"GREATEST CHIPS"
by Bob Baker Fish, Inpress 5-6-2002


Minimum Chips this week release Portfolio, analbum compiled of songs they recorded between 1994 and 1997. "It's our grunge CD," they tell Bob Baker Fish.

Since 1999 Minimum Chips have become a regular on Melbourne's live circuit, popping up together or separately at various venues around town. They first came to notice via their sublime Freckles EP (Trifekta), a cheeky melancholic blend of indie cabaret and chilled krautrock bliss (drawing allusions to the likes of Stereolab, Broadcast and Sonic Youth).

Now three years later they have a fourth member and new album out. This time its a long player but rather than new material it's actually a collection of singles, compilation tracks and unreleased material from 1994 - 1997. Entitled Portfolio, it's a document of their Brisbane years.

"I can't remember where it came from, but I guess we had all these singles and other stuff", reflects guitarist Julian Patterson. "Actually about five years ago there was a tape floating around with most of this material. A few of our friends heard it and liked it, so we thought it would be a good idea to stick it all together and make it a product.

"It's just to remind people that we're still here because we're sort of in the middle of recording some new stuff and we knew we'd take ages to get it out," offers singer Nicole Thibault. "We had all of these songs ready to go. Some of them you couldn't get any more and we had requests for 7 inches that we only made a few of and were sold out. People wanted to hear the old songs so we thought we'd put it all together on a CD and make it more easily available."

For THibault and Patterson, returning to these tracks has been a little daunting, kind of like the audio equivalent of looking at daggy old snapshots of yourself. "It's more like a form of torture," quips Thibault self depreciatingly. "We don't listen to it, we just get it out there." The curious thing is that Portfolio is anything but outdated, daggy or torturous. Whilst the tunes are predominently gentle, beguiling and intimate, the approach is innovative and exciting. IN their sounds there are vague references to what was occurring around them, but it's clear that, even from an early age, Minimum Chips were known to forge their own sound. If anything, it's much more experimental and instrumental than their more recent work, driven predominently by guitar. "I suppose it was an early nineties thing," jokes Thibault. "It's our grunge CD and now we've moved on." It's also a lot rawer than Freckles, with the majority of the album recorded at home on the four-track, emphasising the band's do-it-yourself approach and giving the music that warm immediacy that only a four-track can bring.

Finding eachother in the early ninneties in the incestuous Brisbane music scene, like many things about Minimum Chips, it seemed more like a comfortable accident than by design that the band began playing together. "I suppose we just casually got together and started making music," remembers Thibault. "Nic and I started jamming and then, actually Ian invited us over to his place in Wooloongabba to have a jam," remembers Patterson. "He was also interested because Nic was a trombonist and I guess it was kind of an intersting combination. It wasn't really a conventional grunge combo. Oh .... we said grunge twice."

At the time, Nicole was working in a shop where they could rehearse and record regularly, something that Minimum Chips used to their advantage, producing a number of singles and finally their 1997 Swish CD (which is also included on Portfolio). Speaking of this time now, Thibault seems quite wistful, referring to it semi-sarcastically as the glory days, though she doesn't for a moment regret her move to Melbourne. "It wasn't really like a serious decision we made for the career of the band to move down to Melbourne," she relates. "We just basically moved down because Brisbane sucks and all our friends had moved down here. It's more the heat in Brisbane that's oppressive than anything. Melbourne's great. You really had to make your own fun in Brisbane. I mean I don't want to sound cliche, but in Melbourne it's so distracting. Every night there's either a band on , or an art opening. In Brisbane people don't go out that often, so there tends to be lot more bedroom creativity and that's what we used to do."

The distracting elements in Melbourne could, in part, explain the three year plus break between Freckles and the new material they're currently recording, though much of it seems to do with the quartet's relaxed attitude to their art, which, while it may cloak their sounds in a beautiful, carefree aura, does little for their productivity. "It's true, we're just not cut out for the music industry, that side of things. We're not very organised in that sense," jokes Thibault before adopting a laid-back moaner's drawl, "Yeah, we just float along where the wind takes us. We're just beatniks. You know, whatever dude."