TAPE/OFF
- ballpointpressbne
- May 8
- 15 min read
Updated: May 12
Words/Interview: Aysha Swanson
Images: Daniel Sergiacomi, Peter Krbavac, Pat Bowden, Stevie Scott
The floorboards groan like they’re about to quit. Somewhere behind the drum kit, a fairy light shorts out, casting half the room into moody shadow. There’s no stage — just a corner cleared of op shop furniture and covered in stomp-box cables like roots creeping across linoleum. The crowd’s packed in close, cans in hand, sweat on necks, that warm hug of beer and youth and busted plaster.
The band starts without warning — a single chord held, then a blast. Guitars ragged and sharp, drums that sound like they’re trying to break out of something. The singer leans into the mic like it’s personal, voice half-swallowed by feedback and the room’s strange acoustics. No one's filming, it’s just the music, pulsing through a space barely holding it together.
If you’ve been to a certain kind of show in Brisbane — sweaty, loud, carved out of a house party or a corner of The Zoo — you’ve probably crossed paths with Tape/Off. They’re a band that formed without ceremony but with plenty of grit; born in a home studio in 2009, when drummer/vocalist Branko Cosic decided the best way to quit waiting for the 'right band' was to build his own.
From the DIY days of The Hanger and The Waiting Room to three full-length records and countless shows, Tape/Off have become elder statesmen of Brisbane’s underground — if such a thing exists. Their latest album ‘Fort Sensible’ is a product of their years together: brash and intelligent, restrained and emotional, political without posturing, and fiercely rooted in the strange, specific urban sprawl of Brisbane.
AYSHA: Hey! Thanks so much for chatting with me today, I guess I wanted to start off with how Tape/Off came together?
BRANKO: So, Tape/Off started 2009. I started the band because during the 2000s I had a little studio in my house, I was learning how to record myself. I had played in other bands but none of them ever gigged or got off the ground and I just thought ‘it's gotta be better than this’ so I wrote a bunch of songs, recorded them at my studio and started getting people together. Nathan who sings in the band and plays guitar, I knew him before that, he was like ‘yep I'll jump on board’. Originally, I wanted to play guitar and find another drummer, it didn't work out that way, I thought it was easier to teach someone the guitar parts rather than drum parts and that was the start of the band.
Over the years there's been some line-up changes but the line-up has been these days which is myself, Nathan (Pickels) on vocals and guitar since the start, Ben (Green) who's on guitar, he's been around since 2013 and Cam (Smith) who's on bass has been around since 2012. So we've been together for all the three albums that have come out, but yeah the first couple of years was a lot of figuring out, we didn't have a handbook that told us this is how you start a band, we just started playing. We had two EPs out in 2010-2011 and within a year were going from just saying yes to whatever gig possible, to starting to get special supports and things like that. So, yeah that's the short version of how Tape/Off started.
AYSHA: Is there a story behind the name of the band?
BRANKO: Nathan came up with the name, naming bands is so much harder than it needs to be, it's such a dumb exercise. What it actually means is during the 80s there were a line of boom boxes made by you know Panasonic, Sony, Sharp, whatever all those big electronics makers and back in the day there was never really an off switch. So through the mid 80s they would have these cassette players with a tuner in it as well with a radio and you would have a switch, if you flipped it up it was the radio switch which turned that on and then you switched it down or in the alternative direction it said Tape / Off. So Nathan just came up with that one and I thought it was just really suited because I'm an electronics nerd and I remember those boom boxes growing up, so we kind of figured that people who would be into us would get the reference, but now that we've been together for like 15, 16 years obviously there's probably at least two generations that absolutely do not understand the reference at all, which is totally fine but yeah it's a reference to a time when home stereos had to be turned off.
AYSHA: How would you describe your sound to people who haven’t listened?
BRANKO: It's always a tricky one. It's so easy just to say indie rock and I think that means a completely different thing these days than it did, I guess, when we were coming up with the band. We just say, we just kind of name bands. We're big fans of Slacker Rock. So, Pavement, Sonic Youth, things of such. But we also are kids of the 80s and 90s as well and we throw in a lot of influences with that too. As we've gotten older, we've figured out ways of how to be quieter or more dynamic. So, we're big fans of Mogwai and Post-Rock bands like that. So yeah, the easiest way to sort of mention our sound is start saying some band names and see if people either look at you blankly and want to stop talking to you immediately or if they totally get it. And then they're like, ‘oh, that's cool’. Usually, it's just like we're a rock band, a loud, big, dumb rock band. And they're like, ‘oh, cool, OK, no worries’.
AYSHA: Well, I’m a big fan of Sonic Youth and I also love Pavement so that’s probably why I like you guys a lot, actually my friend Zac from Special Features is a big fan of yours and I promised him that I would ask you what your favourite Sonic Youth song is? I know, It’s a tough question.
BRANKO: Good call, I would say it is ‘Disconnection Notice’, which is off ‘Murray St.’ in 2002. Murray Street's kind of like, it was like - I love all the records I do - but you know, how you have an affinity with sort of like the record that was like your entry point?
AYSHA: Totally, yeah.
BRANKO: Like I had heard bits of ‘Dirty’ and bits of ‘Washing Machine’ and stuff like that when I was in high school. I remember when ‘A Thousand Leaves’ came out, like love ‘Sunday’, and there was a TV show in the 90s on Australian TV called Recovery and Sonic Youth played on it in 98 when ‘A Thousand Leaves’ was out, and they played ‘Sunday’ and an amazing version of ‘Wildflower Soul’ and I can't find it on YouTube. It's like as if no one recorded it. I have a VHS tape somewhere on this earth of those performances. They were really impressive. But it wasn't until ‘Murray St.’ that I finally sat with a record and learned to love it.
AYSHA: You recently released your third album ‘Fort Sensible’ – seven years since your previous album ‘Broadcast Park’ and eleven years since your first album ‘Chipper’ – how would you say 'Fort Sensible’ differs from your previous releases?
BRANKO: ‘Chipper;’ was an album of discovery, I worked on it in a house that I lived in down in Kingston. I was living by myself at the time and every Sunday afternoon the guys would come around with song ideas and you know, because I had a studio, I hit record on everything. I recorded every single practice. The guys were never really fantastic at remembering what riff went with what or naming things properly or anything like that. So, if there was something that sounded good, we try and go in that direction and make something from nothing and that album was totally encapsulating that. I think we were starting to get pretty busy in our lives as well and we didn't have a lot of time together, so it was a bit of a piece to get a record. So that one is interesting in its own.
‘Broadcast Park’ was the first one where Ben and Cam were fully on board and that was a lot more collaborative. I still mixed and recorded at Cam’s house. Then after the tour that we did for ‘Broadcast Park’, we had started on ‘Fort Sensible’ probably late 2019 and then with COVID everything just got stretched out like super long and I reckon we finished the album by 2022, but it just took a long time for us to finally get our ducks in a row to just get it out. Yeah, I wish it didn't take that long because we kind of thought, ‘does anybody care about this anymore?’ We had the finished record, we kept listening to it, we knew it was really good and we knew we were still really proud of it. Yeah, we just had to kind of really put a full stop on it and say, ‘guys, let's just get it out.’ So, we finally came up with a plan to do it and finally it's in the world.
AYSHA: Is there a concept behind ‘Fort Sensible’? Something that links all the songs together?
BRANKO: Yeah, there's definitely politics involved in the lyrics, there's a lot of love, hate and things. There's a lot of like very witty social commentary on things that we notice around us. And it comes from a very Brisbane lens as well. All four of us - I should say - two of us grew up in Brisbane. Ben, he grew up on Gold Coast, Cam, he kind of moved around the place, but spent a lot of his life in Brisbane. And we've seen the changes in Brisbane, like from when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was running this state for damn near 20 years during the 60s, 70s and 80s and kind of turning it into one big country town or country city. And from that, never really growing up from that, we kind of grew up from it, but there's still things where Brisbane is just a super big country town, not so much a small city. So yeah, social commentary is definitely a thing from that.
But musically, we definitely challenged ourselves to edit ourselves. I think we wanted to make a sharper point about certain music, but there's also some songs in there that draw out longer as well, like ‘Crying on the Kitchen Bench’ is us really trying to be a little bit more restrained and controlled. And ‘Monday’, which ends the album, is another one where we try to build up suspense and there's a couple of false parts where you think we're about to go into a really loud part, but then the second half of the album, it's absolute just release. So yeah, that's the difference from some of the other albums.
AYSHA: Do you have a specific writing process as a band? or has it changed overtime?
BRANKO: Uh, yeah, from ‘Chipper’, which was total piecemeal, like piecing it together in a room sort of thing, fast forward to ‘Fort Sensible’, where all of it was written in a room and us just on our phones recording it and then listening back to it to remember what the writings were.
Like Nathan would come in with an idea and he would just have a couple of chords. He'd just noodle on something, but he's great in that he usually has some words to go with it. He's just got the start of a story. He's witnessed some sort of event or a sort of news story or something like that and can bring that into the room and we've already got like a bit of a template to work on. It's like the ingredients are kind of there. Let's turn it into a really tasty meal. That that's how we prefer to write. I don't think we're very good at being a studio band. We just never have enough time in each other's presence to be that kind of band. So yeah, jamming it out is how we get to where we end up.
I think it's been very easy for us in the past to just be a very first chorus, verse chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, end kind of band. We just really wanted to shake off any sort of structure like that. Which is super fun because that is the challenge. You don't think you've really accomplished writing the song if you feel like you're just following just a template. Yeah. It was a challenge.
AYSHA: Where would you say you get creative inspiration from?
BRANKO: It comes from just the backyard, really, just our general sights and sounds. All of us kind of live in different parts of the city and we just see things, how it's done, the Brisbane way. You know, we're all sort of world-travelled and that's kind of cool, but we never really write about anything outside of our own backyards. It's just a bit of a common Brisbane/Australian feeling.
AYSHA: Building off of that, you guys have been in the scene for a while, I’m curious if you’ve noticed any changes in the Brisbane music scene over time?
BRANKO: There's always been changes. I mean when The Zoo shut down that was a massive change which we really didn't know what direction that was going to be in. Luckily Crowbar has come in to fill that hole. I mean with the recent news of The Bearded Lady being on the verge of shutting down as well, that's concerning. We've definitely been a band during times where there has been mass venue shutdowns earlier in our career. By that time we were starting to get support slots here and there or whatever and I feel like we just graduated from just the small stage to kind of the next stage and that would have been 2011-12-13 somewhere like that. Then it slowly started coming back again 2014-15-16, venues were starting to become good. One thing that I really miss that Brisbane was doing really well in the 2000s and I haven't seen much of it in recent years, but it could be down to age as well cause I'm not getting as much, is that the good house party or the DIY space.
Cam who plays bass in our band used to run a DIY space called The Waiting Room, which was in West End, so it was alive during 2011 to about 2013-14 and made so many lifelong friends through that space and opened my eyes to a lot of bands that I don't think would have really broken through. A lot of international bands played there as well and it could only fit 80 people, so Cam spend a lot of his time and his effort to make that thing work as it was a continuation of another DIY space that existed between 2007-11 called The Hanger which was my foot in the door to a lot of music scene stuff.
Just last night I was at the Olivia's World, Keep On Dancin’ and Local Authority show and ran into so many people that I would see all the time in those early 2010 shows at house parties and stuff like that and obviously they've all got you know life things happening so I never get to see them, but it was just so delightful to see all in one place again and actually get a hint of nostalgia going ‘man I missed this feeling’, a feeling I feel like I have not felt in a long time. I’d love to see like just a community of people that would have just house parties all over the city and you know, if cops shut down one house, don't worry, we know our mates are going to have a house party in a couple weeks’ time down the road. That'd be perfect.
AYSHA: That’d be pretty awesome, I’d definitely go to those. Do you have any tips for upcoming musicians?
BRANKO: Yeah absolutely, recorded music is always the way, it's never been easier now to record yourself whether it's just an idea or fully fleshing it out. It's always good to seek out like the recording studios that we have around Brisbane as well. So many like Cam's Incremental Studios, Chris Brownbill has Underground Audio. There are so many great studios kicking around town.
I guess you know getting friendly with fellow bands like starting a bit of a friendship base or a community, their own community and yeah getting the recorded music and then getting into the community radio like Triple Zed to start getting the word out through there because once people start hearing the sound of something that they really enjoy or really identify with, the name will stick. The two things will go together and with social media obviously you know have a visual presence that goes with it and then I feel like that's the ingredients there to be a band in 2025 in Brisbane. So yeah, great live show, great recordings, those two things alone and getting into community radio, those three things, that's it.
AYSHA: Just quickly getting back to ‘Fort Sensible’, do you have a favourite track on the album?
BRANKO: Yeah ‘Crying on the kitchen bench’ is probably my favourite. There's a part in the middle where I'm not playing drums at all and it's just a little bit of a repetitive guitar line that that goes over. We really tried to capture a bit of an emotion that I still get goosebumps from as well, where Nathan has like a slide or maybe he was using a beer bottle of time I can't remember now, but he was kind of just sliding it on the strings and making really eerie just singular notes. We really had to count out how long we wanted that part to go for, then I just come back in which is a simple beat, but we still keep the eeriness going in the background that that's my favourite part.
Nathan really kind of is pretty good at drawing like a picture. Like why is somebody crying on the kitchen bench? You kind of have your assumptions, is it someone has left somebody's relationship breakdown? Is it death in the family? Is it some event? You know what I mean? And we really wanted to respect kind of that feeling, yeah, really be careful with it because we wanted it's just something we don't do often at all. I guess just we want to be sad for once because we are silly and funny and things like and loud and brash and all that kind of stuff. So, we could do all that stuff. No problem. But the sombre part. Yeah, it was something new for us.
AYSHA: Vulnerable.
BRANKO: Yeah, vulnerable. That's a good way to put it.
AYSHA: Lastly, what’s coming up for Tape/Off? Anything you would like our readers to know about?
BRANKO: The shows that we are doing for our tour, there are songs that we haven't actually played live yet from the album. We have been playing songs from the album for a good five years. So, there are a lot of people that got a preview of it, the people who had been coming to those shows. But for people who haven’t seen us before, will need to bring earplugs, because we are loud. But you'll just get to see just four people that do lock in, even though we seldom practice. We just know each other well enough that we know how to play each other’s parts. We're so used to not having great monitoring either, so, we have our own sort of like internal clocks, we know what each person is kind of doing, even though we don't have to look at each other. We just lock in as a unit and we want to just engage with people. Because being on stage for that amount of time is something to definitely not take for granted.
So, we're definitely not the kind of band that just jump up. It's like, yeah, let's quickly do the half hour thing. You know, the joke between the song and then get off. It's never been like that. Every show has been different for us, and I swear that there would be a podcast one day where people would ask us stories about some shows. And we've got stories of some of the weirdest things that we've played. Weirdest places we've played, weirdest things we've seen and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, yeah, for anybody that's never seen this before, I guess, yeah, you'll see four people that have experienced those things.
AYSHA: Are you able to tell us a quick story about one of your weirder show experiences?
BRANKO: I can pull out a story of some that I forgot about, it was only until recently, I was reminded of it, where we were playing in Wollongong, a place called Dicey Riley's, which is a pub. I can't remember exactly what year this is now, might of been 2019, off the back of ‘Broadcast Park’, but we were just getting Airbnb’s all over the place because they're affordable and we booked this one Airbnb in Wollongong that was right around the corner from the venue, it ticked all the boxes. It was like, sweet and the price was amazing, what’s not to like, so we just booked it.
And I remember when we arrived at the place, the accommodation, there was specific instructions about you had to park in this one particular car park because that was the one for the unit for that place. And when we got there, there was literally guys in that car park. And they were just about to jump in the car. And I don't know, we just said, ‘Oh, you guys leaving?’ He's like, ‘yeah, like, we booked this joint’. But he said that ‘somebody else's booked it. So now when we don't have it anymore.’ And we're like, ‘Oh, that's really weird. Okay, fair enough.’ I didn't think too much about it after that, I thought it was really weird. But the guy, when we met him was extremely strange. And he's like, ‘Oh, you're in a band. Oh, that's really cool.’ He had very short answers.
I’ve seen enough horror films to kind of get a vibe. This guy wasn't all there. And we were just trying to look around the apartment and look for things that we could have a bit of thought to maybe kill the conversation, then get to the venue so we can start loading in. He had a guitar; it was like a metal looking guitar. And I was like, ‘Oh, so you play guitar too, are you in any bands?’ he was like, ‘no’. So, I said ‘Oh, well, cool guitar, you like playing guitar?’ he said ‘I played it once or twice. Like I think I tried Metallica once. That's it.’ And we're like, ‘okay, cool. Let's get the hell out of here.’ And then we played the show. And it was just a really, really weird show as well. I can remember that bands we played with. But overall, it was an extremely weird experience. And all four of us had to sleep in the lounge room because the guy only had one bedroom, but it totally was not the description of what his Airbnb was.
AYSHA: Well, lucky nothing too bad happened, you know, he could have been a serial killer.
BRANKO: He could have been. I'm glad we didn't find out.
[Both Laugh]
TAPE/OFF
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