Cities of Gold is the side project of The Santamaria Brothers, aka Pat and Andrew, aka founders of the mighty Sydney crew, Motorik!
A vehicle for their varied musical inspirations outside the realms of house and techno, Cities Of Gold allows the duo room to play as broadly from their record collections as possible. Indeed during an all-night long Cities Of Gold set, it’s not unusual for the music to be devoid an electronic kick for quite a while.
This Thursday, Cities Of Gold will be sprinkling their musical delights across 77, playing the opening set at Tempo Comodo. Ahead of the gig, we asked the boys to share with us four tracks that make up the Cities Of Gold sound.
Los Mirlos – ‘Sonido Amazonico’
Psychedelic shaman rock from the Peruvian Amazon. A melding of ancient forest rhythms and western instruments that continues to run through our veins and a methodology that we lean into heavily both as musicians and people.
Luke Vibert – ‘I love Acid’
It's rare that the musical brilliance of a song is matched by its film clip - here we have exactly that. Jono Ma, our longtime friend and collaborator, showed us this late one night and it’s stayed in our playlists ever since. Particularly if we want to twist some melons!
James Brown – ‘Bodyheat’
We've both been huge James Brown fans since childhood. He embodies everything we love about dance music, and very few tracks express it better than this one. ‘Bodyheat’ is raw but disciplined, heavy but incredibly stripped back - somehow it’s equal parts funk and punk to our ears.
We often imagine JB conducting the band in the same way a techno producer will work a sequencer and 909 – it’s an energy we’ll keep coming back to forever. Just to add to our collective memories of this song, there is an unreleased Theo Parish edit of ‘Bodyheat’ which we heard him play at the peak of a set, which has to be one of the best dance floor memories.
“Every chance we get to run a Cities Of Gold is a pleasure, so when Phil Smart asked us to step up for Tempo Comodo, we couldn't have been more honoured. And at the home of Sydney electronic music, no less!” – Cities Of Gold.
Bodo Elsel – ‘Mein Haus’
Extremely fond memories of this track - it was a staple on Motorik dance floors during our first parties circa 2010. At that time we were really in to the idea of taking the piss out of how the techno scene took itself so seriously.
Hopefully we didn’t rub too many people up the wrong way, but it was pretty funny to us. With ‘Mein Haus’, Bodo Elsel has nailed the perfect balance of being hilariously self-aware German minimal acid, while also being really awesome German minimal acid!
Cities of Gold play Tempo Comodo Thursday 30th June 2022 at Club 77. Full event details HERE