Behind this year's exciting new album, "I Don't Feel Like This Is Happening", Mediafriend has been busy making us feel like a lot is happening. I caught up with the man behind the mp3 to discuss the new album, life, and what's to come.
Me: Thanks for meeting me here, I know...
Mediafriend: No problem, this isn't very far.
Me: So you're from Boston, where do you think you fit in amongst Boston's local music scene?
Mediafriend: I'm from other places too, and I'm not sure that I fit in here much at all. I do know that the sounds of the city have crept into the music.
Me: What sounds?
Mediafriend: The windy sunshine, cold bricks, tired people, deep rooms, broken electronics, Boston is in there, breathing against the beats.
Me: I have no idea what you're talking about.
Mediafriend: [coughs] You can always hear a musician's apartment and the street outside their window through their music. It can happen in many different ways, but it usually happens. I'm pretty sure it's happened in my music. That's probably a good thing, I think Boston is an interesting city to listen to. But if you listen carefully, you can hear NJ, Philly, NY, and whatever in there too. That's just the cities I mean...
Me: You mentioned "broken electronics". From what we've heard you've done your share of breaking electronics so to speak.
Mediafriend: Yeah, my brother got me into that. It all boiled down to the notion of having entirely new instruments. Nobody is going to rip off your sound if they have to reinvent your instruments first. Well, maybe.
Me: What instruments are we talking about?
Mediafriend: The Playertron mainly. It's a big part of the sound. The Playertron is a series of tape players with a bunch of knobs and switches that allow you to control the speed and play a cassette tape like a monophonic instrument. We record tones or voices or whatever onto tapes and go from there. It's great.
Me: We heard you play all this live on the album. Is it true that none of this was sequenced?
Mediafriend: That's mostly true. Definitely all the synth parts and those tapes and of course, any guitars [are not sequenced]. The beats are mostly tapped out on a trigger pad or played on a drumset. Some of those beats though... on those I sequenced a beat, burned a cd, and mixed them up on a pair of cdx's [cd turntables]. So, everything does go through some process of actual performance and nothing is completely sequenced.
Me: And what do you go for when you're finding samples?
Mediafriend: Usually I just record everything within range of my microphone and work from there. All the sounds are real. I play a lot of instruments, at least a little, so I'm always recording those. Also, I sample my old songs a lot.
Me: What instruments do you play?
Mediafriend: My main instrument has always been the saxophone. All the horn parts you hear are real. I've also got a fretless bass, guitars, piano, drumset, turntables, and uh, other junk I'm sure.
Me: Cool.
Mediafriend: Thanks.
Me: Your lyrics are cryptic, what's the deal?
Mediafriend: I think we write songs to say things that words aren't suited for. I'm not writing lyrics to narrate a story. I'll write an actual story to do that.
Me: So do the lyrics mean anything?
Mediafriend: Oh yeah, they mean a lot. They are a part of the musical whole, a color on the audio portrait. They're important, just not more important than the rest.
Me: There are a lot of doubled vocals on the album. Is it to hide mistakes in singing?
Mediafriend: [laughs] Oh no! That's not the point at all. I usually sing a song twice and pan them so one is on the left and the other is on the right. This gives me a chance to inflect some lines in two different ways simultaneously. It's the complete opposite of compromise. Also, it's a good way of overcoming volume issues in a mix. It allows you to sing softly... intimately and not be buried by everything else.
Me: In our conversation on the phone, you mentioned a band, "Miles From Land", that you were in. Can you tell us about that?
Mediafriend: Sure. It was a rock band sorta. We broke up, it's hard to say why, but I get the feeling that little things were just allowed to get too big. After we broke up, the singer actually released a cd from rough mixes I had. I didn't know until I got a copy in the mail. That was a little weird. I was kinda glad to see the album escape oblivion, but I was also kinda annoyed that my finished mixes didn't get put on the album. That, and I wasn't credited for mixing and recording the whole thing.
Me: Well, we heard it. It sounds great.
Mediafriend: Thanks. I don't mean to sound negative about it, I'm pretty happy with the whole thing. It captures a lot of the band at the height of its 2 or 3 year existence.
Me: So no chance for reunion?
Mediafriend: I doubt it. We didn't separate ways in the cleanest fashion. We all probably could've been more polite about that.
Me: We've also heard OkayFriend's recent album from a link on your website. You produced this?
Mediafriend: Yeah. He had a bunch of tracks and rather than polish them off completely, he just kinda said here finish them. So that's sorta what we meant by "produced" in the credits. I blipped it up and mixed the parts a bit and added some instrumentation, vocals here and there, you know...
Me: Any other projects?
Mediafriend: Yeah. Lots of them.
Me: Great. Care to tell us about any of them?
Mediafriend: Eh, maybe some other time.
Me: It seems that you keep busy. How long does it take you to write a song?
Mediafriend: It varies. The question is usually how much time does it take before I have a moment to record the song in my head. Sometimes it can be a while. This last album wasn't like that though. I finished the whole thing in April.
Me: That's pretty fast!
Mediafriend: They're not usually that quick, but this album was a bit more inspired than usual.
Me: By what?
Mediafriend: Lots of things. It's what makes the album exciting for me. It's very coherent, very centered. A lot of the themes get viewed from multiple angles through different songs. And I think the album flows as a singular musical piece.
Me: Before we part, can you just give us a quick summary of the album, or explain why we should buy it?
Mediafriend: Well, you should buy it if you like it and want to help me not be broke. As for a summary, I don't know. It's an album that comes drained from some of my deepest wells. I don't care to explain that, but I hope you can hear what I'm talking about on the cd. [Samples are available on www.mediafriendmusic.com]
