Kate Miller-Heidke - Music

Kate Miller-Heidke toured the United States and Europe with Ben Folds between 2010 and 2011, revealing a talent that was born for the theater, trained for opera and capable of rocking the house from here to Australia, which solidified her position as a rising new indie pop artist gifted with an intuition for honest, emotional songs of love and loss punctuated by gorgeous piano playing and evocative guitar hooks.

Her latest LP, Nightflight, will be released in America on June 19th but has already hit Australia where it debuted at No. 2 on the ARIA Charts. Following a sold-out tour after a performance with the English National Opera in London, Kate Miller-Heidke is looking forward to her playing the US.

IE Weekly got a chance to catch up with the young artist despite an international schedule where power chords, emotional concertos and beautiful fiorituras are the norm.

How did your music career first begin? 

I studied opera at University in Brisbane, Australia. I was headed down that career path but I always loved writing music, playing guitar and piano. I began playing in bands while studying opera and eventually sent an EP to the National Broadcast Network in Australia. I still do both, so I guess I’m a bit of a musical schizophrenic but I’m finding my balance.

You performed with the English National Opera in London in “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Do you feel that you have a theatrical side and a musical side, or is it that when you are onstage there’s no difference?

Well, there is a difference in opera with inhabiting a character and being part of a cast. When I’m playing music I have to take everything on my own shoulders, but with opera there’s a thrill with being a cog in a machine. But my own music has been my main focus. It is lovely being onstage…it’s just like taking a holiday from being myself.

Your career is already quite successful, and you just got started. How does that feel?

When I was touring with Ben Folds I told him that I sometimes felt like a fraud, and he told me that the feeling never goes away, no matter how successful you are.

There’s an personal, intimate philosophy throughout Nightflight. It’s also hauntingly sad in a lot of places, but in a good way.

This record is much more honest. It’s more exposed. Being that honest wasn’t really a conscious choice, it just something that my collaborator and I were tapping into. We were living in his grandparent’s house. They had recently passed away so the house had been dormant for months.

I could see how the environment would make you feel introspective.

I wouldn’t describe making the album as being entirely fun. It was miserable, but the record is a lot richer for that.

Some of the best lines in your songs come across not as poetry, but as sentences taken from your personal diary. Does it scare you a little to have to expose that much of whom you are to the world when you are making music?

It’s funny, when you first write them it’s deeply personal. But after a dozen times you lose that connection and it’s not yours any more. It becomes no one’s and everyone’s at the same time. After a while you push the songs out into the open sea and if they float you feel lucky.

Tomas Barfod - Music

DJ, musician and producer Tomas Barfod began his career decades ago using an Atari computer, a vinyl record player and an Akai monosampler. “I started playing music working with very old technology . What you have on your iPhone now is much more complicated than what we had. Now I’ve narrowed it down to just my Apple computer and a program called Logic,” Barfod says.

Just a few years later Barfod had moved from his bedroom to filling up venues in cities across the world, from Tokyo to London. “I started by making music for fun. Half a year later I was touring with my band Filur, and within two years we were in Japan playing with Ken Hirai, who is really big over there.” 

Since then he’s played across Europe and America, composing remixes for artists like Franz Ferdinand, Gorillaz and Shakira. Barfod also finds himself in high demand creating dance club hits for labels like Turbo, Kompakt and Gomma. “It’s a big part of my life listening to music, and my whole career has taken me everywhere. I always enjoyed doing experimental, underground music. 

Experience has taught him that it’s the talent, not the tools. “I’ve seen musicians make bad muisic, and then a kid on a laptop in the suburbs makes something better.” Shiny programs and snazzy computers won’t cover up garbage. “In the world of music it’s the guy behind the technology.”

You can travel the planet, but if your career is music ending up in Los Angeles can be inevitable. “Now I’m back in L.A. making more commercial music.” Having worked the independent circuit, Barfod enjoys seeing street music perculate up to the mainstreatm.”When you hear a big hit, like a radio song, well, at least 65% of it is from the underground and the types of bands that really experiment with music."

In addition to working as a DJ and producing, he is also a drummer for the band WhoMadeWho. “I started playing drums when I was ten. I was in a lot of bands and at some point in my late teens I was earning money playing gigs, but I realized that I didn’t want to be a drummer, I wanted to be a DJ, so I got into electronic music.” 

But after a few years behind the turntables, the talented Dane wanted back on the drums. “When 80’s, retro bands with old-skool electronic sounds got big again, I missed live music, including live guitars and playing live drums.” 

He doesn't consider himself to be a sort of rock star, though. “I’ve tried both things. It’s nice to know both sides when I play the music. On the other hand, when you have the inside knowledge of being a DJ, you have a better understanding of what the crowd wants when you perform."

Like most successful artists, Barfod enjoys being close to the crowd, although he likes to keep the relationship mysterious. “I feel like I can take the audience anywhere when I perform,whether it is to sweet places or to evil places. I’m always going to prefer being a DJ and playing in a club instead of in front of thousands of people on the drums.”

“It’s always like you are starting a party when you are a DJ. You can just start a party anywhere, in the streets, anyplace. I can play thousands of songs as a DJ, but when you play live you are much more limited,” Barfod says.

He’s been working on a presently untitled solo album to be released this spring. “I’ve been making a lot of music under different monikers, but now I want to do an album in my own name.” After so much collaboration, Barfod is enjoying the freedom. “It’s really nice to have a project for myself. When you work with a band it’s a blessing because you get to work with other people, but sometimes your ideas have to go through compromises.”

Barfod is careful to point out that he has always enjoyed working with other musicians or as a member of a band, but for now he wants to see what he can create without external artistic influence.

“Now I can sit down and really make a song sound like I want. It’s really nice to have a project for myself.” Like most producers he usually has more than his fair share of work, so for now having just one is like a vacation. “I’ve realized that I need to cut down on a lot of my other projects and concentrate on just one.”

He promises that his new album is going to be worth listening to many times over, combining electro, pop and blues sounds, but with some tracks featuring unpredictable instruments like chimes and wind instruments to keep the listener guessing.  “I love to create songs that are completely different than what you expect.”

Remix Artist Collective - Music

André Allen Anjos is the mastermind behind Remix Artist Collective (RAC), a cadre of artists (including Andrew Maury out of New York and Karl Kling of Portland) who compose brilliant, dance worthy remixes from bands across the musical spectrum, including Tokyo Police Club, Bloc Party, Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and more.

Anjos didn’t plan to create songs to end up everywhere cool, from nightclubs in Germany to the silver screen to HBO’s Entourage. “I never thought I would be doing it,” he says. “I kind of fell into making music and really like it. I think I just got very lucky.”

Music had always been a hobby to Anjos, but with college coming to an end he knew he had to find a real job, soon. “I was just two years away from graduation; I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

With the recession still raging, nobody was hiring, and the student loans weren’t going to pay for themselves. “The terror of the real world started to seep in, and I had no other options. I got into a stable financial situation by the time I was graduating, so the timing was perfect.”

The jolt of adrenaline proved to be a bolt of inspiration, and years later the young composer credits technology and the Internet for making it possible, mostly from contacts he made through email and social networking.

“Technology completely enabled me to do what I did . . . to make this whole thing happen. It just fell into place. I could just work and go to school in a small town, instead of a big city like L.A.”

Producing a successful track out of someone else’s song takes talent and technology. What’s essential for imagineering a successful club hit?

“For a proper remix, the most important thing is to not change the basic song structure. It’s vital to stick with it. After that, you can do what you want. Mess around with different sounds, chords, drumbeats, and go from there. It’s really a case-by-case thing.”

Having created more platinum-worthy tracks than he can shake two laptops at, what’s next?
“We’re getting into productions, film, TV . . . that’s really exciting because it keeps things fresh.” No matter how glamorous the music business can be, it can really drain you, but new projects energize the muse. “That’s the hard part . . . keeping ourselves entertained. If you are not having fun, it can be pretty draining,” Anjos says.

Lately the group has found inspiration in composing songs for critically acclaimed cable television dramas and motion pictures, including Holy Rollers with Jesse Eisenburg.

“I did some television stuff for Entourage, and another show called How to Make it in America. I think that’s going to be the trend for us, for a while.”

Those big bites of success has given the group a taste for film, so maybe fans will get a complete soundtrack sometime in 2012. Anjos is looking forward to it. “I’d be personally more interested in doing a full score for our next project.”

Remix Artists Collective at UCR’s The Barn, 900 University Ave., Riverside, (951) 827-2276; rside.ucr.edu/barnseries; www.rac.fm. Wed, Feb. 1. 8:30PM. $5 students, $12 non-student.

Amon Tobin - Music

Amon Tobin samples music to create songs the way Rembrandt used color to create art. He has an ear for finding that single perfect element in a song and understanding where it could go. The result is electronic music that is both familiar and mysterious, punctuated by once disparate elements that are as energizing as they are inspiring.

Tobin moved from Brazil to Britain when he was 10. Growing up in Brighton, he began to compose and mix hip-hop, refining his techniques throughout the early 1990s. In 1996, he released his first album, Adventures in Foam, launching a career that has taken him, quite literally, across the world.

Even with the current success of his latest album, ISAM, the journey is never over. “I guess it’s more [of] just a personal exploration of sound, and what’s possible with sound and music,” he tells CULTURE. “In composing each song I try to find the hardest thing to do and do it. It’s about overcoming obstacles.”

The DJ confesses that it’s not just the work, though. It’s also the art. “It’s a love affair,” he says. “With music, I try to explore as much as I can.”

ISAM is worth falling in love with, and fans will discover the album to have a much more acoustic touch, compared to Tobin’s previous works.

“This latest album I’ve been working on is based on acoustic instruments that I’ve learned how to play and make songs [with]. It all started a long time ago when I became interested in the context of changing a piece of music for greater effect,” Tobin says.

“Let’s say you have a drum solo and a piece of jazz music. It’s going in a certain direction, so you take a few beats from that drum solo, you take some pieces of the jazz music, and then you place it in a musical environment that is vastly different, with an entirely different speed and an entirely different style, but the original energy of the music is there.”

He’s moving beyond sampling with ISAM. “Over time my samples got smaller and smaller and now I’m now more interested in affecting the sound, transforming the sound. The sound’s origin is less important.”

Tobin’s latest album contains an organic quality that can often be missing from electronic music. “Everything done on the album was supposed to be there. I based the songs on ideas that had come out of instruments I used. It’s emotionally driven. It’s based on rhythms and melodies.”

And, he’s still exploring new realms of sound. For Tobin, it’s a journey, not a conquest. “I don’t look at albums as challenges, as if they are a problem to be solved. I’m driven by curiosity about music. That’s my enthusiasm. Music is something to explore.”

Tobin’s international tour for his latest album features a 3-D electric art show designed to make the audience feel like they are part of the music. “It’s an electronic show that doesn’t apologize for being electronic . . . What I’m trying to do is make it about the record, but I’m going to incorporate myself into a visual element. I want the audience to enjoy something they see as well as hear. It’s a cinematic experience.”