Boogie Reverie

Jan 24, 2009

Topic: Featured | Tags: , ,



Why Boogie? Does your family call you Boogie too?
They call me Mike still, because its my birth name. Boogie came from my guitar style. It started off very Delta Blues and Boogie Woogie, psychedelic too, which is where the Reverie comes in. There’s the far out side of my music that’s bizarre and ambient. Then there’s the poppy side of things. The pop side is very perverted and more subversive than your typical themes. Join Us on MySpace is not your normal pop song, but it is catchy.

So if your influences aren’t local, who are they?
I’ve been influenced heavily by Bill Hicks, who has awesome concepts and encourages people to think for themselves. There’s Wendy and Carl who influence my ambient stuff. A band out of Germany in the late sixties and early seventies called Can. Faust from that same place and time period. The Fall is a huge influence. I haven’t heard people compare my work with many others, although I got a Beck comparison once.

You’re a one man show, do you enjoy being the center of attention?
In my previous bands, I was having trouble because the other band mates didn’t want to write their own parts. They knew I could do it because I had done solo stuff. And before that I was in Zagny & Sons in 2003. Those guys are great musicians, but in terms of dedication, it was getting increasingly difficult for me to do all that. I would write things over and over, draw charts, it actually drove me insane. I decided to break up that band and devote all my time to going solo. At the time I was also building a studio here in Carrboro.

Does the studio still exist?
Oh yeah.

What’s it called?
The Blue Room. It’s a one man studio, behind my parents house, in this garage type thing that we used to rent out to a tenant. The reason I’ve been working by myself for so long is because I like the way it sounds. People ask me all the time where they can find my music and as of right now, I haven’t played live with Boogie Reverie.

Are you going to play live sometime soon?
At the CD Release party. I have nine hours of music thats really good and I think people would really love. I would, if I could, play live with a group of musicians who would be dedicated to doing just that. I’ve started something with this drummer, a really good drummer named TJ. We don’t have a name yet. I was thinking when I release all this stuff, wherever I play, I would have other bands come in. There is a great local band named Ronga.

What instrument did you start on?
Guitar, I was eleven.

Tell me about the equipment you use now.
I usually put a drum set down first, I have a drum machine and then put effects down over that. A bass part, a guitar part, keyboard ambience over, and some vocals. Your typical rock song, I guess. But I really like playing around with my Rolland 8 Track Hard Disc Recorder.

What’s your general mood going into recording?
I try to be as blank as I possibly can be. I try to keep my energy in the studio very mellow. It’s intense when I walk in there, my conscious shifts. Sometimes i black out and then I’ve created something I cannot even wrap my head around.

Have you ever thought about joining a label?
There was a time where I was talking to as many artists as I could about it. I would like to go that route someday but first I would like to prove to myself, and to other people, that I can do a lot of the stuff without a label. I think the music business as it stands today, is the mafia in many ways. You can’t do anything on your own, they want to know everything that’s happening.
I would definitely love to have a distribution deal with a label that’s interested in not cutting corners. And I would enjoy having competitive artwork. This triple disc I just finished called Boogie Street Radio is three hours long and really bizarre stuff. I’m having trouble figuring out how to market that because the whole thing about defining my art is difficult. The first disc of the record is the most perverted pop and mainstream sounding stuff that then crosses over to the weird. About half way through the first hour, the songs are catchy then it turns fringe culture material – uncomfortable to listen to. The third disc is instrumental and interpretive and it’ll be hard to market when those themes are very spiritual.

You placed yourself in the “Rockabilly” category on Facebook, although you’re clearly not, why?
I did some Elvis covers for fun to start off with, Hound Dog, and I had the whole Boogie thing. One of my favorite bands, The Fall, that I mentioned earlier, is noisy rockabilly. I love that loose, fluid guitar.

How do you feel about living in this Indie rock environment and how do you differentiate yourself?
I don’t know if you noticed in your time here, but almost every time you go to a show, it’s Indie Rock. It’s not that I have anything against that style, it’s just not the early 90’s anymore. All those great bands like DInosaur Junior and The Flaming Lips were great, Pavement, but now it seems the experimental edge of that has dwindled.
I want my music to be more dangerous, more human and expressive, geared toward raising people’s awareness and conscious levels. That’s needed right now – the art should go with the urgency of this time. Its our current climate.

You obviously attend festivals, but have you attended any rallies or political stunts to gather inspiration?
I have gone to a few political things, but I am non-partisan so I don’t support Obama, I don’t like politicians or politics very much, but I am interested in attending things like that just for the experience and to get myself on a certain wavelength. Sometimes I feel very distant from that attitude of activism, so it’s good to be eye to eye with that. Makes it easier for me to critique.

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