For local electronic duo Albatross, music has been a lifelong progression, never sticking to a certain sound, ever evolving into something spectacular. Sam Weston and Thomas McAlister have been on an auditory journey since their first meeting at the beginning of high school, landing now in the blissful world of dreamfunk electronic.

Their debut 7”, Murder/Casper’s Theme, presents us with stuttering drums, swirling pitched vocals, far away synths and undeniable grooves. FBi spoke to Albatross on their 10 year anniversary as friends (awww) about progression, performance, and Sydney vs. the world.

FBi: How did you guys meet, and how did that lead into you making music together?

Sam: Well, we met at the start of high school, ten years ago last week… And yeah, we just started making music together as soon as we realised that we both had an interest in it. Then things just kept going in that direction. We were in bands together the whole time and it’s just kind of ended up the two of us.

Would you say the electronic stuff was born out of something else, or was it always there?

Tom: Well yeah, we always dabbled in it.

Sam: We used to be in a band called Chambers, and that ended about two years ago. Coming out of that we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do and had always kind of been doing electronic stuff on the side, separately or together. So we figured just do what was natural and kind of chew that for a bit and see if something happened, and we both really enjoyed it.

So when did Albatross happen?

Tom: As Sam was saying, we kind of just made music together since we first became friends. So when [Chambers] broke up, which was in 2008 maybe, over the sort of next year or two it was weird because we had always made music together but never had properly…

Sam: We had been doing it together since 2002 I guess, 2010 is I guess when we put a name to it.

Tom: It’s like kind of a thing that we always did, and we were like ‘Oh wait, maybe we should actually be a real act’.

From that, what has influenced the Albatross sound the way it is now?

Sam: It’s just like an accumulation of everything that we’ve ever been influenced by in our whole lives really. It’s not really a conscious decision to try and make any one sound or aim for one thing that we like, its just kind of what comes naturally at the moment. Things are constantly changing, like, our next release will probably sound nothing like our last release, and our last release sounds nothing like the first demos we put out, and so on and so forth. So, it’s just really what we listen to at the time.

Tom: We sort of see Albatross as our avenue to do whatever we want basically. We’ve started off making like ambient stuff and then went on to kind of borderline IDM, and its just sort of whatever’s next.

On to the release now, your debut 7”, Murder/Casper’s Theme, how did it come about?

Tom: Jarred [Jarred Beeler of