How do you feel about your place in the music industry, it’s really changing in this new age.
I think I’m pretty irrelevant to the music industry and to most music scenes because I’m not really making music for the press I’m making it for people. These days I feel like I have a really interesting fanbase and I want to interact with them and have a long slow building relationship with them. I’m not open to rules, I’ll tapdance if I wanna tapdance, although I can’t tapdance. *Laughs* I’ll make polka and mambo if I want, or I’ll play dubstep or remix one genre with any other genre regardless wither it’s what I’m supposed to do or not. There’s a lot of bands and DJs who are really big in the world of press and you’ll hear so much about a name and then i’ll listen to it and it’ll be like “…okay, it’s not that amazing, I dunno I don’t see it..” and there will be so much hype about it. It’s such a consumerism corporate culture it’s really easy to run a promotional campaign for something, I prefer underground systems of music distribution because it’s more authentic. Quality rises to the top and there is so much brilliant music being produced and remixed right now, it just blows my mind. Some of the other things I’ve been hearing that other people have been making are pretty awesome.
It does seem like the hype is always like two steps behind with what people are actually listening to. If in two years your song sucks despite all the cash the promotion machine is throwing at it, it still sucks. *Laughs*. Anyway, how was your summer?
I had one weekend off in the entire summer, it’s over now and I’m looking back being struck by the realization that it’s gone now. I’m hell bent and dedicated in trying to slow down time like a hummingbird and engage with matter and time in a more rapid sense of perception so I can perceive things moving slower so I can spend more time enjoying them. Kinda how Neo could stop the bullets or when you see a hummingbird moving super fucking fast with all those little tiny movements, to us its fast but to them everything moves slow. I’m not even concerned with so much as having a good time, I just really want to notice everything and be gratefu for things, even if they’re rough. I think hummingbirds do feel it all, they can move so much faster in a minute than we can that a hummingbird minute is probably like four or five human minutes. I wanna live on hummingbird time.
What are your personal goals for the next year?
Two part answer, I have no idea what the future holds, I could see a million scenarios playing out and some of are good and some of em are bad, and even the bad ones are just a matter of perception and we’re all gonna vanish in a few centuries so none of it really matters, but in the moment, it all matters. I definitely have hopes and daydreams that I would love to see come true but if not it would be a good lesson to learn.
What made you wanna name the album Cozza Frenzy?
I love when music utterly takes me over, makes me explode inside and kind of freaks me into an absolute dervish, there is that thing that happens when a group of people all pop at once and the whole place feels like a mobscene, moshpit or something…super swampy and insane. That can happen to a person when they are alone as well, to many kinds of music. So musically, that is what the title is about. It’s also a play on ‘rage against the dying of the light’, we all have the gift of life, and it’s about embracing that gift wholeheartedly and pushing yourself and each other to go as balls out and buckwild as possible before POOF! We’re gone.
Tell me about “The Churn of The Century”?
I tried to find old songs that rock and bring them into a modern situation, Churn of The Century is inspired by a couple of records from 1910, 1911 that I had a brass section come in and re-play. We tried to make it sound like an old antique sample but ya know there’s this artist called Dunklebunt from Vienna and he remixes all kinds of world music and gypsy music. I’m really into Balkan gypsy music and horn sections and ska, weird Romanian shit, really anything I can find, old radio broadcasts, beats from hip-hop, vocals from hip-hop. There are so many artists out making sick electronic music.
What was creative process like during the three years you were making this Cozza Frenzy?
Well, it wasn’t three years of nonstop album work, it was three years of nonstop touring watching my dreams for an album fade and fall and crash into a million pieces on a daily basis. It finally came together this summer and I’d released a couple little EPs and a couple singles. I probably made about a hundred songs that won’t ever be released, I went through and picked any of the songs in my repertoire, any bangers, any songs with standout elements and mixed all that together. I wanted to capture 80 minutes of music that I liked, I wasn’t trying to be like “What is Bassnectar? What would Bassnectar say?” it was more like “I like this song”.
What are your top five favorite books?
5 of my favorite books are: People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, Ideas And Opinions by Albert Einstein, The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil and all the Calvin & Hobbes books
Finally, whats the craziest shit you’ve seen go down at one of your shows?
I’ve been paid an extremely large amount of money (a mix of Russian currency, licorice and Yen) to neither divulge that info, or even refer to the situation in any other way than “Egads”….
thank you for this article and the reminder