SM: What was your experience like touring with Les Claypool last year?
TC: I’ve known Les for quite a few years now through a friend of mine who listens to his band. We basically played around 20 shows with him over three different tours. They were great. They were amazing musicians. We’re friends with all the band members. It was a fun tour. I would sit in with him during like the drum freak out thing that they have. Yeah we love Les. He’s amazing. And his audience, they’d be looking at us like wondering where the bass player was and it’s in our computer (laughs).
SM: Do you have any other collaborations lined up or any people you want to work with?
TC: We’ve always wanted to make some tracks with Bassnectar and Eskimo. There are tons of people. We love collaborations. We think that’s a real good way to just be influenced by someone else. We have tons of influences. We’ll see who ends up actually working with us. We have a lot of people in mind for sure.
SM: You guys are pretty big in the festival scene. How have those experiences shaped the Beats Antique’s live performances?
TC: I think it’s helped us sort of bring a bigger show. When you play in a club for 500 people that’s one thing. When you play at a festival with 8,000 people at Austin City Limits that’s a whole other thing. It’s just a different ballgame. You have to project all the way out to the back of the audience, and that can be pretty far. So we just do things bigger at festivals. That sort of translates into us writing bigger, heavier songs so it can reach more of the masses.
SM: Do you have a favorite festival memory?
TC: Gosh. There’s so many of them. I would say Austin City Limits and playing in front of 8,000 people. It was an amazing experience. Also, Camp Bisco playing at noon on a Friday afternoon, and starting out with 150, maybe 200, people and by the end having around 5,000 people. That was pretty memorable because it just kept going. And right when we stopped playing, this huge thunderstorm hit and rained everyone out.
SM: How did you guys get interested in world music?
TC: Well I mean it’s just a part of music in general. Zoe’s dance was involved, and she has a lot of world influences obviously in her dance. I’ve been interested in world music ever since I was kid. I love African music. I love Eastern European. I love gypsy music in general and then South American music, Cuban music. It’s kind of like what you do. I mean once you learn how to play rock and stuff you end up branching off and checking out other worlds’ music. And that makes you travel places and you go look and see how they play things there. Western music can only go so far, and so there are other influences involved. Once you start combining influences you start being influenced by other things. I’ve just keep being influenced by a lot of different things in my life and so are David and Zoe and we just incorporate whatever we sort of feel like. We don’t have any rules to our band so we just kind of go with it. It always just ends up with just something acoustic, something electric, something old, something new you know. A lot of opposites are in play in our group.
SM: David grew up in Burlington, VT in the 80s just as the Phish scene was coming of age. Has he ever mentioned if that had any influence on his music, and has that had any affect on the Beats Antique?
TC: Yeah totally. He definitely was able to check them out. He was in a band that was heavily influenced by Phish as a teenager. My sister was a huge Phish fan, and I was heavily influenced by them as well in my later teenage years. He talks about it all the time how he just remembers they were local heroes.
SM: What would you tell people who’ve never seen the Beats Antique what to expect out of a live performance?
TC: Obviously there’s the dance element that’s really captivating. And then I play live drums. We all play live drums actually. And then David also plays viola and electric Turkish banjo, and basically it’s like big electronic tracks with improvisational things. Basically it’s improvisational versions of our songs that are on our album. You change songs for the live show so that they’re different. We have someone sit it or like bring extra dancers. When we did our show at the Fillmore at the beginning of this tour we had a string section, a horn section, an accordion, a percussionist, extra dancers. So we kind of have this huge show. It just depends on what comes out. Depends on what shows up. Generally it’s just the three of us rocking on. But sometimes we have other elements involved as well.
SM: Besides the festivals you are playing this year, what else can people expect in the future from the Beats Antique?
TC: Well we’re working on a fall tour. We’re also working on an EP. We’re doing two EPs this year and then a full-length album at the beginning of the next year. We have a lot of new material that we’ve been writing, and we’ve performed some new material that people have never heard before. Probably throughout the festival season we’ll be deciding. We’ve been playing a lot of new songs on this spring tour. So probably around the end of the festival season around the fall we’ll have a new EP out, if not two. We’re working on a collaboration now with someone who’s a significant producer that we cannot speak of right now. But it’s pretty awesome.
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