Dan Mac, lead singer of ARIA award winning band Art vs Science, releases debut single Zooming from solo project The Swirly Train. The track is wild, but it’s the music video which is bound to turn heads: a bizarre storyboard style clip in which the frames were all lovingly hand drawn by Mac. In the video, Swirly Dan takes the crowd on an adventure in The Swirly Train – an “intergalactic techno train powered entirely by human imagination”. There is a journey to the stars, heartbreak, and the promise of a good future.

While budgetary necessities were the mother of this particular invention, personality and storytelling were not compromised: “Since it’s not fully animated the viewer must fill in the gaps and use their own imagination to follow the narrative, and I’ve been doing these drawings since I was a kid – in a way they mirror my mental life better than I can actually articulate”. The drawings are rich with emotion and convey the classic adventurer undergoes trial and becomes less naive arc.

Musically, on the surface there is exuberance and frivolity; a manic joyousness – but the Wagnerarian horns and whole-tone string sequences betray a menacing sense of darkness that lurks beneath the persona. The extended bridge paints a picture of naively falling in love, but losing touch with the heart. While the second half of the bridge illustrates an almost nightmarish response – reclaiming the heart, but losing the mind. The return to the chorus is almost non-sequitur, but herein lies the comedy: we’re not actually sure if Swirly Dan is “all there” after the turmoil. He might be crazy.

Happily the story is already written and you won’t have to wait too long to find out – most of the album is done and in various stages of mixing. Watch out for The Swirly Train in 2019 / 2020

THE SWIRLY TRAIN
Biography

“Zooming throughout the universe, we’re sailing towards a hidden world of love.”

The Swirly Train is an intergalactic techno train powered entirely by human imagination. It takes the ecstatic tension of “what is going to happen next” to a new level, as the listener is literally transported into the mind of Swirly Dan, the conductor of The Swirly Train, for an exhilarating tour of the galaxy.

It comes as no surprise that it is the brain-child of Dan Mac, lead singer of Art vs Science, the notorious three-piece who achieved infamy writing songs like “Magic Fountain”, “Parlez-Vous Francais” and “AIM Fire”. In the same way that AVS took electro house and channeled it into a high voltage live show, Swirly Dan has twisted another dance genre to his own nefarious ends – taking the thumping hypnosis and freedom of tech house structures and completely disregarding convention when it comes to harmonic content. The songs are populated with classical and psych textures, kitschy 70s crooning, vaudeville, T-rex Guitars, tin whistles, ukuleles; basically any instrument within reach or imagination gets a shot at the big time.

On the live front The Swirly Train is just as compelling: you don’t need to be a techno fan to get on board. If you are in the crowd Swirly Dan will pick up up and put you in the carriage. Like Willy Wonka on acid, you don’t know why he’s built this mutant electric chocolate factory but he really wants you to enjoy it.

“I wrote the original music for my DJ gigs to force me onto the microphone at the beginning, to shove me in front of the crowd and into the lights, and at the same time bring in people who weren’t sure about the genre – the train is the sound of the music, the breakdowns are the stations, and the drops are when we are hurtling along to the next planet.”

As his grandpappy once said “a man’s reach is as wide as his dreams”. Could this be the music to move humanity from planetary to interplanetary civilisation?

“Probably not. But if there’s a crowd of people enjoying it – either laughing at me or dancing to the music then that’s one group who is in a sense co-operating… The music makes no attempts at depth, but I think depth comes through if you listen hard enough. Nick Cave will probably not like this music.”