Segue (6)

Segue was an electronic live act formed in Brisbane, Australia, in the early 2000s. The band began as a side effect of the high number of Australian live acts represented on the club and festival circuit at the peak of the Breaks and Progressive House genres. A volume that led to a community while traveling and touring abroad, and a large culture of collaboration across genre lines. As band leader David Ryan departed from the live Breaks act Superfluid on the Creative Vibes label, he began to write some Acid House throwback tracks, calling in friends Leo Hede (Statler & Waldorf) and Kris Swales (D-KO) to realise them in the live setting, along with a long cast of contributors. These collaboration sessions would often occur after shows, coinciding with the rise of that era's community-centric "MP3 blog" culture, leading to unexpected coverage and support for bootlegs and unreleased material created specifically for the live shows with an emphasis on deep cultural reference. One example, an Acid House homage to the Chemical Brothers, led to a steady series of larger bookings and a hardening of their sound towards the "live synths and drum kit" aesthetic found on breakout shows like the Big Day Out's Boiler Room in 2008. Intended as a series of one-off shows, Segue became a staple of the live act circuit, and notably supportive of the emerging generation of artists stepping into their first shows through support slots and industry mentoring. The act wound down in the early 2010s, with David Ryan moving to San Francisco as a tech founder, Leo Hede focusing on DJing and co-creating the KANA collective in Brisbane, and Kris Swales taking over the editor role at a music publishing company. In the active years of the project, Segue released a number of tracks on Smash Bang Records, a steady stream of remixes of other Australian acts. In more recent times, a re-issue of an EP and an unreleased album are flagged as part of a resurgence of interest in this era of Australia live act history.