une interview qui explique encore l'utilisation:
Citation:
Vivian Darkbloom are a local rock band with an esoteric name and a few musical tricks up their sleeve. We caught up with vocalist and guitarist Rob Morris, who was kind enough to take time from his surely busy schedule as an MIT grad student/rock star to discuss the band's newfound medium of expression on the guitar, working in the studio with a high-profile producer, and dividing time between studying and being on stage.
Boston Music Spotlight (BMS): Thanks for talking with us, how's it going?
Rob Morris (RM): Good, thanks.
BMS: Your band's name, Vivian Darkboom, actually comes from Lolita, and is Nabokov injecting himself into the novel in a peculiar way [a fun fact: Vivian Darkbloom is in fact an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov]. Did the elusive nature of the character play into choosing that name?
RM: I could probably come up with some post-modern reason as to why it's fitting, how it's a symbol of having that alter ego. Like pretty much any musician around Boston, we have day jobs that are very different from what we do musically, and our personalities on stage are different from how we are off the stage. So we liken that [notion] to a symbol that music is this thing that really drives us, but is also a fractured part of our identities: we live very different lives during the day, and play rock music at night…but in reality I can't remember why or who came up with it, but it seems to fit for those reasons.
BMS: Appropriately, then, there's a certain dark, almost ethereal quality to your music that I can't quite put my finger on, and all in spite of the fact that it's filled with catchy grooves and guitar chugging. Where does your inspiration come from?
RM: It's interesting - my girlfriend was just talking about this. She'll hear me write these songs, and I'll demo them for her with lyrics. I'll model them [musically] off of pop songs, but, and I'm not sure why, lyrically I tend to gravitate towards darker themes, more somber and melancholic. I think it's a cool combination to have a pop sound and structure and infuse that with dark and meaningful, less candy pop sort of lyrics.
I listen to a lot – Aimee Mann, for instance. Her songs are well-crafted, structurally simple, but her lyrics can have a fair amount of gravity. It's more darkly-tinged than you might expect when just hearing the chords without vocals on them. I tend to listen to one song over and over again, and then I'll move on to another one.
BMS: So you're not really an album man?
RM: (laughs) I used to be, but lately I've really just been obsessing over one song, or even just a part of a song, I'll rewind and listen to it again and again. Right now I'm listening to a song called "Kookaburra" by John Vanderslice. If a song catches me at the right time, though, I'll just become obsessed with it.
BMS: How about the other guys?
RM: The other guys obviously bring their own sound to the songs, as well. I don't really know their listening habits all the time, but Cristiano [Castellitto, drums] really loves The Strokes. He definitely comes from a more straight rock appreciation of music. Brian [Skerratt, bass/vocals] listens to a lot of different things – I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what's in his CD player right now.
BMS: I've got to ask you about this: how did you decide to start using a Wii controller to manipulate guitar pitch?
RM: I think there are a lot of reasons as to how I came to do that. I've always been interested in experimental things that become sounds we can add on top of music which are also commercially relevant. I'm exposed to a lot of sound artists at MIT, and I wish some of the technology would make a scene more in mainstream music. [Those guys] are an influence.
In general, just the idea of gesturing with the guitar, I think, is something that seems intuitive. Guitarists do it anyway, even if it isn't doing anything musically meaningful, it's just a thing you do. When you want to emote, you want to move your body, so it seems naturally to harness that [motion] with an instrument. And of course there's guitar hero, which has that thing where if you hold the guitar up it'll give you more points or something.
So, my mom got me this Wii system as a gift, and one day when I got tired of bowling, I saw it lying next to my guitar. And I thought, "What if I velcroed this on there? Then I just kinda figured things out from there.
BMS: So how does it work, exactly?
RM: Okay so, any computer can recognize Wii controller, just like it'll recognize a wireless keyboard or mouse, through Bluetooth. If a device is nearby, [the computer] will know where it is. So any Wii controller, if you put it by the computer and run the Bluetooth connection, you can get it so the computer is receiving information from the controller – all the information it's outputting. Then it's just a matter of getting software going that can take the numbers and data and do something with it. I use a program that basically lets you design your own guitar patches – experimenting with ways to make guitar effects is great. You can really make some crazy effects.
Anyway, once I'd been doing that, I could get the Wii data to talk to the guitar effects that I'd already built. Any effect like echo or wah-wah, if I tilt the Wii controller up, I can have [the program] say "Ok, if the numbers are going up, make the echo go up", and I can make it so that it's translating when I tilt a certain way into changing some part of the effect. It's like a Wii controller automatically moving dials on a box.
BMS: How does the Wii guitar factor into your songwriting? Do you have any plans to use it more in the future, kind of like those cool small noisy sections of your songs?
RM: Ninety-nine percent of our work is in writing a song, so when a song is finished, then we decide whether it would benefit from that stuff or not. Most of the time they're fine on their own, so I have a lot of really bizarre stuff just lying around from my own experiments with it.
I do think we'll be using it more in the future. I've got a lot of ideas that would involve guitar stuff. Some of it is like using that concept to mash up vocals. I really like the idea of constructing the voice performance live. Radiohead does that with software – Thom will sing a phrase and will gradually deconstruct it as it loops, so the voice becomes more and more robotic. It's very symbolic and interesting.
It's really a question of coming up with the right scaffold in a song so these experimental things can just sit there and not be forced on just for the sake of putting them in there. That part is hard. Hopefully there'll be more , and when we're done with the next batch [of songs] there'll definitely be a lot more of that stuff. It's definitely compositionally challenging, yes. If we were some crazy avant-garde band we'd probably be doing it more.
BMS: Pragmatically, how much sense does it make to use the Wii controller as opposed to a whammy bar or bending the strings? How much of it is musical and how much becomes performance art?
RM: It really depends on the situation you're using it in. The Wii controller doesn't replace [the whammy bar or string bending]. What I find is that using the Wii is interesting and fun for a couple of reasons. There's lots of ways to bend a pitch on a guitar, one of them being a pedal. When using gestures with the Wii controller, I'm able to find all the little pitches in between: it's not a case of on or off, up or down. I can kinda sweep and gesture in 3D space, and I obviously couldn't do that with a pedal. When bending a string, you can only bend it so far. With the Wii motion, I can bend a pitch way, way farther. Bending a string still may have more expression, musically, but it is limited. You can only really bend two strings at once, but with the Wii controller I can bend whole chords.
The whammy bar is fun and cool, too, but it can detune your strings, and you can't bend it up too high. It just feels really fun and natural, [being able to] gesture and shake the guitar, and have it respond to you. I still bend strings naturally, though, and it can't replace those things.
BMS: You've been featured on a number of tech blogs because of your Wii guitar – has this helped bring people to your music?
RM: Definitely. It's a different way to attract audience members, but it still works. We have a lot of fans that signed our mailing list who have just come from seeing our shows, and who happen to be teenagers, saw the Wii stuff and thought it was cool. It gives us a different fanbase. We can't really perform for them that often, but it's still fun to have new ears to sing to.
BMS: Are you ever concerned that people will write you off as a gimmick band?
RM: It's not really a concern of ours. Maybe if this stuff came out when we were first starting, it would be, but we have enough fans and support from the local press of our music, from people who don't even know I'm doing this stuff. We really do spend most of our time writing tunes that can be heard on their own, even if you know how the sounds are being made.
BMS: You guys worked with producer Scott Riebling in the studio – what's it like working for the producer of some pretty big acts [Fall Out Boy, Cobra Starship, The Academy Is…]?
RM: We worked with him recently to put out a single release with two songs. It was pretty cool. First of all, he's a really great producer with great ears and instincts. I'm kind of a techie, and reading about audio production and then watching them work is a thrill. We do get occasional tidbits from his life as a rock star. He was in Letters to Cleo, and I think he played bass for Weezer a bit, so he knows a lot of people. You know, he'll just be casually talking about how his microphones got burnt up in a fire at Flea's house. He knows a lot of my idols, which is cool.
When we're working with him, we're always talking about music or food. He's kind of a chef, too. Really good at making pizzas. I think he told he he's a pizza consultant. He knows way more about pizza than the average man – I mean, restaurants ask him about how to improve their pizza. He was telling me once about the difference in water used to make the dough in Naples, and he went to Naples for that very purpose. He had a pizza oven in his apartment that he had modified so it baked at really hot temperatures, really fast. But he's not a snob about it – he definitely likes most pizza.
BMS: Beyond the pizza, has his presence affected the writing or recording proess at all?
RM: We have kind of a mutually respectful relationship. He got a hold of our demo, he liked our songs and wanted to work on them. I gave him pretty drawn-out demos of most of our arrangements, and we went from there. The songwriting hasn't changed much, but in the future we might talk with him, do some pre-production work, but I don't think there was any sort of difference as far as the approach to songwriting, regarding what he may bring to the table.
BMS: Is it difficult splitting time between being grad students and a band?
RM: Uh…yes. Yeah, it can suck. There's not too much to say there, but as a grad student you do get a little bit of flexibility – moreso than if I were working at a regular job. It is intense, and at times we're definitely working longer hours than most people. At the same time, though, if we need to go play New York on a Thursday night, it's totally doable. With a more traditional job, that wouldn't be possible. So it has its pros and cons.
Vivian Darkbloom will be performing Friday night at Olivers Nightclub as part of Boston Music Spotlight's Local Spotlight Live Series. They will be joined by Barnicle, Candance Brooks Band, and Topheavy. Tickets are a paltry $10 dollars.
Updated: 2/6/2009
