Footage of a kid owning the dance floor in a Ukrainian night club in 1997 has been doing the rounds on the Internet for a little while now but it’s never been backed by a song as chilled as Old Mate’s “Stressin”.Taken from the forthcoming debut album It Is What It Is, the track is a rhythmic punch from Pat Telfer who over the last few years has developed Old Mate from a solo affair backed by an iPod to a shambolic six piece party band. The new track sees Telfer (who has also played in Dud Pills and Bitch Prefect) toning things back again with the help of Noah Renolds on drums and bass.Shot at Disco 2000 in the city of Kharkiv, the video footage shows the kid dancing like a boss complete with tucked in sweater and price tags on his sunglasses. The squirt would probably be around 27 years old by now and own a racquetball and squash supply store in Florida. Or he’s probably dead.We chatted to Pat about the clip and the new track.Noisey: That footage of the kid asks more questions than it answers.Pat Telfer: Kids do the silliest things sometimes.The new track seems a bit of a change from earlier Old Mate stuff. What is the current state of the band?This album is a recording project where I learned things about mixing and sounds that totally changed my approach to music. Noah Reynolds played all the drums, bass and percussion with his magic hands for this track and I thought it was something that needed to be released because it's so nice and so weird. Old Mate is in a constant state of change, experimentation is the way to move forward and most experimentation leads to failure, but thats the only way to grow and evolve, it's not as interesting to me to repeat the same pattern over again once I can predict the result as it is to try new methods and once in a blue moon be really proud of what we were able to achieve.SDZ records have a pretty impressive roster including the Rebel and Cheveu. How did you hook up with them?Nicolas and I got talking over the internet a few years ago. He sent me some records and tapes that were really interesting and exciting to me, stuff with pitched vocals and this one tape that has about 15 vastly different styles of music by the one artist, like blast beats followed by folk songs followed by a synth arpeggio for five minutes kind of thing. That doesn't sound good when i write it but it's really sick. I asked him to release IIWII when it got finished at the start of this year, he said it took him a minute to get into it because it's so different from what we've done before, but it clicked after a while. We're going to do all kinds of things.
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