Insulinfunk Interview with A Faulty Chromosome
by Blake Garris ~ October 13th, 2009. Filed under: Interview, Music.
There’s really no way to describe A Faulty Chromosome without doing them a vast disservice. What we can say about them though is that they’re from Austin, Texas and their latest album Craving to be Coddled so We Feel Fake-Safe could use some of your monies to get off the ground. We recently got the opportunity to talk with frontman Eric Dalke. His music is pretty unbelievable, his answers to our questions are pretty unbelievable and we pretty much think he’s going to be the next big thing– even though he doesn’t want to be.
So I can only compare you to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah meets that robot voice Kanye West uses to distort his vocals meets Magnetic Fields, I guess. How would you describe your band?
Hmmmm… Well, I think if you could listen to my entire record collection, it would make a bit more sense. I mean, I can go through each song specifically and cite my attempts at sounding like Brian Eno or Trackstar or Thin Lizzy, but it’s funny that people always mention Clap Your Hands… (whose music I don’t particularly mind, but also don’t own or listen to. Actually, when they first came out, my girlfriend would play it and I would mock the singer by overexaggerating it as the yodeling/kermit the frog-type gibberish I hear it as). Live, I understand that my voice croaks and cracks due to poor sound, so I get those references, but you’ve never seen us live, and I don’t hear it on the recordings at all, so…? ? ?
Magnetic Fields (other than the obvious fact that I covered an entire EP of theirs) I get on account of it being a cruddy drum machine looping over and over, mixed with the fact that I can barely sing so just sing-speak slightly off key.
Ha! I have no idea why you say it sounds like an auto-tuned Kayne West? If I were the type of person to be offended (which I’m not) , that would actually be the worst insult I’ve ever received.
I think it’s pretty hard to “find your voice.” You start singing other people’s songs and then — when you finally find songs you don’t butcher too badly — you start to emulate those singers, but then the trick is to mix in how your own voice should sound singing without any affectations (like Americans singing with British accents!?), but it’s pretty hard.
So, as you can see, when someone asks me to describe my band, I blather on for a while because I have no idea, as there’s nothing specific I feel properly explains it in a way that I’m comfortable with. I’ve actually been trying to come up with a genre for the next album: sloppy-jangle-loser-pop, sock-hop-hip-plop, or childish shoegaze-bop-college rock. I just want it to be an accurate representation of who I am and what I’m attempting to say, so: polite, messy, confused, sincere, frustrated, goofy… I mean, if you can accurately describe a band’s sound by a mere mention of 4 bands or less, they are doing a terrible job making original music (that, or you and I just haven’t listened to much of the same music).
How did the band get together?
I had been writing and recording songs in my bedroom since high school, but I hated everything I wrote (too cliche/ depressing/ uninteresting). I was living in Los Angeles at the time (getting paid minimum wage to sit in the audience of TV shows and make Jim Belushi think he is funny by pretending to laugh, even though I refused to emit a sound for moral reasons) and finally was not ashamed of the songs I was writing, so I decided to post a craigslist ad. I got tons of responses, but from dudes who wore eyeliner and people with “connections” asking to “jam.” The only one I liked was from Mike (former keyboarder) who mentioned nothing about music and just replied with some weird, cryptic nonsense. I think our first practice was him saying that he was horrible at playing music, but that he took piano lessons at his aunt’s house in elementary school and all we did was decide that we wanted our live show to feel like we were kids in our parent’s basement and there was a leaky pipe with a bucket to catch the drips. Then I had my friend at work play guitar (even though he was a hippie and I don’t like hippies, and he hadn’t heard of a single band I liked) because he had a lot of neat effects pedals. Then we spent 2 years being ignored by nearly every single venue in southern California, so I demanded we run away to somewhere with nicer people, so I picked Austin.
Where do you draw your influences?
Equal parts from my record collection and working retail for so many years and being subjected to top 40 (maybe even more of the latter?). Having to hear Nickelback and John Mayer and Avril Lavigne over and over and over (at least 10 times each during an 8 hour workday) and really trying to analyze how unoriginal and awful the music and lyrics were and how confusing the messages were. I think that has influenced me more than anything. There is so much mediocrity being crammed in every hole we have these days and I want to make sure I am not adding to that. I think poorly written music is far more dangerous than people may think, and — when put through the wood chipper of general semantics — you’re just kind of left with a pile of unrecognizable sawdust instead of sturdy, oxygen-producing, shade-giving redwoods.
As for “influences,” this next album is kind of retracing my entire life, and in doing that I’m realizing all the music that has effected me far more than anything else has been things that most might not notice upon listening like old radio jingles or TV theme songs stuck in my head or having to hear my sister listen to New Kids on the Block every single day for 5 years. And I think growing up in Chicago hearing old neighbors listening to polka or ranchera, and the idea of making music that gets people dancing and clapping and actively singing along is far more inspiring to me than trying to be attractive and all loud and indifferent like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus & Mary Chain or whoever else it’s currently cool to copy off of these days.
You have some pretty interesting sounds. What’s the song-creating process like for A Faulty Chromosome?
Well, since it’s kind of loop-based, I basically either construct a pleasant-enough sounding main guitar riff or some sort of video game-ish thing, and then let it loop over and over all day until my heart converts to the song’s beats-per-minute, and then I just start mumble-singing gibberish over it to figure out how the melody will go and then eventually words will slip out amidst that blather. Then, once there’s an idea about what the song is going to be about, I try to think of noises that make sense logically in that song’s world. I did a better job of that on this album, I think. Like, a song set at a suburban park in the summer, so I made the maracas sound like a sprinkler and I made the keyboards sound like an ice cream truck and bells like a neighbors wind chimes, and a synth line sound like locusts in the tree… I like unusual noises. I don’t want to play chords that are familiar and convey nothing. Everything makes noise, it’s just a matter of figuring out how it will fit (and if someone tells me I’m not supposed to record a certain thing or a certain way, or that I can’t do it because no one has ever done that before, I make sure I do it twice).
You have four Magnetic Fields covers on your Last.fm page. Why?
I was asked to play a Stephen Merritt covers night here in Austin, and so just did the House of Tomorrow EP in it’s entirety (it was the first album of theirs I got when I was little after writing down all the music listed on the end credits of Pete & Pete, and it’s still my favorite), but in order to know how to play the songs, I just recorded demos of them all as I was learning them and figured I might as well let people who wanted to hear them hear them since the biggest complaint I hear from people is that I do a bad job of keeping people informed of things. I have facebook and twitter, but really want nothing much to do with them, but I guess I understand the desire to want to feel connected.
What does the public need to know about your band that we haven’t discussed yet?
The public needs to know, first of all, that the band even exists. People have said things to me like “You’re so good. How are you not famous yet,” and, I mean, what am I supposed to say to that? We’ve played CMJ and SXSW and toured a bunch, but it doesn’t really seem to matter these days unless the proper websites tell the world how amazing you are (because everyone else immediately believes them and wants to be associated with cool things too, so it all snowballs so quickly; I wish I knew how people got big in other countries first? That would be fun to do).
Also, the public should know that I’m in the process of trying to make a faulty chromosome a non-profit organization (HELP!) so that they don’t think my motives are monetarily based and can take what I say seriously. See, I don’t ever want to accidentally make money and get comfortable and buy a house or a nice car or new clothes or new furniture. I always want to tippy-toe the line between suffering and surviving to keep me honest. The idea of the band isn’t just to “rock” or to get free drinks or be escapist and whine along to music about life and have people ignore their own lives and have nothing change, it’s to ask questions and make friends and to think and make others think and find solutions and dance and smile and sing and help each other feel hopeful about being alive (it seems weird now, but I hope it will make more sense once the next album is done). I would feel like a failure if we became popular and all we did was act like some stale image of cool, some painting of what manufactured, commercially viable emotion should look like. But I don’t want to be a painting, I wanna be a portal! And I don’t want to be rewarded for my work with money, I want to get rid of money. I’d feel dirty being rich, buying a designer banana tree for the kitchen and sticking my head in organic sand in the backyard.
Because, I mean, is it really that impressive being rich, and then only donating like 12% of your earnings to charity? It feels like even then it’s mostly only done to inflate their egos. A song on the new album is a response to this awful music video by Lionel Ritchie called “Dancing on the Ceiling” (which I had never seen before until recently) and — in doing some research about the man, found out a lot of really interesting things, one of which was a detailed list from his divorce of how much money he and his ex-wife spent per year, and it was just horrifying. Here’s a guy that co-writes that terrible song “We are the World” under the guise of helping poor African children and, wow, great, you helped open a school and a hospital with the proceeds, but you alone spent 3 times as much money last year on plastic surgery and four-star hotels, so it becomes less of “how can I help people” and turns into “how can these people help me feel better about myself and make people think I’m good?” And that’s shameful.
Can I take credit for breaking you or did somebody do that already?
I paid a promotion company waaay too much money to do that for the last album (well, not money so much as credit card debt), but clearly they did not, so if this interview manages to somehow cause there to be more than 7 people at shows next tour, then yessir, I will trumpet your name from the mountaintops as the sole breaker of the band. I will make a heart-shaped button with your face on it and wear it always so that people will ask who you are and I can proudly proclaim “This is Blake, he broke me!”
What’s next for A Faulty Chromosome?
I am finishing up the album (mixing, drawing pictures; it should be at least available online for free in early August), doing all the awful business stuff like having to write a band biography (in 3rd person, which is ridiculous, as though you’re pretending that someone else is saying such nice things about you?) in order to send out to all the fancypants’d blogs to trick them into thinking we’re wonderful/reviewing the record/speeding up the process of having people know who we are, trying to find someone or a label to help press the record, trying to get a booking agent to help us tour Europe. Then, once that’s all finally done, I’m going to either start working on a full-length, stop-motion movie based on the album (with my friend Siloen in Canada) or go back to school to get my PhD if people won’t take the artsy fartsy stuff I do seriously enough. So that should take care of the next 6 years at least. But before all that, I have to go get a job.
And finally, what’s the meaning of life?
Boy, I’ve been asking that question everyday to everyone I meet for the past 27 years (though no one ever told me a good answer (my mom said it was to go to heaven, and all of my teachers said “Don’t get smart with me! Stop daydreaming and do your homework!”) . It has nothing to do with religion or making money or owning things or attaining some sort of status. If you let things bother you and don’t laugh enough, you’re doing something wrong too.
I know it’s got something to do with ridding yourself of your ego and all of those ridiculous fears that have been instilled in you since birth by people, and then learning to be empathic instead of angry so you can make full use of your brain and help as many people as possible do the same so that you can all work together and help even more people until everyone is okay (idealistic sure, but anything less would make me pathetic, so I’m going to try my best).
But it certainly starts with introspection. Something to the effect of “secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others in need of help fastening theirs” (I just got back from the airport). I eat a good mix of science, art, humanism, and cartoons. I want to be smarter. I was just reading in this scientific journal that 73% of what Americans talk about falls under the category of “trivial/gossip,” and I find that horrifying, and would like to try to do better. I’d like to help see to it that more people take time to understand language better. Studying General Semantics and Psychology in elementary school instead of teaching a lot of skewed, half-truths and then having to unlearn it all and figure out what is actually true would make things a whole lot better.
So for me, the meaning of life right now is to make music that acts as a best friend who drags people from their comfort zone and makes them think and ask questions and be happier and feel less crazy and (I hope) inspired to leap out of bed in the morning and do whatever it is that they’ve been put on this muckheap-of-a-planet for.