Excerpts from a Radio Interview with Karmacoda by Tony DuShane -
Drinks with Tony on Pirate Cat Radio
(c)2007 Karmacoda and Tony DuShane
Interviewer: Tony DuShane
Karmacoda on the air: Heather Pierce, Brett (B.) Crockett, Rafael Acevedo
Karmacoda: Rafael Acevedo, Heather Pierce, Eric Matsuno, Brett Crockett
Music: Spectre from Illuminate
TD: Karmacoda on Pirate Cat radio 87.9 FM San Francisco, Los Angeles. PirateCatRadio.com. Karmacoda live in the studio, hey guys.
B: Hey!
Heather: Hello
Rafael: What’s going on?
TD: We have Heather, Rafael and Brett from the band. That was a great track.
B/Heather: Thank you!
B: That’s from our new album Illuminate, it’s going to be released on March 5th, its brand new.
TD: And released through what record label?
B: Sola Musa, it’s an indie label.
TD: It’ll be available in record stores around San Francisco?
B: San Francisco, online everywhere, iTunes.
Heather: Amazon, CDBaby
TD: OK
B: We’re everywhere.
TD: So the people out there know.
Heather: Yes, Karmacoda.com (laughs).
TD: So downtempo for those of us, including me, who don’t know all of the electronic genres, what would be a good description of that style of music?
Heather: It’s like Portishead.
Rafael: Massive Attack
Heather: Everything but the Girl, Morcheeba…
Rafael: A little Thievery Corporation
TD: And the term downtempo, what does that describe?
Karmacoda: Photo from the new CD Illuminate.
B: It’s more of a lower tempo, chill out kind of a thing. It’s kind of related to trip-hop which is another common (electronic) genre; it’s a slower tempo kind of hip hop beat, but with more trippy music that came out of Bristol (UK) in the 90s. It got its big start there and it’s kind of…
Heather: A syncopated groove kind of thing.
B: What do you think Raf?
R: When I was first joining Karmacoda, I wasn’t even really sure what the term downtempo meant, but it definitely has hip hop elements, but also I think when it was first establishing itself there was a lot of electronic music that was more techno based, a lot of dance or even house music, acid house music, and a lot of the chill out areas of night clubs or raves at that time were playing electronic music at a slower speed. Not necessarily with a lot of vocals, but with a lot of instrumentals and synthesizers and just a lot of different elements coming in. It’s really a lot of different things, but definitely a lot slower tempo than techno I guess you would say.
Heather: Just ask the DJ right? (laughs)
TD: Do you play the compositions or the samples? Are you the one who’s doing most of that in the live shows in Karmacoda?
Rafael: Yes. Samples, scratches. Anything that I can find in between areas where Heather might be singing or Brett might be singing and so I just try to find my place in there.
B: In the band Raf is the DJ and Heather is the singer, of course, and I do some singing too. There is live guitar and live bass and we bring in different instrumentalists and live piano. We try to mix up more synthesized sounds and samples and DJ beats with real instruments so when we play there are live guitars and singing and bass.
Heather: We also like to keep more of a songwriting form too. Sometimes with electronic music it can be very ambient and we love that, but we’re all songwriters so it’s important to us to have interesting lyrics and the kind of form that you could go out with an acoustic guitar and play these songs and have it really stripped down and it’s still there. That’s something that we’re trying to mesh with the whole electronic idea, trying to fuse everything together. A little jazz, a little rock, a little electronic music.
TD: It’s good. I was going to next play track 6 off your new release, is that the one that will be the first single?
B: Yeah, that’s our new single, it’s called Turn.
TD: Turn, OK, we’ll come back with Karmacoda in a minute here. You’re listening to Drinks with Tony on Pirate Cat Radio.
Music: Turn from Illuminate
TD: Karmacoda and Turn on Pirate Cat Radio, 87.9 FM San Francisco / Los Angeles. Karmacoda live in the studio right now. So how did you guys come together?
B: It was about 2001, I’m a producer as well as a musician and the band started as a studio project because I was just getting into electronic music, starting to discover stuff and I just started writing some tracks and met Heather and played her some tracks and she went, “Oh that’s cool, I could add some vocals to that.”, and she did and then we suddenly had a bunch of tracks and a record and we thought, well we need to play live and then we hooked up with Rafael. It’s was kind of…
Heather: Karmic.
B: That’s actually where the name came from
TD: Oh yeah?
B: We really kind of came together in a simple almost pre-ordained kind of way, so we thought it was kind of Karma, it just sort of gelled, and because we’re electronic and use a lot of loops and coda is a musical term which means to return to the start of a section, and loops are codas over and over again, so Karmacoda, and it also sounded kind of cool. We started playing live and people starting getting into it, so we just kind of took off. It was fun. It was never planned, that was the thing, it was never, “Oh we’re going to start a band.”
Heather: It was like an after-school project…
B: An art project.
Heather: Except we weren’t in school (laughs)
Rafael: It was kind of like a hodge-podge of, “Hey let’s throw these sounds together and see what we come up with.”
Heather: And then try and play it live and see if we can do that and it just kept moving forward and moving forward and we wrote more songs and we’re still here and we’re still inspired to write more and do more.
B: It was a happy accident basically.
Rafael: Fun
B: Fun, yeah.
TD: For your show next week (referring to Karmacoda’s January 25th performance), what’s the setup, who’s going to be on the stage with you?
Karmacoda Live: Heather Pierce and DJ Rafael Acevedo.
B: For our lineup, Rafael is our DJ and he does kind of everything, he’s playing keys, he’s scratching, he’s playing turntables, he’s doing beats and kind of percussion, he’s going crazy. He’s kind of our drummer, percussionist, keyboard player and I’m playing guitar and piano and singing and our bass player Eric is playing bass and Heather focuses on vocals. We also have a dedicated VJ and he’s doing custom visuals so that every song has its own presentation too. We really try to do it up in terms of live music, live musicians and really killer visuals.
Heather: Just trying to give an escapist experience, so you can be somewhere else for a while, in true musical fashion.
TD: Yeah, yeah sounds good. And you were also saying when we were playing Turn that you just shot the video for it?
Heather: Yes, that was this morning at 7 am.
TD: Oh that was this morning!?
B: And we’ve got an early call tomorrow because we’re doing…
Heather: The same thing.
B: We’ll be at Pier 14 (in San Francisco) tomorrow.
Heather: Please bring coffee (laughs)
B: We’ve been lucky and hooked up with the independent film scene here in San Francisco because our music has been really popular with films and TV. We’ve found this experimental filmmaker and he came up with this really cool concept where it’s a combination of high-def video and then he found these funky German cameras that on one 35mm frame will shoot 8 tiny mini frames that are timed, so it’s kind of like time lapse photography. He’s shooting thousands and thousands of pictures with these cameras and he’s scanning them into the computer and animating them so it’s this kind of surreal flip-book effect along with Heather running around singing in the city. It’s kind of a love letter to San Francisco, this video, because we really want to focus in on San Francisco, because we’re from San Francisco and we love the city and want to highlight features and create something cool and innovative. We’ll put that on YouTube and MySpace and have this cool, new kind of video thing for people to pick up on.
Karmacoda: Hanging out with the band.
TD: Who’s the filmmaker?
B: Sinisa Kukic. He’s a San Francisco based-filmmaker from the former Yugoslavia, he moved here when he was about 11.
TD: What would you like me to play next? Would you like me to keep up on the new release? Do you want to go back a little bit?
B: What about Skylines?
Heather: Yeah
TD: Is that on the new one?
Heather: Yeah, track 2.
B: Upbeat, feel good…
Heather: A little more rocked out.
TD: All right, because I’m upbeat.
Heather: You seem like an upbeat kind of guy. (laughter)
TD: Drinks with Tony, Pirate Cat radio, this is Karmacoda.
Music: Skylines from Illuminate
TD: That was Karmacoda, Drinks with Tony you’re listening to Pirate Cat Radio. We’ve heard Heathers vocals, but we haven’t heard Brett’s vocals yet on a track.
Heather: He’s actually on Spectre.
B: My vocals are more subtle on that track.
Heather: It was kind of subtle yeah, he was doing more of a low, rhythm talking thing on that.
B: I’m on Wonder, that’s one of my featured tracks.
TD: For the video, where will that be available? On MySpace?
B: We’ll have it there and on Karmacoda.com
Rafael: We’ll have it on YouTube.
B: We’ll do some gorilla viral stuff too, but yeah YouTube.
TD: When we were talking while the music was going, the way the filmmaker…
B/Heather: Sinisa
TD: Sinisa, um, it sounds amazing what he’s doing.
Rafael: Yeah, I was just looking at this multi-camera contraption he had and I said, “What it that!?” I’ve studied some video in college and whatnot and the idea behind it is cool. I’m visualizing this really slow animation that he’s going to also put in with HD video. He seems to have a great vision and the ability to take our vision and combine it with the tools he has.
B: He found these obscure German cameras with 8 lenses, they’re made out of plastic and when you push the button it takes a sequence of 8 shots on one 35mm frame. He’s going to be this film ninja, shooting hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film and he’s going to scan them and chop them up and animate them as a sort of flip book if you can imagine. We were shooting today and we were on a ferry coming from Sausalito to San Francisco and he’s shooting this bizarre 8 frame still animation thing, coming into the city. As I said, we want this video to be a kind of love letter to San Francisco, because we’re a San Francisco band and we love the city and its vibe and want to capture that along with the song. It’s a video for Turn and it will be out soon, hopefully.
TD: And the scanning, he has to scan every single frame and then he’s going to put it together via animation.
B: In a computer.
TD: Yeah, but this is like photos, I can’t wait to see it.
Heather: Me too.
Rafael: It’s really going to be amazing.
Karmacoda video: Stills from the new video for the first single Turn from the new album Illuminate.
B: We’ve seen some preliminary things and it’s new and fresh and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to have your standard band standing around with instruments playing trying to look cool; it’s been done what 10 million times?
TD: Heather do you ever stage dive at your shows?
Heather: See I have my arm in a cast right now? That’s what happened. I’m very athletic (laughter) [Ed. note: Heather’s arm is fine and no she doesn’t stage dive - ever.]
TD: Downtempo stage diving, I want to see that (laughs).
B: We’re downtempo, but you know, we also rock. I think people are surprised when they see us because they’re like, “Wow you guys kick some ass.” It’s not just a bunch of sullen people shoe gazing.
TD: Oh right, right, them shoe gazers.
B: We crank it up a bit.
Karmacoda Live: Heather Pierce from a recent performance.
TD: When you’ve got a shoe gazing band coming in you know right away, they’re just…
B: <mumble, mumble, great to be here, mumble, mumble> (laughter)
TD: Yeah, exactly. That’s when I just turn everything down and pretend we’re talking but there’s music going on over the radio. I didn’t do that to you guys.
Heather: Thank you.
B: That we know of…
Rafael: Yeah (laughter)
Heather: Yeah we can embarrass ourselves enough easily (laughter).
TD: Heather, Brett, Rafael thanks so much for coming in.
Karmacoda: Photo from the new album Illuminate.
Heather: Thank you
B: Thanks Tony
Rafael: Thanks
TD: Any last things you want to mention, if I forgot something?
Heather: I believe the last track you’re going to play is Wonder which will feature Brett on vocals, again that’s off our new album Illuminate and it’s coming out March 5th and we’re really excited.
Rafael: Buy it, buy it, buy it.
Heather: Please buy it, please support us. Support this show, Drinks with Tony is the best show on radio today.
B: Yes, thank you Tony.
TD: I’m just going to take that in for a second.
Heather: It’s true.
TD: Ahhhhhhh. Love you guys.
B: Good times.
TD: Karmacoda on Pirate Cat Radio, thanks again for coming in I appreciate it. You’re listening to Pirate Cat Radio and Drinks with Tony.
Rafael: Thanks!
B/Heather: Thanks!
Music: Wonder from Illuminate
Please visit www.karmacoda.com and www.myspace.com/karmacoda for more info.
(c)2007 Karmacoda and Tony DuShane