Over on Tumblr, monsterquill interviewed me for a project, and I figured hey, let’s post it here too. Particularly since yep, still busy! monsterquill is in bold italic; I’m in regular text. Enjoy.<\/p>\n
Why do you do fan music, what do you like about it?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Oh, well, mostly, because it\u2019s fun. I mean, sure, I\u2019m not going to lie; it gets attention, because you have a pre-existing audience to leverage, and all that. But I was coming up with fan music when there wasn\u2019t a receptive audience for that kind of thing, I just wasn\u2019t recording it – just because it\u2019s a way to do fandom.<\/p>\n
How did you get into it?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Same way as people get into fan fiction or fan art or anything else fannish (to use an older term) – THIS IS AWESOME I\u2019M GONNA DO A THING! And then I did a thing. I also drew some fairly terrible (and some halfway decent) comic art and wrote fanfic. Music is just another aspect of that.<\/p>\n
How are you involved in fan music community, & how would you describe it?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Well, I started nwcMUSIC, a geekmusic festival held as part of Norwescon, and ran that for six years – this immediate past year was the first one they ran after I handed it off, and I think they learned some things, and will continue to improve next year.<\/p>\n
Describe it? Jeez, that\u2019s a bit of a question. There are so many different such communities – the chiptunes crowd and the nerdcore crowd definitely overlap, and they talk to each other a lot across geographic regions. There\u2019s an older folk tradition called \u201cfilk music\u201d which was the first really organised geek or (\u201dfannish,\u201d in the old language) music community, and they started releasing audiocassettes in the 1980s. (Look up Off Centaur Publications and go from there if you want to dig into that part of the history.)<\/p>\n
There are a fair number of differences in specifics, but it\u2019s funny how the patterns repeat. Like, nerdcore people get together in the hiphop tradition and do improvised\/freestyle rapping over beats, which tend to come from chiptunes, and it\u2019s at homes and sometimes at events and everybody\u2019s just getting together to do stuff, right? These are called cyphers. But filk started doing almost exactly the same thing a few decades before, but folk-music-y, and called them \u201chousefilks.\u201d Chiptunes people have a name for their improv\/workshop\/fun playing get togethers too, but I don\u2019t remember what they\u2019re called at the moment.<\/p>\n
How do consuming a fannish thing and producing your own work relate for you?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Well… in both cases, I guess, I\u2019m playing to the same audience, which is to say, me<\/em>. And also people who like the same things as me, at least, within a certain range.<\/p>\n What genres of music do you tend toward, & what subjects, & do those affect each other, & do you use different ones?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n There is very little geek metal out there, and while I\u2019m playing acoustic instruments most of the time, what I\u2019m really writing a lot of the time is metal. Early metal, rather than more modern metal, but still – that\u2019s why the most common comparison by far that I hear is to Led Zeppelin. (Occasionally I\u2019m thrown in as folkpunk, and get comparisons to The Pogues. But most of the time, it\u2019s Led Zeppelin.)<\/p>\n My personal background is a mash of Newfoundland folk, metal, and electronica. In released material, I mostly hang out in the folk\/metal arena, but I\u2019ll drop a rock track once in a while. Pretty much always, I just go where the song says I need to go.<\/p>\n Like, when I did my first released fannish track – which was really an exercise in how to use a digital audio workstation – it was straight-up rock and roll, because the song required it. There\u2019s a cult classic film called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and it\u2019s an odd, odd film, and I really like it. Part of the shtick is that Buckaroo Banzai is a brain surgeon, physicist, and! leader of a rock band called The Hong Kong Cavaliers, and successful at all three at the same time. (And also, he\u2019s a pulp adventurer, but I digress.)<\/p>\n Given all that, it bugged me that they never got to do a whole song in the film. They start a couple, but plot happens, and they\u2019re interrupted. Soooooo… a bunch of new lyrics, some additional instruments, and a zillion edits later, I\u2019d scraped off every note out of the film and finished that song<\/eM>.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s called The Diesel-Driven Eight Dimensional Jet Car Blues, and it\u2019s on my fan-music page, http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/free to this day. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n What’s your songwriting process like? What inspires you to do a song?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n The problem with a day job is that you have a day job. The advantage<\/em> of a day job – at least, one that doesn\u2019t eat your life, and I note that I didn\u2019t do any music while I was a software developer in the industry – is that you can really pick and choose.<\/p>\n But even without that option – everybody writes for the same reasons, be it writing fiction or drawing artwork or making music. It\u2019s all the same answer. I guess for musicians, it\u2019s \u201cI want to say a thing about a thing, but<\/em> with a good beat.\u201d<\/p>\n I heard a good analogy the other day – artwork is how we decorate our space<\/em>, but music<\/em> is how we decorate our time<\/em>. I really like that. I also think – while not at all asserting there\u2019s no overlap, because of course<\/em> there is – that art is how we write down what we see, writing is how we write down what we think, and music is how we write down what we feel<\/em>. Music is transcription of emotions, and lyrics add thoughts to give specific context.<\/p>\n Or that\u2019s how I look at it, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over on Tumblr, monsterquill interviewed me for a project, and I figured hey, let’s post it here too. Particularly since yep, still busy! monsterquill is in bold italic; I’m in regular text. Enjoy. Why do you do fan music, what do you like about it? Oh, well, mostly, because it\u2019s fun. 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