Music for animals

Jan. 11 2007 Interview with Music For Animals from San Francisco!

Band members Jay: vox, guitar, synth, engineer. Eli: bass, vox. Nick: guitar, vox. Ryan: drums, vox

Contessa- So what is sex rock? I’ve heard you guys refer to yourselves as such.

Jay- It’s a self coined term. It means music that kind of makes you angulated your hips. There’s been that happening on stage and sometimes with the fans too, a lot of angulations hips.
Eli- It means we’re not shoe gazer music.
Ryan-It means our music gets you laid, or me laid because I’m the only single one in the group!
Contessa- What kind of tours are you planning, are you mostly playing in SF Bay Area?
Jay-We are going to tour down in San Diego this spring and as far as Settle. To just ya know spread the love.
Could you describe your artistic process as a band?
Ryan- I have pushed these guys into a jam band situation, we start writing together, and making it an additive process, and sort of like sugar we’ve refine it. Lots of refinement, lots of fighting.
Contessa-Who’s the control freak… you can tell me?
Jay laughs, not me! I’m a little ray of sunshine.
-fingers are being pointed-
Jay-One of the greatest things about writing in this band is that it is so collective. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a project where it really is everyone giving their 25%. In one way you get to put a lot in and the accountability is distributed equally.
Usually Nick or Eli will have a riff that’s kind of sticking with us and Ryan will come in with a good beat and I’ll come in with a melody and we start writing counter melodies and changes and myself, Nick and Eli sit down and write the lyrics, it’s a good technique that we got working.
Nick- We’ve learned to like things we come up with just on the spot. When you have a recording you can pull out the best elements and try and relive that. We’re constantly trying to finish songs we have recorded that feel good to us.
The album that’s about to come out is about us finding a happy medium between jamming and allowing creativity without control.
Contessa-What type of atmosphere do you try and create at your shows? What needs to happen at a show to make you smile?
Ryan-Discovering yourself with alcohol.
Jay-We’ve found out that it’s good to mess with lighting or throw a bucket of balloons on people.
Eli-This one time we tried to fire up a leaf blower on stage and throw feathers on everyone but that didn’t work out so well! (laughs)
Jay-The feathers got five inches off the ground but we tried it! We didn’t want to get up there and just push play. We want to blow their minds, maybe light things on fire.
Ryan-Cerebral destruction.
Contessa- can you explain that?
Ryan-Yes, destroy your mind, yeah…
Jay-Eli has been really key with setting up shows, it’s really cool because it’s added a lot.
Eli-Like when we got that cross-dressing lobster and dancer to engage on stage with each other. Or when that S & M chick came on stage and whipped us!?
Jay-Or when this group of communist came out to our show because one of our songs was kind of controversial and about communistic. They wrote their own review that night about the show too!
Contessa-I see that your currently in the process of releasing your first full length album:
How’s it going so far?
Jay- This album is a marriage of our EP and some of our new songs plus songs we created at our flat in Sacramento, mixed by friends mastered by professionals. Were going to be distributing 15, 000 copies online and at shows.
What should your fans expect as far as the sound of the album?
Jay-A lot of energy, more up-tempo stuff there’s also a little artistic flair, not much…
Nick-The difference now is that we have dabbled with a lot of over dubs and are trying a lot of things out basically just as a learning process.
Jay- We’re releasing songs that we’ve wrote two years ago and you got to reconnect with the song all over again.
Contessa- So are some of these songs revisited if you will?
Eli- Some of them are the exact songs. We were just going to put out another EP but then 3 Ring records wanted a full length album. So this Album is five songs off of our EP Transition , five new songs and one of the new songs is a redone version of Red Cells. The original was very low-tempo but in our shows we had really turned it into a sort of rock anthem.
Contessa-When is the album going to be finished?
Jay- Should be released late spring, about May.
Contessa-Do you have a name for the album yet?
Jay-Self-titled.
Contessa-Here’s a fun questions to rap it up!
In three words or less describe the feelings that you get from being on stage.
Jay- Elation, bliss, fear.
Eli-uhh…umm…happy, fun, smiley!
Nick-nervousness, excitement…release.
Ryan-pumped, ejaculatory, redemption.
Jay- Wait! Is it too late to change the album to Redemption?
Nick- I always wanted an album to be called Sea Worthy!

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