play one of the songs.

Your album Circus St, is your second album. Where did the title come from?

JORDAN: It was just an idea I had that, basically, life, at the moment felt like that. Coming out of COVID. Cloud Ice 9, in general, is about enjoying a sense of liberation in the fact that the world is kind of ending. Circus St was an embellishment on that—life is a bit of a circus. When you walk out onto the street, it can sometimes feel like that, just the bizarreness and ridiculousness of it all. 

It reminds me off, Reis and I, did this interview with this person called Barbara, who’s a puppeteer, and they’re a bit of like an icon around Melbourne. They’d  dress up in a wedding dress, this bearded, ragged old man. We actually got them to perform with us a little before Circus St came out. They would busk. That really coined the idea of Circus St to me, because they were this strange clown on the sidelines of the streets of inner-city Melbourne, reminding you of how bizarre and crazy everything is. The acknowledgment of what Barbara was doing was more genuine than a lot of people that are going into Myer and trying on perfumes, or people in suits late for things. It was that acknowledgment of, it’s all a kind of a strange, mad construction. Circus St came out of thebizarreness of our modern little world that we’ve created. 

REIS: I made a documentary about Barbara.

Me and Jordan also do a little label, which all the Cloud Ice 9 stuff comes out on—Happy Tapes.

JORDAN: We’ve kind of slowly been tracking down curious individuals that interest us. Spend a day with them and document them, chatting, and making little things out of it. 

I spent hours talking to Barbara on the phone after that. Barbara is coming from a similar place. When we went over to do the doco, Barbara was like, ‘Oh, so are you two with the SBS or the ABC?’ We’re like ‘No, we’re kind of like you. We’re weird dudes.’ We bonded over that. 

[Laughter]

JORDAN: They are a very difficult person to track down. 

REIS: The latest I heard was that they were sleeping in their car, and their housemate had just gone to jail. 

JORDAN: They have a pretty unstable world…

REIS: But, hey, who doesn’t?

Why’d you call it Happy Tapes? 

REIS: It’s just kind of neutral name…

[Laughter]

There’s a lot of ideas in this label. We didn’t want it to be pigeonholed by slapping some sort of like a death metal name on it, or something like…

JORDAN: Spiky Tapes!

REIS: We wanted something that’s open and accessible, like the things we like. 

JORDAN: Not always accessible.

REIS: But fairly accessible. 

JORDAN: Very eclectic. We do a lot of different stuff, maybe to our detriment sometimes. Stuff that we’re interested in. 

What’s something that’s been making you happy lately?

REIS: Music. Me and Jordan did a trip to Vietnam and got some pretty wild cassettes and VHS that we bartered tooth and nail for. We’ve been watching those, listening to a lot of the music that we got from there, and trying to learn how to play it.

JORDAN: Olive bread, and Magic The Gathering, mostly. I’ve been really getting into shakshuka at the moment, I’ve been honing my recipe. Honestly, though, just being with friends and talking has been bringing me the best feelings as of late.

Same. What made you want to seek out interesting people, get to know them and document them? 

REIS: I’m doing another video now on this 60 year old Congolese guy, Leona Kakima, who’s been a bit of a local around Footscray. He’s like the Alan Vega of the Congo. This dude is amazing. He’s an absolute superstar that produces all his own music and performs solo to a backing track in little African restaurants and clubs around Footscray.

I really love documenting people that are not getting the recognition that they deserve, or those larger-than-life characters—diamonds in the rough, real assets to culture from my perspective. These are people that never got their little piece of pie cut out for them. The thing that I’d love to see, a commonality between all these people, is that they keep going and keep doing what they do, regardless of what anybody says and regardless of any acclaim anybody gives them or pats on the back. For people who have been doing any sort of creative pursuit for a while, that’s one of the most inspiring things you can digest. 

JORDAN: They’re outsiders that don’t really fit the mould and can’t really be commodified in a lot of ways because they don’t fit into our idea of what’s marketable in modern society. That doesn’t matter.

Barbara, for instance, who’s living this chaotic life, It’s a really hard thing to do, but when they perform, it is unwavering. They couldn’t do anything else. There’s something very empowering about that. It’s very inspiring for people like us that also refuse to play ball a lot of the time…

REIS: For better or worse.

JORDAN: There’s a lot of us out there that don’t want to conform, and capitalism, and the way that the world works at the moment, doesn’t make sense for us. You can either morph yourself into a mould that fits the shape of society, or you can go down your weird little dark, off-the-beaten-track trail in the woods and see what you find.

That’s where things are most exciting to me! We love the cover artwork for Circus St, your grandma painted it Jordan? 

JORDAN: Yeah. I inherited a couple of her paintings. My grandparents house was full of them; I grew up with them. She was an artist her whole life. The painting is from the 80s. It’s called ‘The Feast’. It’s huge, it’s in my bedroom, actually, and it’s intense. It takes up a whole wall; it’s a little weird to witness constantly. 

She was a pretty interesting lady. She’s my Polish side. Her, my grandpa, my dad, and uncle lived on a kibbutz in Israel for quite a long time before moving to Melbourne. She was constantly making art, but she never really exhibited or tried to. It’s like Barbara and these people that don’t have that mindset of, how can this fit into something tangible? It just poured out of her. She was actually a very anxious and depressed person, so it never really came to the surface. It always really resonated with me, and I always wanted to find a way to give it new life and celebrate it. It seemed to really fit in with what we were doing. There’s more to come.

REIS: If we can scrape some more money together to keep putting out records, then you’ll see a lot more of her paintings, that’s for sure. 

Wonderful! I can’t wait. I find that a lot of artists and musicians can be anxious and depressed people. We make art to help us process everything that’s happening in the world and our world. Also, we create beautiful things to try and connect with something other than our immediate pain, something better. 

JORDAN: Yeah, it’s ironic in a way, because if she was able to share that work when she was alive, it would have given her a lot of happiness. But she couldn’t. If she was able to be in a mental position to share it and allow it to resonate with others, then I think it would have helped her. It’s just the way it is sometimes. Maybe that art wouldn’t exist without that sort of headspace in the first place.

REIS: I agree with that sentiment so much. We’re so caught up, we’ve lived our whole lives just in this small skull and experienced the world through these eyes. And there’s very few things that allow you to connect with people beyond anything that you could describe or touch. The function of art, at its purest form, is to make you not feel so alone. 

Totally. And your music can go places that you might not get to. How did the Circus St album get started?

REIS: We made one in a lockdown. Jordan’s kind the real pants wearer…

JORDAN: I do wear pants.

[Laughter]

REIS: We come up with a lot of the ideas and the songs together, but when push comes to shove, Jordan really does produce most of the records. I’ll spit out some demos and stuff every now and then, and we’ll work on stuff together. But there’s a couple of couple of songs on there that has got no one else besides Jordan. The reason that the record sounds the way it does is because of his ability. It’s a beautiful thing. We’ve talked a lot about the live thing being a very different kind of rendition of those songs, not trying to replicate the way that it sounds.

JORDAN: We do play a lot together, at home and stuff and we record pretty much everything. What the end product is, is a lot of, me meticulously going through these recordings, taking sections, twisting them and re-recording them. So it all does come from a pretty organic place. Then there’s this arduous production side that I’m pretty obsessive about. Every day I’m unravelling that stuff. 

Circus St came from off the back of 8BALL. When 8BALL came out, we didn’t have a fully formed band. We hadn’t played live before. That only started happening even after 8BALL came out, and very infrequently because of sporadic lockdowns. The idea of the live band was a lot less fleshed out and came secondary. Now it feels like the opposite, where the live band is becoming the focal point and the recorded stuff is coming off the back of that.

Circus St was sort of somewhere in between. We were recording, we spent some time at RMIT Studios, scamming some free session time with students. That brought to life a lot more of the band element in the recorded stuff. They are strange renditions of live jams and things. I feel those two worlds are coming closer together now, with this improv album we have. We’ve also got the workings of, not a straightforward album, but songs with vocals. We’ve only had a fully-formed band for two years. So that’s starting to make more sense and inform recorded stuff a lot more in the future.

What inspired the more spoken word vocal?

JORDAN: Aesthetically, it feels more punchy and I like the feeling; they’re more like slogans and announcements than lyrics. I appreciate that. And maybe I’ve just got into the habit of it and forgot how to sing properly [laughs]. 

REIS: He’s saving his Alicia Keys moments for the record. It’s coming.

Nice! I love Alicia Keys.

REIS: Me too!

[Laughter] 

JORDAN: The singing is coming back. Maybe I’m a bit traumatised from my alt-rock Radiohead days. 

You were doing the band,  Dull Joys? 

JORDAN: Yeah, that was my ‘how to play in a band’ instruction manual through my early 20s. Technically, it was engaging, but stylistically, it was not exactly what I was interested in. But it was very informative. The whole ‘singing your little heart out’ got a bit squashed by all that. It was like, ‘I’m just going to talk now. Keep to casual.’

REIS: I remember listening to ‘Casual Assembly’ by EXEK with you and you really liking that a lot. 

JORDAN: Yeah, definitely inspired by a lot of post-punk and new wave. My biggest inspiration for making music was soundtrack music for film. There’s always talking with with music in the background. I really appreciate the atmosphere of the casualness of conversation with a lot more evocative things happening behind it.

We love the video you made for ‘Horny Snail Pyramid’.  It’s very Dungeons and Dragons. 

JORDAN: Yeah. Me and my girlfriend at the time were very obsessed with old mediaeval films: the dress ups and fantasy element.

REIS: The Soviet Lord of the Rings as well. 

JORDAN: Have you seen that? 

REIS: Oh, my lord! 

JORDAN: You should YouTube it. It’s incredibly terrible. The green screens! Golem is this fucked up alien, gremlin creature in the caves. It’s incredible. Masterfully terrible. Reis had also been honing in on his VHS camcorder craft. So it all just made sense. We were originally wanted to go to a castle but it just ended up as a few green sheets in Reis’ garage. It came out all the better for it.

Doing things yourself you can be uncompromising. You don’t have to diminish or change what you’re doing. You present it how you want to. It doesn’t matter about views, at the end of the day, you have the people that will get it and you appreciate that more. We definitely want to do more film work.

REIS: We’ve got a couple of schemes for the next one. We’re about to release a more instrumental album. It’s us in various sheds and garage around the place just wining it.

JORDAN: It’s an experimental album called Hocus Pocus. We were thinking about doing something more sci-fi for that. It will all come to the surface soon enough.

On your Bandcamp, there was this really great comment that someone left about Circus St, it said: this album fills me with energy of daring and endless possibilities. I feel so alive listening to it. 

JORDAN: Yeah, that’s my mum! She’s a very special woman and very supportive.

[Laughter]

Have your parents been to any of you shows?

REIS: No, mine haven’t. But shout outs to all the mums. We dedicate all the Cloud Ice 9 records to our mums and the women who raised us.

JORDAN: Yeah. I reckon my mum comes to about 80% of our shows. She’s very supportive. I love her lots— shout out to my mum. She’s like us in a lot of ways. She appreciates the stranger and more off kilter things. She’s a huge, huge inspo!

REIS: The first Cloud Ice 9 video clip was cut up of a short film that Jordan’s mum made. She used to make short films in the 80s. She gave us a whole bunch of her movies she made on VHS movies.

JORDAN: She used to do Super8 stuff and was part of the Sydney creative scene in the 80s. Similarly, with Grandma’s paintings, I used to work with Mum’s footage and make music to it. It just feels like a nice way to [puts on a Don Vito Godfather voice]—keep it in the family!

[Laughter]

REIS: We love to reappropriate lost media. 

That’s awesome. Do each of you have a favourite song from Circus St?

REIS: The last song of the record, ‘Lion Tamer’. I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back too hard but we had this idea for this AI-generated voice and Jordan had written a pretty great little story that flows throughout the record. I like that ambient drone juxtaposed with the AI stuff. That one gets me.

JORDAN: I’ve got such a soft spot for ‘Horny Snail Pyramid’. I feel like that really encapsulates a lot of what we’re trying to do. The song almost doesn’t make sense. It feels like it’s teetering on the edge of falling apart the whole time. We wrote that riff together years and years ago go. We had no idea what to do with it. I slowly formed these words for it and almost wrapped over the top of the guitar line. I was begging these guys to give it a go, showed them with the vocals and they were like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’ It took ages to figure out how the hell that song works.

Is there anything you guys hope people get listening to Circus St?

JORDAN: I hope the general theme of Circus St and ideas behind it come through. I’m proud of what that album talks about and how it relates to modern society. I don’t know if it’s a car album or background album. There’s a lot of weird AI voices. I do hope people can enjoy it in a pretty relaxed setting in a low key way.

REIS: I hope that after a long day at work, someone who wants to disconnect a little bit can put that record on and get taken to our world. 

JORDAN: Like with Barbara, the puppeteer, I hope that it makes you feel like that a little bit; that everything’s a bit wonky and bizarre. That you take a moment to be like, ‘Oh, I am a human being in a modern society; that’s actually not that straightforward.’ It’s actually quite a strange thing as an animal.

[Laughter]

I get it. A lot of things in our society aren’t really geared towards nurturing humans. We’re bombarded with so much every day.

JORDAN: Yeah. There’s a lot of manipulation. There’s a lot of chemicals that need gratifying and become strange obsessions. 

REIS: The bottomline is that—life offers you a lot of disconnect. It’s not for the benefit of you but it’s an extraction of your attention. It takes from you but doesn’t give a whole lot back. The power of art and music is that it does have that symbiotic relationship where it can give you something back and it can affect your mood, and you.

JORDAN: The art that makes your brain change is inspiring. You can feel new synaptic waves firing in different directions. It’s what it’s all about.

REIS: 100%. I’ve been listening to Public Enemy so loud over the last week that my neighbour, who I haven’t actually spoken to ever, came over and told me to keep it down. 

[Laughter]

Nice! Anything else you’d like to share with me? 

REIS: We’re always tinkering. We’re open books. Let the public see it all.

JORDAN: Give the public what they want. 

REIS: I don’t know if they want it.

[Laughter]

JORDAN: Give the public what they’re going to get!

[Laughter]

Check out the home of Cloud Ice 9 – HAPPY TAPES here. Follow @happytapes. They’re playing at Jerkfest again this year – don’t miss them – get tickets HERE.