| Photo by Chris Becker |
After releasing their first album in 2006, New York-based band BM LINX is back and getting some well-deserved attention. The trio just released a new album, Black Entertainment. It was mixed by legendary rock producer Alan Moulder, who’s known for his work with The Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle, Blonde Redhead and others.
Black Entertainment features a fresh take of the classic-alternative-rock+electronic sound that we’ve grown to expect from the trio (Tony Diodore on vocals/guitar, Jonathan Murray on bass and Andrew Griffiths, a.k.a. Griff on the drums.) You can hear some samples below.
We sat down with the guys for an interview and discussed working with Moulder, on-stage production techniques (there is an iPod involved), music — past, present and future, and whether Diodore really means it when he sings that “rock ‘n roll has lost its soul.”
I caught you guys at Pianos during CMJ. It was a high-energy set — and very loud.
Griff (drums): I like playing there, it’s so small but its…
Jon (bass): The word is intense comes to mind.
Tony (vocals/guitar/prod.): When we were first playing shows there and I wasn’t sure, you’re never sure, but for CMJ they just do such a good job.
How do you guys produce your electronic elements in the live setting?
Tony: We do it really simple. I know there’s a lot of guys out there who have complicated setups.
Jon: Black magic.
Tony: The record is partly electronic, and what we do is take those electronic elements and put them on one channel, and the other is a click track. We load it onto an iPod. And when we’re playing live we have the actual audio going out to the crowd and the click track to Griff, so we stay with it and we know when songs start and end. And that’s it. No black magic at all.
Jon: Yeah, people have these crazy Pro Tools setups with laptops.
Tony: They scare me, you know. That stuff can fail.
Jon: Too many moving parts.
Griff: And you then have to have an extra member in the band. We might have to have it one day.
Tony: Also a lot of what we have is loops. There’s no reason to have someone back there just pressing play. I don’t think having a mono track makes much of a difference, unless you’re playing Madison Square Garden or something and you want it to be all over the place. It’s just bass hits and a couple synth sounds and stuff. I know guys who do it with CDs. CDs skip. Some people don’t use a click. But this works pretty well.
Tell me about your work with legendary producer Alan Moulder.
Griff: We had already recorded the tracks and everything and he then did the mixing.
Jon: He definitely made changes. You can hear it in the tracks. It was funny because these two were there in London and I had to work and I was here in New York, and every day Tony would send me what had happened. So I was eagerly waiting to see how things had changed and how things had developed. You can really hear it.
Tony: I can’t say enough nice things about the guy. He’s a consummate professional, he is just so dedicated and just so nice, really nice guy, open to suggestions completely, and just awesome to work with. It was a real honor.
He’s worked with so many great artists…
Tony: I just couldn’t help but ask him, so what was it like doing [The Smashing Pumpkins'] Siamese Dream? And he’s like, well, that was a good year because I did that and then the Nine Inch Nails record, Downward Spiral. He did both of those in the same year.
Jon: So, basically, he defined a good portion of my life that year.
Tony: It’s pretty amazing watching him work. The board that he uses used to be Trent Reznor’s board. So it’s just an active piece of equipment of rock history. And I’m asking him questions like I’ve known the guy forever. Making a suggestion to him and I’m like, maybe try this? But there a couple of things we worked together on and he’s just really open to all of it.
I must say, Siamese Dream was an epic record…
Tony: It’s just unbelieveable. I started listening to it when I came back. I put it on and I was like, damn.
Jon: Well between that and the guitar used in that recording. The hollow-body by Epiphone.
Tony: Oh yeah, that was James Iha’s. We tracked a lot of the stuff at Stratosphere Sound in New York that’s owned by Iha and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne. And, coincidentally, EQ Magazine interviewed Alan Moulder about his work on our album and it’s in the issue that recently came out with Billy Corgan on the cover.
Speaking of 90s acts, while introducing electronic elements, you guys seem to keep alive some of the more traditional rock sounds, guitar solos, and other elements that set you apart from a lot of the modern indie acts. Do you derive influence from any big 90s acts?
Tony: Absolutely. Nirvana. Nirvana’s so huge that you couldn’t not be influenced by them.
Jon: They’re inescapable if you’re our age.
Tony: Smashing Pumpkins, absolutely, for just little guitar technical stuff that I used to be really into, like moving octaves and stuff like that. I used to really love Mudhoney. I’ve never been a fan of indie rock. I don’t really like it. A lot of the 90’s rock bands – just huge big guitar sounds.
Jon: They were unapologetic and un-self-conscious. We talk about this a lot. A lot of things that indie rock lacks is that it’s almost afraid to really step out of it. In a lot of 90s rock, they would play huge songs and it would just be balls out, just unapologetic. It was just rock-n’-roll.
Tony: They were thinking really big and I can appreciate that stuff. A lot of it comes from 70s stuff, too.
There was a period when the guitar solo was just dead. No one would do that. I was like – what the heck? On our last record, the first one, Portable Genus, there’s like no guitar solos at all. But, this time around… I don’t ever get to see anybody playing their instruments when I go out and see shows. I wanna see someone play, you know? So, I think we’re just doing what we want to see.
Jon: Yeah, that’s come up throughout the whole thing. ‘What would we want to see?’
Griff: What show would we want to go to, what would we want to listen to…
Tony: And for electronic acts, you’re either extremely electronic, like very edited music, or you’re just completely rock, and you’re low-fi. But I don’t see why you can’t do both things.
We listen to a lot of electronic stuff like acid house and stuff like that. A friend of mine let me borrow a TB-303, it’s a Roland instrument. There’s a lot of that on the record, too. I love that instrument. I mean, Richie Hawtin pretty much did everything you can do with it.
Jon: We like to incorporate rock and we like to incorporate the dance elements but not compromise on either at all. A lot of artists say “we’re rock, but we have a bit of dance,” and others are like, “we’re dance but we have some guitars in it” and we were just like, well, fuck it, why not take all our favorite elements of each of them and really just try and pack it all in there. As well as some of the stuff that nobody’s ever heard. You know, that’s a whole other thing.
Tony: There’s also a bunch of acoustic guitar stuff I love. There’s this acoustic guitar guy I love named Leo Cotton. I’m just a big fan of his. So I wanted to do something that’s got a beat and got some strings on it and it’s got a synth bass, so it’s a weird mix, but I think that it works.
Tell us about the Craze Factory label.
Tony: Yeah, they’re great. They’re brand new. It actually sprouted from a couple A&R people, so they have some experience and they have a lot of connections. We’re their first band so we get all the attention. So we don’t have to fight for any attention, which is cool. So, yeah, it’s all positive.
Let’s go back to some other influences. Griff?
Everything, like Zepplin, The Who, lots of classic rock, Hendrix, and, just through the decades, The Cure, The Cult, you name it, every single decade there’s a lot of influences from the 60′s, 70′s 80′s 90s and present day. And I think you can hear that in our music. I think you can pick out things from every decade. Whether it’s Depeche Mode or Rush or whatever, there’s a little bit of so many influences. I don’t know. I could sit here all night.
Tony: We didn’t want to shy away from the progressive thing. Like rush is a really good example. They were really pretentious a lot of the time. Just bizarre. But so musical too and they really took chances. So a couple of songs on their newest record are really long, and they have some progressive elements in them. And we wanted to try that, too.
Because so much rock music has happened that we like and … it’s hard to say what influenced us. So much has happened. We want to try to capture our favorite parts of it. We don’t want to just do one thing. We’d get bored.
Jon: And now for the first time ever people are listening to so much music. You have iPods. So you don’t even need to listen to a record. You can skip from like Richie Hawtin to Jimi Hendrix to Rush to Beethoven. And we love our music because its for those people who listen to everything. The time of when people just listen to rock music is gone. You’re exposed to so much on TV, commercials, everywhere. And we’re just trying to make music for those people who listen to everything.
You guys seem to maintain a lot of rock elements that are no longer common in indie rock. Does that have anything to do with your lyric “rock and roll has lost it’s soul” from the track 123CAT?
Tony: I’m sort of bitching in that track. That one would take a long time for me to explain, from the name of it, to what it all means, but what I did with that particular track is — I was basically trying to be an asshole. It’s a really abrasive sound. Then I just over-edited it.
Because in a lot of electronic music I just hear these fucking edits everywhere, just going crazy, and when I hear that I immediately picture a Pro Tools window and I just see all this audio everywhere with lines all over it and I’m like, “that’s bullshit.” When you make a record now, people are protective of the record. Which means, even if you’re drummer can’t play drums, and ours can, the computer will chop it into pieces and then make it sound right, in time. You can use Auto Tune on vocals, which I refuse to use. I don’t know if Alan used it or not, I wasn’t sitting there watching him all the time, but if I’m mixing a track up I wouldn’t use it. I think it sounds good if it’s a little off. But this track in particular is just completely over-edited and it’s supposed to sound really abrasive.
I think a lot of people are using computer technology in the place of skill–or soul. It’s not gone. It’ll never be gone. But it seems to be disappearing. It makes me bummed out because I don’t want to think we’re in an irrelevant time, musically. But everything is computerized. We wouldn’t be able to do anything without it.
Jon: People have access to so much technology and so many instruments. We have access to more music-making equipment than anyone has ever had in the history of fuckin’ mankind. And the question is, “What do we do with it? What do you fucking do with it?”
Tony: Yeah, so that’s really what it’s all about.
And technology has, of course, also impacted the way we learn about music, and the way artists promote themselves. There’s room for everything on the Web. How has the web helped you guys spread your music or make connections you otherwise wouldn’t have?
Jon: The Web is kind of a scary thing because it gives everybody a little bit of a voice, and its easy to get a tiny bit of traction, but it also gets a lot of noise. Because every douchebag can pick up a guitar, get a little four-track recorder and throw it up on Myspace. And at that point, they have the same voice as you and they can email everybody just like you can. So, I mean, even though there’s an equal opportunity for bands, it also means that you’re up against literally tens of millions of other people. So I think probably the hardest thing is getting your email actually read by people.
Tony: I love watching standards happen, like on the internet. It’s interesting to watch. Like if i hear about a band and want to check them out, I never go to their website. I go to their Myspace. Every time. That’s a standard now. Myspace might disappear for people just socially networking, you know, “hey you’re hot” or whatever–fuck that–but for bands it’s just so easy to use. It just works.
As far as the opportunity from the internet, I know something had to have happened…
Griff: Everything we created, everything that came our way, has been from us playing live…all of the big stuff. I dont think anything major has happened.
Jon: We’ve gotten reviews and stuff like that, but I guess what people need to do is they need to get off their bed, and they need to play live. If you don’t actually get out there and hit the ground, its not really gonna work, it’s never real. It’s as real as your Myspace friends are your real friends.
Tony: There’s one weird story. We put out our first record, and nobody knew who we were. We were zero, we weren’t anywhere. We were just trying to pick up some local shows. We put it on cdbaby.com. Somebody buys it in Russia. This guys works for MixMag Russia, it’s a pretty big Magazine there, and he wrote a big review of the record all in Russian. We couldn’t read it. But we were like, wow. And we got it translated and it was just glowing and really long. He wouldn’t have found the record without the Internet, and we wouldn’t have found the review. It just makes the world smaller. It completely does. Everything seems accessible.
I find that’s sad in a way – regionally. You want to go to LA and see what LA is like. You get off the plane in LA and it looks like New York. That’s kind of boring.
Jon: Didn’t he find the record because he was searching for the club Twilo?
Tony: Yeah — Twilo — a crackhouse posing as a New York nightclub. It had the biggest system. It just made your heart skip a beat. It was awesome. I just mentioned that in a little blurb on cdbaby and the guy was searching on Twilo in Russia and found the CD and bought it.
And your first show was at Snitch here in New York — which is actually closed now.
Tony: Fuck that place.
Jon: Yeah. That place was owned by musicians and yet it was the worst club to play at.
Tony: They had no monitors. And if you’re mixing a band, you want to hear them. Their mixer was behind the stage! Behind it. How could you even tell what it sounded like?
Jon: It was everything wrong. It could have been amazing. But it was everything you could have possibly done wrong with a venue.
Griff: And there was not much room in front of the stage — it was a long, narrow room with the stage on the side…
…but you gotta start somewhere.
Tony: We would’ve played anywhere, you know. It’s either that or like the 2nd Avenue F-train stop. Whatever, man. You gotta have a first show.
Jon, how about your musical influences.
Actually, its kind of funny because I grew up with hippie parents so I was literally raised on like The Doors, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, some Grateful Dead, lots of Jimi Hendrix, all that stuff. That was the music of my childhood. That and classical music. That’s all I listened to. I didn’t listen to 80s music–even though I grew up then–until I went to college. But after that I got really into hard techno and breakbeat and that sort of stuff. I used to spin records and was a rave promoter. So I love the stuff that Tony does. It’s fuckin’ incredible. We’re very much of the same mind. Like when we met–we became friends before we had the band–and I think that that’s one of the things that we really connected on, because we both had this love for like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and then also were able to go out and listen to Green Velvet at like Twilo at 4:30 in the morning.
Tony: And we were like, fuck it, let’s just start band. Because Griff and I were in a band prior to this one and so we were looking around for some shit to do. And I used to run a DJ night … I’d spin records and shit down at a club that’s not there anymore in the East Village. And we were like, we should do something called Crappy Trance Night and play the worst trance music. But we never did it, because you can’t really do that. No one’s going to go to a night that’s supposed to suck. Maybe they would. I don’t know.
Jon: Come to our night, it’s the worst!
Tony: Yeah it’s terrible. You’ll hate it! Come on out. Haha … It’s the worst.
Jon: The worst!
I would go to see what you guys were doing.
Jon: Well that’s the thing … that’s exactly what everyone says because you know deep down people wanna hear that really like cheesy…
Tony: Everybody was a DJ for a minute, so people still have shit trance records they bought down at Satellite. It would be funny to have a contest like ‘bring in your worst record.’
Jon: Oh I have some serious crappy trance like such progressive … like stories about house music and ecstasy. It’s incredible.
Oh and I want to add another influence of mine. Since I grew up outside of Baltimore, when I was like in middle school, I used to listen to Baltimore breaks, and this like really funky Baltimore hip hop that used to exist in only one little area, but now it seems to be absolutely everywhere. Now whenever you go to like Hiro or places like that everybody plays that shit now. It’s eerie. Because I listen to it and all I think of is being like 14 and listening to that stuff in my bedroom. It’s the same record. It’s the strangest thing. I was like … I thought this stuff would go away.
Tony: That Baltimore-club sound.
Jon: Yeah, Baltimore club … guys like Rob Lee, K Swift who actually died recently, DJ Boo Man, Unruly Records .. all these people, that’s what I grew up with. And it’s funny to listen to. It’s all the kids who’d ride skateboards and shop at Kid Robot and all that. And now they’re discovering it and I was like man… I hate to say this type of shit but I was listening to that shit when I was like 14. Some little suburban white kid. It was awesome.
Tony: They used to play it on the radio down in Baltimore.
Jon: Yeah, that’s all they played! Club Cuts, K Swift. I used to love that shit. My parents used to yell, “why don’t you listen to Jimi Hendrix?!”
We’ve lost that local radio — you used to be able to hear some unexpected things and local flavor.
Tony: Now it’s blogs.
Yeah. Fortunately the Web has filled the gap in showcasing new music, after the radio stations were all bought up and homogenized.
Jon: It’s weird, too, because everybody’s always saying we should get on radio, and I’m like, I don’t know anyone who’s listening to radio. I can’t remember the last time I turned on a radio.
Tony: We’re on radio now.
Jon: I know. We’re on Clear Channel. But it’s weird living in New York where no one listens…
Tony: Those are they guys who did that. [Clear Channel] bought up all the radio stations and made them all completely irrelevant. You’d hear the same five songs everywhere you go.
Jon: Well, there was a bill that got pushed through Congress … you used to only be able to own a certain number of radio stations, and that number was drastically increased. Yay, lobbyists. Now you’re able to just own whoever the fuck you want, so they just bought everybody.
Tony: Obama will spite Clear Channel! Obama will spite them all!
Jon: He’ll walk on water to spite Clear Channel. Well, you can put this on record — we’ve all been vehement Obama supporters.
Tony: Could you vote griff? No?
Jon: You can’t vote.
Griff: No.
Wait are you serious that you can’t vote?
Jon: Yeah, he’s a felon.
Griff: No — I’m a green card holder.
