BLOGGER: rogerSIMIAN
LOCATION: scottish borders
ROGER'S BANDS: the stark palace,
dawn of the replicants LABEL: shark batter records * KONO MICHI: An Interview w/ Michi Wiancko *
Brooklyn is home to some of my favourite acts of the moment:
TV On The Radio,
Santogold and
Kono Michi -
Kono Michi being the song-writing project of my label-mate,
Michi Wiancko, a professional classical violinist, brought up in Orange County, trained at Juilliard and long time resident of Brooklyn's thriving Indie community. Michi's day job involves touring the world with orchestras, often as a soloist, but there's nothing she loves more than recording her songs in her apartment (using voice, violin, toy instruments and computer beats) or playing them live with an ever-changing string quartet line-up. This is a Reader's Digest type teaser of the full-length interview, which can be read at
SharkBatter.com.
Roger: What have been the big influences on the music of Kono Michi?
Michi: This is the kind of question I would probably answer way too thoroughly. I'd start by listing all my favorite bands, composers, artists, performers. Then I'd tell you about people and events and movies and experiences that had a lot of influence on me, and then lots of random things like rain and animals and death.
Roger: When did you first start hatching plans of pursuing a career as a song-writer?
Michi: I've been silently sneaking up on the egg very slowly for a very long time, but it really didn't start beginning to hatch until about three years ago. It's still hatching, it's a big egg, and I can sort of see something fuzzy and cute inside, but with a sharp beak and very odd-looking feet.
Roger: Oh, I think I've heard that beak pecking at glockenspiels on your song
When I Don't Come Back. Traveling the world as a rock musician has been described as "tourism in the dark". Bands see very little of the cities they visit, jumping from hotel, to venue, to bar, to hotel (as satirized in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels). Is it a similar situation in the classical world, or is there a tad more luxury and glamour?
Michi: Most of the time I'm in a generic budget chain hotel, which looks exactly like the last one I was in, and I don't stay much longer than a day or two, so all I see of the area are the roads that connect the airport, hotel and concert hall. When I play a solo with an orchestra, I'm usually put up in a pretty swanky hotel with featherbeds and room service, and then I hoard as many free bath products and mini-ketchup bottles as I can. Sometimes I'm hosted in a private home, which sucks if the host knocks on your bedroom door at 7 am because they expect you to join them for breakfast at 8 am, but is awesome if they just leave you the keys while they are on vacation and you can walk around naked and be surrounded by family portraits and photographs of people you've never met in your entire life, and never will.
My international experiences have all been both luxurious and properly touristy. I was flown to Barbados for a week where we only rehearsed for two hours a day. The rest of the time I was floating in a pool with a drink in my hand looking up at monkeys in tamarind trees, exploring huge fields of sugarcane, or swimming in the ocean, where I (at the risk of sounding like a compulsive liar) caught a ride on the back of a giant sea turtle once while I was snorkeling. I recently played a couple of shows overseas with my friend Rench's country hip-hop band - one in the UK and one in the Netherlands - and at the risk of sounding spoiled and patronizing, I was really looking forward to sleeping on dingy venue couches, surrounded by empty bottles and broken cymbals, balling up T-shirts from the merch table for pillows. But alas, to our surprise, we were escorted across the street to one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in in my life... the most embarrassing luxury of which was a Jacuzzi bathtub and a heated towel rack. None of us complained, though.
Roger: When you play live as Kono Michi, you tend to use classical musicians and write out most of the parts for them as musical notation. But you've had experience playing in rock type bands too in the early days, haven't you?
Michi: That turned out to be invaluable experience in terms of learning about technical things, just the nuts and bolts of being plugged in on stage, which was VERY foreign to me for a while. It still is sometimes. I'll introduce my violist to the sound guy before a sound check and it's like introducing a frog to a chipmunk. Sound guys tend to freak the hell out when they see a cello or a viola. "Why can't you just be a chick with a guitar?" is written all over their face.
Roger: Can you describe the pink milk bath promo video that you're working on?
Michi: The pink milk represents a self-constructed womb - an attempt to mimic and thus recapture the life-giving and nurturing environment we all took for granted as fetuses. It also represents the sea, a return to my childhood, to mother earth... but I'm also in danger of drowning which IRONICALLY represents taking that VERY life away! I'm totally kidding. I just like taking baths. Actually, the video will no longer be pink, but milky white. I discovered that the pink just made it look like I was hanging out in some water after just having been bitten by a shark.
KONO MICHI on MYSPACE
