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Jul 22, 2008 04:59 am
Edited : Jul 22, 2008 07:38 am |
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MyGothicHeart.Com Interview with B00le by Abortedlife
MGH: What does B00le mean and why did you choose this name to represent the band?
The band name is not tremendously significant, MAB and I formed the band at Loyola College in 1996, we were both in school for Computer Science, and as a sort of joke we called it George Boole and the Toggles (as in toggle switches.) So later on we shortened it to just Boole. Since the internet and networking were still rather young, lot of bands and labels were using circuitry-related allusions in their music in the early to mid 90s, and it was not yet as trite as the zero in my nickname.
MGH: What were your individual lives like before the group's formation. Do you have any past, present or even probable future regrets stumbling into one another?
Mike/MAB and I are brothers, we both had extensive school band and garage band backgrounds during the 80s, and Andy and I met at College in 1990, so we all knew each other for quite a while. We didn't add Andy to the band until around 2000, and for a while there the band included our other brother JJ on guitars (who has all sorts of prior gigging experience with his bands Spill, PND and Damn That's a Big Beetle I Wonder If It's Poisonous.) JJ and I actually have another more rock/metal oriented album in the works as well.
Andy was always a musical ham, he fronted a band called Big Fish in high school, and Mike played in a jam band at Loyola called Papa Goulash, and he also has a side project called Mow Down Brown.
MGH: How do you plan the next move and who makes the final decision for such things to materialize? Is there a band leader that does the sole brainstorming as well as brainwashing?
I do most of the programming, songwriting, and steering for the band. Andy is really good with promo and is the most charismatic performer, Mike is good at fast critical thinking on mixes and song ideas, and handles the logistics of live performances, so everyone has their niche.
MGH: What was the purpose of your extensive collection of song recordings? There's a lot of them in your discography.
My original electronic project, The Apologizers, began in 1990 and was designed to be a completely experimental outlet for my musical curiosities and comedic interests. Since most people are oriented toward pop formulas, this project doesn't really appeal to them, but that's not the aim. A good comparison would be something like John Zorn's Naked City--not a pleasurable experience for pop consumption so much as a ridiculously indulgent form of self-entertainment for the artists involved. A lot of that influence made it into the early boole music, and even now it still does to some extent. You gotta be who you are, and I am at least part evil clown, so there is no separating that esotericism from the music.
MGH: What other musical outfits were you attached with in the past?
We're acquainted with a good number of artists in or near the industrial genre in the US and abroad, but having never toured, we're not really close friends with too many bands. That's neither bad or good, just a lack of interaction.
MGH: What instruments can each member play aside from the electronic gadgets and do you get to add their elements into your collective sound?
Mike and I have both played the saxophone since the age of 8, we also both play bass and guitar, Mike used to be a string bassist in orchestra, Andy can rage on a kazoo and also a hooter/melodica, and he knows the lyrics to nearly every single pop song released between 1950 and 1990.
MGH: The track lyrics on Pheromones are actually quite broad as they address a lot of worldly issues with the human factor right in the middle, while being executed in good taste. Can you narrow this personal observation down to your main sources of inspiration.
Musical inspiration comes from all over the history board, Motown, to jazz, bebop, fusion, Seattle scene, etc. It's hard to say where the lyrical inspiration comes from on that album because it's varied, but a lot of it comes from issues dealing with evolutionary and interpersonal psychology, and of course some politics. We're kind of getting away from politics these days and heading more toward the psychological and so called occult or theological topics. If I had to generalize, I'd say that most of the inspiration comes from addressing the disparity between the way we are expected to perceive things, and the way they actually are, which is what most art should be about--people taking on the Shiva role and destroying the phony world erected by the fearful at the expense of the bold.
MGH: I think Pheromones is your most defining album to this day. It's hard to believe this was put out in 2002 as it sounds very distinctively current in its own right.
Thanks, it probably comes from having more of a punk and rock background and thus not settling for electronic gimmickery as the mainstay of the musical message. There's almost always an expanse of emotiveness between the rock and dance genres--rock tends to be the music people turn to for emotional catharsis, and dance music or electronica tends to be what people turn to for physical, visceral party or novelty music, we see no reason this has to be as such.
MGH: Vocal lines are unpredictable, edgy at first, then it flows into a softer and more melodic texture as the samples stealth their way in for a piece of the action. There's seamless harmony in the chorus too. Who are the band's singers and writers?
I do most of the songwriting, we usually write two or three part harmony due to the number of singers in the band. Most electronic bands aren't using harmonies but we come from that Motown/soul background and really enjoy creating interesting harmonies. From the first two songs we did as Boole in 1996, Mike and I built in harmonies. It can make the music hard to perform, as we are all probably average singers at best, but the music is not about virtuosity so much as the feel. If we were to hire a professional singer it'd not be the same band, and all the bands we appreciated and learned from tended to sing their own music. "Bob Dylan is singing flat" or "Joe Cocker has improper diction" isn't really something posterity has concerned itself with.
MGH: I sent an interview offer to Tom Shear/Assemblage23 back in 2001 but never got a reply. He was probably on tour or something. You guys, however, are very approachable and you have no problems leveling down with your fans like in your web forums.
This might sound funny, but I am not really comfortable with the concept of the fan or "fanatic," I think it portrays the listener as some sort of frothing, uncontrolled victim of artistic wizardry. We all have good careers, and aren't really trying to fulfill some stardom role. To paraphrase Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk, if you like a car, you don't celebrate the manufacturer, you just drive the car, that's pretty much how we feel about music. The bard tells the tale, only in our gratuitous modern times has the bard become the tale himself.
Tom Shear is a nice guy, I've met him before, if he didn't respond, he was probably just busy. He's one of the more helpful musicians in ebm/industrial, having set up a forum on his site a very long time ago with the purpose of helping people to learn more about electronic music production. When not touring, he would tend to be on there talking to people a lot.
MGH: Would you confirm in your approach that time influences the music, or otherwise? Thought I'd ask this to find out wether you are making a specific type of music that's fit for an era, or if you intend to break out from the norms instead.
Music is something that tracks the zeitgeist, and vice versa. Political events, technological developments, and cultural changes tend to influence music, and vice versa. At the same time, another thing working on the development of music is the psychological progression of the artist as time goes on, each album is like a scrapbook of their focus and mentality and how they adapted to personal and cultural events of that particular time period. It's very easy for an artist to look back at the music they did a long time ago and find it stupid, but where you were is where you were, and were probably meant to be, and regret is the worst of all human emotions, second only to grief.
MGH: What were you engaged with during your hiatus from the last boole release Pheromones? Was the inactivity due to the saturated history of your earlier works, or you did you simply realize you didn't make music only to impress others while sacrificing oneself, but a balance of both?
We haven't released since 2002 because most of 2003 and some of 2004 was spent remixing other artists, and we had a lot of fun with that. Some of the songs on the upcoming CD were written as early as 2001, so it's not a lack of ideas or work during that time, so much as a lack of focus on turning out a product. In a way it's probably selfish because it's very easy to forget that there are people out there who want to hear the music and will only come to it by way of CD, but when you're on your own label you don't have anyone pressuring you to release, and when music is not a career, nothing really seems pressing or urgent.
Most people seem to download their music or suck it off of torrents these days anyway, so it seems almost passe to burn it to a bit of shiny plastic and then mail it all over the place, and some bands have switched to entirely online release already. Then again, one of the main places people listen to music is in their cars, and not everyone is yet wired up for digital or sattelite download in their cars, if they even have cars. Very few people I would imagine are buying portable CD players these days when they can just buy iPods, so once all new cars come wired for some new form of portable solid state media, such as USB or whatever, I imagine the CD will completely die, and then we and every other band will be left with tons of useless backstock. My friends already use iPods and other hard drive based media in their cars.
MGH: Heard your teaser mix of the upcoming material scheduled to be released this december- a testament why I'm particularly addicted to your tunes on your CDs. Hopefully you guys didn't bounce back to the eerie days doing your hard-to-gulp styles. I did notice a bit of upbeat rapping of some sort.
One of the new tracks, 2000 and None, actually addresses the myths of futurism, which makes that a kind of ironic statement. We currently tend toward a heavier sort of psypop sound, but we're experimenting with different formats. We're not a band that really has a "signature sound" and that probably hurts us in the area of productization and mass digestability, but the whole point is for it to remain fun for us, and so for that, eclecticism is required. The only real charter of boole from the beginning was basically "experiments in dance music" so under that heading, who knows what we'll do, maybe some distorted african or cubano rhythms, who knows. We also work with Inox (Dogs Hate Monet) from time to time, and he has a lot of interest in the world/fusion area, so we aim to keep it interesting.
MGH: Before this whole thing shifts to another direction, may I ask what record label is it going to be under ?
The Vital Few is going to be released on two American labels in January, one is ours, Dancing Bull Productions. We have not pursued any European or APAC labels, and we probably won't, not due to lack of concern for those audiences, but probably due to vanilla laziness.
MGH: The "remixes" keyword tends to be sporadically redundant about your site. What remixes have you done for others and vice versa?
So far I've remixed Stromkern, Assemblage 23, Infekktion, Talamasca, Ayria, Epsilon Minus, and Ego Likeness. I'll probably do some more in 2008.
MGH: It was humorous when you sent out an RiB fansign with you lifting weights in it. I know this is fluffy and uncalled for, but how did that take place, were you requested to do it or was it out of freewill?
I'm actually friends with Dylan (DJ Mikkel Natas) who does sound and booking for Razed in Black, and he asked me to take a RIB promo photo, so at the time I was doing a lot of deadlifting, and I came up with that picture.
MGH: I'm rather surprised why the band hasn't been rewarded with enough publicity that you so deserve. I hope on the next release, you'll be raking in enough cash to buy each of your fans playstation CDs!
We don't really seek a lot of publicity, or do a lot of promo or image control. Our interest lies mainly in the studio, although we do try and balance that out with a few shows a year. It'd be fun to get "bigger" but I imagine playing the same songs 25 nights in a row is not a whole lot more fun than staring at the walls of a cubicle, the difference being that you get the clap and cirrhosis instead of eye strain and the caffeine shakes. Travel is the compelling part though, it'd be a lot of fun to go see places we've not been and hear the stories that the locals have to tell.
Who's the gamer in the pack and did you also get to do soundtracks for those PS games you play and the like?
We all play a bit of XBOX, PS3, PS2, GameCube, etc. I'm currently working on a few different PS2 games: God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus, Champions of Norrath, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Prince of Persia. Mike and Andy play a lot of sports games. Mike's girlfriend is the worst gamer, I can just walk up to her and say "GameCube" and she'll sit down and start playing it. I don't usually have the time or patience to crank on video games for hours on end.
Please enlighten us on your self-titled project which was released in 2000 and the inclusion of a female singer. Would you be doing that move again soon? It was way ahead of its time for the y2k that I would still purchase the record as a 2008 offering.
That's not actually a female, that's my brother JJ singing in falsetto, like the Bee Gees. I guess you are talking about Disco Vampyre. People seem to either love or hate that song, it's so off the hook silly. I tend to reside in the hate camp myself, these days. But it's a pretty ridiculous fusion of the worst era in Disco and industrial...which, you know, nobody did at all until the Scissor Sisters came along and did it like 100 times better.
MGH: Do you mind telling us more about your coined "synthrance" musical description?
The synthtrance thing is meant to be tongue in cheek and redundant, because there is no such thing as acoustic trance. The sound of acoustic or unplugged trance is silence. Well, at least, that is the case as we define trance in the modern era, it's all synth and sampler music. Then again, the original trance music is acoustic predates electronic instruments, and involves instruments like the Tanpura.
MGH: The Apologizers for a former moniker reminds me of The Pretenders or The The, why that name and were you in some apologetic period?
The idea behind the name the Apologizers was that by building apology into the name of the band, we had a preemptive license to do absolutely anything we wanted musically, without having to apologize for offending anyone after the fact.
MGH: Any possible touring in the works ? Who would you be sharing the the stage with?
Mostly we'd like to be involved in some sort of gothapalooza tour where several bands just pile into a couple of rented busses and rampage across America causing trouble. I have bands in mind that I'd like to tour with either due to enjoying their personalities, or due to believing their musical styles and energies to be similar to our own. Tours take a lot of planning and unless we have help we may never actually sit down and do the bookings.
MGH: It's too obvious now that I really like B00le. I'm hoping you'll get a massive response on your next issues. So, in what year do you see your retirement from the music business?
I'm glad you really like the music. I hope to go to entirely new places in dance music with my future productions. We all lead busy lives with tons of commitments, and so we tend to slow down on band activities sometimes, but I've been producing and experimenting with sound in one way or form since 1986 or so, and it's integrated with my identity such that I don't really see myself ever stopping, although the energy required to promote and pitch the music to the underground music "industry" is something I may or may not be able to maintain, as evidenced by the 2002-2007 hiatus.
MGH: Thank you guys! This has been truly an honor to be interviewing you. Good luck and hopefully you can ask Tom Shear to get an interview going with us here at MyGothicHeart.Com or any other cool connections you have!
Thank you. I don't do interviews often so I like to try and cover a lot when I do. They feel a little strange and narcissistic, but then again, I like to try and give people the benefit of my insights on art and how it integrates into life, which is something I've spent a lot of time pondering. |
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| Jul 25, 2008 12:25 pm |
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| Aug 12, 2008 09:11 am |
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