“I’m addicted to jamming,” Marc Brownstein proclaims, as he discusses the major changes afoot for one of his projects. Now this assertion certainly comes as no surprise to fans of the Disco Biscuits, who have seen it realized onstage over the past 18 years. However, the bassist’s comment marks a new direction for Conspirator, the quartet he founded with Biscuit keyboard player Aron Magner back in 2004 and now features guitarist Chris Michetti, as well as its newest member, drummer Greg “Torch” Sgrulloni.
In the following conversation Brownstein reflects on Conspirator’s “epiphany that we wanted to be a band of instrumentalists augmented by computers rather than a band of computer tracks augmented by instruments.” He also discusses the Disco Biscuits, who will host City Bisco this weekend at the Mann Center in Philadelphia. Conspirator’s extensive fall tour opens on October 3 at Mexicali Live in Teaneck, NJ.
You have a new drummer in Conspirator. Let’s start there and we can move on to discuss the ongoing development of your sound.
We have a new drummer, his name is Greg [Sgrulloni], aka Torch, which is a name his friends gave him when he was a young’un. That was his superhero name. His friends named him. They all had superhero names. Scorpion, Torch whatever. Torch stuck for some reason and that’s who he is. He’s a drummer we discovered on the Internet. It’s a changed world, where one can just discover new partners by surfing the Internet, seeing something you like and reaching out to them on Facebook.
For specifics, this particular drummer was gifted to us by Adam Deitch, who is one of the special special rare cases of a musician that transcends genre and is so deeply proficient at what he does, the styles that he plays and most importantly, and the feel he has, that he plays with legends across the board. When you see somebody like that posting about other drummers, you almost don’t have to watch the video.
So Deitch posted something about Torch?
Something along the lines of, “Check out this ridiculous drummer, Torch” on his page for his fans to see.
And you happened to be on there?
Magner caught it, or Chris, somebody caught it and Chris reached out to me, saying. “You have to check out this video of this guy I saw on Deitch’s page.” I watched the video. Simultaneously, Magner was calling him and I was emailing him. At the same time, we both reached out to him. He was on one medium trying to get in touch with this kid and I was on another trying to get in touch with him. He hit me back on Facebook and was like, “Cool.” My pitch to him was we often need backup drummers in Conspirator, maybe you should come check us out.
We didn’t know if he knew who we were or had an idea about the band or anything. It turns out not only did he know who we were, he was somewhat prepared for the phone call because one of his close friends and someone who plays in a band with him is a very, very big Biscuits fan and has basically brought him the song “Commercial Amen,” and said, “Hey listen, you’re going to have to learn this song and you’re going to have to get it right because at some point you’re going to get called to be the drummer of the band Conspirator and every one of their drummers fucks this up. Let’s just learn it now, so when you get there these extra bars of music that pop up throughout the course of the song aren’t a surprise to you and you’ll just nail it and get the job.” That was Josh or “Joshtradamus” as I’m calling him because he predicted we’d ultimately call his friend Torch for the job.
Now the reason we were even doing that, we had used 9-10 different drummers, Darren from The New Deal, Mike from Lotus, Allen from the Biscuits, Adam Deitch… In the last two years we really used all of the drummers available out there but nobody was really available to join a new band. Since Conspirator started pretty much from scratch in most places around the country, we aren’t really in the position to lure someone away from one of the huge bands they’re in. When KJ Sawka became available after Pendulum stopped playing we jumped on the opportunity to add him into the fold.
We had someone who was completely available and it drastically changed the sound of Conspirator to have KJ in the band. He is a tried and true EDM star. Which was cool for us because at that moment in time the way we were feeling as artists was we wanted to something so different from the Biscuits that it would not be compared to the Biscuits. That was the thought at that moment: “This EDM thing is happening. Nobody is doing it with a live band, let’s do it for real with a live band. Let’s write some EDM music and for real go out and play EDM shows not jamband shows, legit EDM shows.” That’s what we did for a year.
The reason we did it mostly was because we were playing to the strengths of the drummer at that moment. His strength was in technology, Ableton, integration of electronics with a live show which is something that he mastered as a solo artist and also brought into a live band platform with Pendulum. He had learned so much with how to use Ableton and computers to integrate live instruments while he had the four year stint with Pendulum.
He came in and taught us all this stuff. While it was happening the band was getting progressively further away from our roots. That was intentional on our part. It was an artistic choice, understanding that if we were going to that, we would be playing to a different fan base. We were going to have to go out and play festivals and build up new fans. We were totally okay with that. We saw it as a great opportunity.
I want to emphasize that everything we do is artistic, none of it is ever about money. I feel inclined to say that because when I see other artists doing stuff like that, I’ll rush to judgment that people are chasing money or something. I want to be clear that when we do stuff… like with The Disco Biscuits, we weren’t like, “Hey, let’s take the two least popular kinds of music and mash them together, because we want to become rich.” We did it because of an artistic inspiration and we had enough dedication that we stuck with it long enough that our festival we created became in line with what was popular in the mainstream and has become very successful because of that.
I just feel that with Conspirator what we did over the last year was because we were being inspired by the stuff we were seeing happening around us at Ultra Music Festival, Camp Bisco, Counter Point. There were also these new kinds of music that didn’t exist 20 years ago and we wanted to incorporate them into the live band aspect, which is nothing new. That’s what we’ve always done throughout our years, as electronic music has progressed, we took those styles and incorporated them back into the live sound.
With Conspirator we took it a little bit far by cutting out a lot of the improvisation. Maybe it was because at first we weren’t really that good at improvising. It was a new band, we needed to develop new chemistry playing together before you could just drop everything, jump off a cliff and hope that’s it going to be the best jam that got played all week, or all month, by any band, or all year. Do you want to win the Jammy for Best Jam of the Year? You’re going to have to practice for a little bit. It doesn’t just happen. You don’t just get the Jammy for Best Jam of the Year automatically. We’ve played together for a while now.
Let’s step back for a minute. For a while now you’ve been a four-piece with the three of you, rotating drummers in and out. But Conspitator existed for a few years before Michetti came into the band. How did you initially view Conspirator and how did it change when Chris joined?
Initially when we were Conspirator we wrote an album and had some songs. We had eight songs: “Orc Theme,” “Commercial Amen,” “Liquid Handcuffs…” most of which were loops we were playing over, some of which were melodically and harmonically based. We would have the show padded with electronic loops that we would loop out and just jam over for 10-15 minutes. We would always bring different musicians in whether it was Joe Russo, Kris Myers on drums, or Tommy Hamilton or Jake Cinninger on guitar, that’s what the “conspiracy” was.
We were all co-conspirators, we were all working together. It was about collaboration. The project was about collaboration with different styles of music and different types of musicians. Like Cheme [Gastelum] on flute, we would just bring people up and have people jam with us and see what they sounded like. It was like a Miles Davis experiment. Miles Davis is gone now, but he got as far as jamming over R&B styles with his album, Amandla. This is a pretty big digression, but it goes to prove a point. Over the course of the years, every ten years or so, Miles Davis would completely turn the musical scene on its side and change how jazz was perceived, played and interpreted for everyone across the board. For us, it was playing off of that. Here we were doing this for the past ten years, now how can we jam differently than how we’ve been jamming for the last ten years.
The first bunch of years for Conspirator was loop stuff on the computer and rip on top of it. When Michetti joined the band we started writing many more songs, it became more track-oriented. EDM had become a force in the industry, there were new methods for writing songs, new methods of presentation for electronic music songs. We got inspired by that: the builds, the drops, the heady bass music and all of that stuff and we started writing that kind of song for a couple of years.
We explored it, very successfully out on its own. We went out and rebranded with a new drummer, into a new scene and Conspirator started to build up a really nice fan base.
I also want to say that Biscuits fan have been incredibly supportive on my journey with Conspirator. I understand that it seems threatening to the thing they’ve grown to love and adore. I’ve tried many times on social media to impart the feeling that Conspirator is not ever meant to threaten the Biscuits. Instead it’s giving Aron and I a creative outlet and downtime when we wouldn’t be doing the Biscuits anyway. That’s what is going on. I’ve answered that question a million times but I feel as many times as I say it, there are always people who haven’t heard me say it. So I say it again: Conspirator isn’t a replacement for the Biscuits. The Biscuits and Conspirator are coexisting because the time exists. The time for us to be artists and go out and tour exists for us. As we all know now, not everyone in the Disco Biscuits wants to tour and just play music and have that be the only thing their life is about.
As we’ve been touring, obviously not everyone comes out. The places where the Biscuits are the biggest, is probably where Conspirator is the smallest, like Philadelphia and New York, where most the people are hardcore about the Biscuits and are not as eager or open to change or support something that doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of music they want to see. I understand all of that. I’m just so grateful for the amount of support we’ve received. It’s been good. We went out and had a five show run in Morgantown, Harrisburg, Virginia Beach, Charlottesville and then Columbus, OH for a festival. They were by the far the biggest shows we’ve done in those markets. By far. Like double the crowd, in three of the markets. That’s really really exciting. For me it’s exciting to have that support. Right now we’re having a “moment.”
You talk about nurturing a fan base but now you’re moving forward with a significant creative change. Have you been anxious at all about the fact that people who have seen Conspirator over the past two years might have certain expectations regarding your sound yet what you’re trying to do now is a bit different?
Yeah, I’ve thought about that, but in the end for me I just have to be true to myself. You know? I believe that what we do is better significantly when we’re improvising. When I get off stage I feel excited, charged, high. I feel like if I were a sponge, I was fully saturated. When I get off, it’s a natural high and I wasn’t feeling that as much when we weren’t improvising. And I just think this is a really open-minded fan base. I believe that those are the same kids who are seeing Big G, but also seeing Papadosio and Lotus.
We still have the songs we wrote over this last year, the songs are great. It’s just that instead of playing 15 bangers in a row, there will be three of them spread out over the course of an hour and ten minutes. When you get to the precomposed build and drop, there is so much more meaning and feeling when you’re coming out of an exploratory journey than when you just bounce them one up against each other.
Over the last two years, a lot of the sections that were improvisational had bass sounds that were made on the computer. It wasn’t freeing me up to able to do what I do. I have a very specific skill set that is my contribution to the jam. It’s very specific what I do. It’s not random. The improvisation isn’t random. There are things you can do to make jams soar, things you can do to make them funk, things that you can do to make them deep, things you can do to make them euphoric, things you can do to make them dark. And that’s what I know better than anything in the world. What I know better than anything is how to make slight, subtle changes in the bassline that are going to communicate something to another player to go in a different direction or bring in a specific vibe or mode.
I was shackled in Conspirator in terms of that specific ability over the last couple of years. It wasn’t as if it was anyone’s fault. We didn’t have a difference in vision. We had gone and made these tracks and then we were playing them live we discovered this problem with it, which was it was really hard to improvise over because this stuff that was already in it.
I’m not the producer. I’m not the guy who has the tracks who can take the stems and I’ll take the all the basses out and rebounce it and remix. I’m not that guy. I’m basically asking one of the other members of my band to do an enormous amount of work, a disgusting amount of work, to make my life more rewarding musically.
You’ve mentioned your growing dissatisfaction. I’m curious about Aron and Chris. What was their take on all of this and the commitment to move forward with a transition?
These are my best friends. They are so unbelievably supportive. When you go to Chris or Aron and are like, “I’m having an issue, I don’t like this.” It’s hard because nobody wants to be told that someone in their band doesn’t like something they’ve done. But it wasn’t about not liking the music they made or the music we’ve made or the tracks we’ve made, it’s just that this one little aspect is handcuffing me. It’s funny, we have an album called The Key and we have an album called Unlocked and an album called Unleashed. Until this week I haven’t felt like we had the “key” and that it wasn’t “unlocked” or “unleashed.” I just feel like it was very hard to change from what he had turned ourselves into, into what we wanted to be.
I don’t want to characterize like it was what I wanted it to be individually. It was an ongoing discussion for a long time about how to incorporate what we know how to do best into this, but still stay true to what we were trying to do. I want Conspirator to be everyone’s band. I don’t want Biscuit fans to feel like it’s not their band. I don’t want it to be that way. I want everybody who’s able to see my band to go see Conspirator whether they are into the electronic jams or not or the electronic songs or not and walk away and say, “Holy shit, that was incredible.”
We do have some of the best instrumentalists out there, I honestly believe that. I don’t look at myself as one of the best instrumentalists, I know that I’m not. I know that there is a different level out there on bass, a flashier level. Roger Waters isn’t there either. He’s brilliant. He’s not Victor Wooten or Oteil. There is a different level. What I do is what I do. I think I practice hard and do it well.
The other guys in the band are some of the top instrumentalists at their position. Chris is technically absolutely ridiculous and an incredible songwriter. Really, really talented. Aron is Aron. And Torch is a four-year Berklee graduate who comes from a jazz and classical background who then moved into electronic dance music a few years ago. Coming from this jazz background…something has happened that I almost can’t put into words. Something has happened over the last week that’s given me a renewed sense of purpose.
Let’s stick right there. In terms of the timeframe, we’re jumping around a little bit but in terms of Torch joining Conspirator, how many times did he play with you guys before it was obvious that he was the guy? How did that all come together?
I want to say we started looking for someone when KJ’s Destroid project started to blow up. He’s got this huge thing with Excision. Their first show had 3,000 people at it. It’s this huge thing and we’re not. So when there became weekend conflicts between the two bands, KJ obviously had to go with the huge paying gigs. For us, that was a little disappointing. For us, we needed to find a backup drummer because it was going to start happening. We love KJ. He still works on the music with us. He’s still producing with us and mixing and mastering and doing all that stuff for us. He’s still our brother and part of the team.
He’s disappointed because he is a big part of Conspirator and it is a family thing for us, being together every day for 18 months. But if he’s not completely available that’s a little bit of an issue for us. We asked Torch to come down and he played like three songs for us in Philly a couple of months ago. The story goes like this, we hadn’t really told Torch anything except “you wanna come down and play music with us, we are sometimes looking for a backup drummer.”
After about 20-30 minutes I stopped. It was kind of hot in the room. We were in one of the weird rental studios and I didn’t want to be in the studio all day. So after about 30 minutes I was just like, “Ooookay, I’ve heard enough, has everybody heard enough?” and we went to Wawa and got some sandwiches. That was the deal.
After playing for about five minutes with Torch it was like, “Oh my god, what is going on right now?” I could describe musically the difference between some of the different drummers I’ve played with over the years. Sammy wasn’t really even a drummer so much as he could just play any instrument and that’s what he ended up on because we needed a drummer for the band. He’s very jazzy, very swinging with a metal edge. He had an incredible amount of swing and feel. Over the last couple of years I’ve gone from Darren Shearer who’s really housey with it to a huge deep pocket, to KJ who’s very technical but extremely straight not jazzy, more robotic, kind of where Allen comes from. Although Allen is a Berklee guy too and has a very deep swing when he wants to do. But he’s more of a robotic player. They call him the robot. It’s great for electronic style. It’s great to be very straight, right on the beat, right on the cliff, to have that ability. But it feels different than a guy like Greenfield who comes in and is extremely light on the touch, very jazzy, just like pocket playing, gets deep into the pocket, where your bassline just plays itself.
Every drummer you play different basslines for. It’s incredible. You change your drummer and your bassline changes a little bit. The feel changes in the way that my basslines go for every different drummer. For Torch, somewhere in the second show, there was a beat, a moment, when we were playing a house jam, which is tricky to get it right. There are a lot of drummers out there who play electronic music that can’t get a simple four on the four beat right. A ton of them. I see mostly baby bands, young drummers all the time where it’s just, “That guy doesn’t have it, doesn’t have the feel.”
Torch has something really, really special going on. Every day for the last three weeks, I have had to think, “Duh. Deitch was posting about him.” It always comes back to that for me. It’s hard to find somebody who plays electronic music who is this jazzy. Most of the people who are this jazzy don’t like electronic music. It’s hard to find a hardcore musician who’s down with the EDM vibe. For me, I was worried because I know he’s really into EDM and here I am saying to our new EDM drummer: “Welcome to your new EDM band and oh by the way we want to be a jam band. P.S. I hope you can jam.”
We just started by explaining what I was looking for in very simple terms. “When we get into the house jams, I want you to think about it as a Chicago house back in the day, super swinging. Build it slowly, don’t do anything too much. Don’t go too crazy. But, build your energy, add your elements in slowly. Every 16 bars or something, bring in another little element. If you’re on an offbeat hi-hat, bring in to where it’s two offbeat hi-hats. From ‘boom, boom’ to ‘boom tikka boom, boom tikka boom.’ Just add a little element, change the beat to bring the energy up.”
When we made the switch to the new drummer we decided our new drummer doesn’t use electronic drums, it’s all acoustic. We had to listen and be like “Is this going to work without the electronic drums? We are an electronic band, is it going to sound too wonky? Too much like a band? Are we going to sound too much like the Biscuits?” All of these questions start going through your head. The answer was that it sounded awesome.
And while we were making that change from a band that was running off all electronic drums to a band that isn’t running off electronic drums, Magner and Chris took the time to do this enormous upheaval of work that needed to get done in order to free me from the shackles of the composed tracks. It took an enormous amount of work. It was basically, “Okay, we are changing drummers right now, let’s do it right now and make this change we’ve been talking about for 18 months, right now.”
I got so excited about it, Budnick. I was spewing it out on Facebook for like a week and a half a straight: videos, clips and I was gushing. I can’t tell you. I started to take hate for it. Biscuit fans who on the first day were like, “This is the greatest news of all time,” on the fourth day were like, “Shut up.” The flipside is, I’m genuinely excited. It’s truly as if I’ve been locked up and have been unlocked. It’s truly as if I’ve found the key. The great past is that the chemistry has been really, really great. Magner, Chris, everyone has been playing so well. There’s been a sort of groundswell of support for it.
Look I don’t want say anything that people are just going to laugh at me for saying or blasphemous. Last night I got a message from a Conspirator hater, somebody who decidedly and outwardly hates Conspirator. She said, “I’m really excited about the new sound of Conspirator and she said, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this, but I was pretty fucking blown away by the jamming at Catskill, it sounded at points, please don’t tell anyone I said this either, better than the Biscuits.”
Now, I think that’s one of those things, what’s better than something, how can you say one thing is better than another, everything is individual to how someone feels at that particular moment. This is from a hardcore Disco Biscuits fan who’s been following us for years. I think what she meant to say was she was getting the same feeling that she gets from the Disco Biscuits and hasn’t gotten from Conspirator in the past and that was very exciting for me.
Speaking of the Biscuits, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the four of you will be back on stage in a few days for City Bisco. Can you talk about that event?
I’m the king of spewing hyperbole that people will throw back at my face and say this is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said…but, I believe honestly, that right now the Biscuits are playing at the highest level we have in years. With exception to the year 2009 where we were firing on all cylinders the whole time and part of 2007 and 2008 which were great and parts of 2011 which were decent. I don’t mean to take away from the great times we all had. We all had great times. But I’m talking about being the best we could possibly be. I’m talking about a standard that was set high very, very early on in our career that we’ve always strived throughout the years to meet and surpass.
Well, that all having been said, I feel that 2013 is a year that although there weren’t a lot of Biscuits shows will be looked back upon by fans as a one of the great years of shows. When you aggregate them all, put them side by side and look at what was done, I think you’re going to look back and think 2013 was a great year. So that having been said, I’m really, really excited to get back on stage with Allen, Jon and Aron because the band has been in such a great place over the past 12 months, which comes out on stage.
You get into a place where everybody is happy and there is a good balance. There are no question marks. We know what we are doing right now. We know what we want to accomplish. We know how much we are going to play. There are no disagreements. Everybody is on the same page. It might have taken us a few years, but we are all on the same page. We all agree this is what’s best for The Disco Biscuits. If we are going to survive for the long term, if we are going to have longevity, we’re going to have to do this on our terms. Otherwise, it’s all going to go up in flames. We’ve learned the hard way. People will say to us, “You need to go on tour to be great.” I challenge that. I think on tour we wear ourselves down. We harm ourselves physically and emotionally and put ourselves in a place where we can’t perform at the highest level.
Well we are back. The band is killing it. This Camp Bisco was my favorite by far of the last 4-5 years. It was so much fun to be up there and know what my role is. What I’m supposed to be doing, how to do it and hearing the band members respond to it so precisely to just everything that everyone was doing. Everyone was in sync.
I was going to follow up with a question about the impact of steady time together on the road but you anticipated it.
We can go out and play a lot of shows, but then there will be no shows. Maybe we’re a little light right now. Maybe 25 is a little light. Maybe when Jon is done with the project he’s working on. I don’t want to go deep into because it’s his prerogative to his own privacy but he’s working on a really, really cool second career and having a lot success with it.
I can’t speak for everybody, but I know people in the band were bummed out that he was trying something else, that would affect the time he could put into Disco Biscuits. But I’m really happy for him. Jon’s one of my best friends in the world. He’s like my brother more than anything. We’ve been together for more than 20 years, and we’ve been a band for 20 years. We started the Biscuits in 1995 but we started playing together in 1993. For Jon, Sam and I it’s been 20 years since we started. I just want him to be happy. I don’t want to be out on the road with a miserable guitar player who’s pissed at me because I booked a fifty show tour because that’s what I want to be doing.
I love touring. Budnick, I love touring. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t care if it’s 7,000 people on a Saturday at Red Rocks, 20,000 people at Camp Bisco or 275 people on a Wednesday in Morgantown, West Virginia. It’s equally exciting to me. The other night the music got me so jacked up that I was like, “That’s what I’m addicted to. I’m addicted to jams.”
I would almost end it there but before we go I do want to ask you about studio recordings from both the Disco Biscuits and Conspirator. Let’s start with the Biscuits. Do you have anything planned for later this year or 2014?
I had a moment a couple of weeks ago where I thought to myself that it might be a good time to talk to the band about recording something new. While we were doing Otherwise Law Abiding Citizens, we would talk about what the next album will be. Then we went out on Identity Tour and came back and basically stopped touring. Then Jon got really deep into his new project and we got really deep into Conspirator. I thought to myself, “It’s time to say to the Biscuits, ‘Let’s take this two week period and go into a studio and bang out the basic tracking and then all do our overdubs.’” Basic tracking takes five to six days and then we could all do our overdubs. Whatever is left, we’ll do in our off time and make sure it gets done and put out a new album. That’s something personally I’d like to do, but I haven’t spoken to the band about it. I’ve spoken to the Jambands.com world about it.
But purely on speculation, I would like to record another album. I have a ton of unrecorded Disco Biscuit songs as do Jon and Aron. I could think of an album an album right now like Otherwise Law Abiding Citizens. Maybe it has something like “Crystal Ball” on there, but then it has stuff like “The Bridge,” and “Last Day of Everything” or some of the newer stuff Jon has written. Or maybe we go into the studio and we finally put “Hot Air Balloon” on wax. That’s something we’ve always talked about over the years.
I don’t know. What it’s going to come down to is do we want to take a breath from the projects that we’re working on right now? Everyone has been working really, really diligently for the past two to three years to launch some new project into the sphere of the realm of successes. I just think that it’s going to be a case of the stars aligning where everyone has the time and inspiration to say, “You know what, this is the moment in time to keep the Disco Biscuits alive and vibrant.”
Last one; In terms of the forthcoming EP from Conspirator, when people hear it, will they be able to detect the band’s new direction?
Directly before you called me I was on the phone with Chris having this exact conversation. Your final question, is exactly where we are right now with our conversation of what to do. The new song “Up” is an EDM song. It’s the first song we’re releasing from the new EP. It was written before we had the epiphany that we wanted to be a band of instrumentalists augmented by computers rather than a band of computer tracks augmented by instruments. A subtle but major difference at the same time.
When we went in to write we had been writing computer tracks without instruments. Now when we go in to write we’ll write the computer tracks but we’ll be writing the guitar lines and basslines right there and just augmenting that. We’re writing the songs like songs. The foundation of the music is guitar and basses and even when we play it with a computer track, it’s playing two other guitar tracks not synth tracks that we programmed. So for us, we’ve started to write tracks on computers that are incorporating instruments from the first moment. You’re going to hear on those tracks the direction we are going into in for sure. There are no wobble basses, we aren’t making dubstep tracks anymore. If we are making stuff in the dubstep tempo it’s being done with regular basses and regular guitars and regular sounds, which just sounds more organic. The song that got mixed first though, called “Up” is a straight EDM song and it was mixed and mastered by KJ. And I just listened to it right before the interview and my reaction was, “This is not going to be received well with the messaging of our band right now.”
The messaging is, “Hey fans of improvisational music, come hang out and see Conspirator, we’re going to take you on a journey right now. If you felt this band wasn’t for you over the past year and a half, come back into the fold, it’s not the same band anymore.” And it’s not. The music and the show is completely different. I am confident that all the fans of Conspirator that we’ve made over the last two years will be educated on the virtues of improvisation because we are doing it electronically. It is really high energy and awesome and cool. But it is also low energy, explorational and weird at the same time. There is this dichotomy there.
My suggestion was “I don’t want to come at the fan base with this message and our first release be completely the opposite of what our message is.” My feeling is we ought to make three versions of this particular track, a club mix, which we already have, a live mix, which is something that we need to put out if this is going to be the messaging of our band, that we’re more organic and an extended mix that might have a jam in it. That’s the conversation we just had.
Listen, that’s a great question and the answer is in as few words as possible, as we are trying to figure it out. I want the music to represent the direction. Mostly because that’s what I want the music to sound like. By the same token I do want to put out an electronic version. I look at Bassnectar and he opens for EDM acts and jamband acts. He always wanted to bring everyone in the fold. It was never about going after one type of fan or one type of base. It was always about everyone. I take a lot of inspiration from that.
