MuteMath

It was Saturday, March 10th 2007.  The weather was crappy and the sidewalks were frozen.  Not the greatest weather for a band that is used to hot sunny days most of the year.  I was fortunate enough to meet two of the members of Mute Math inside the Club Soda, the venue they would play later that night.  In the dressing room, members of The Reason and The Cinematics were chilling, drinking or typing on the computer.  Here’s my brief encounter with Mute Math lead singer Paul Meany and bass player Roy Mitchell-Cardenas, where we talked about their album, their shows and mainstream music…all of that with the ‘beautiful’ background music of noisy venue pipes as though the pipes were dying to be featured in one of the band’s new songs.

CONFRONT:  Let’s push record on my old-school tape recorder.

PAUL:  We actually take this kind of recorder especially for talking samples.  Actually Darren decided to do an incognito interview with his grandma and got some great quotes and we used some for our songs.

CONFRONT:  All this behind her back?

PAUL:  Yep.  She did not see it coming.  Anything for samples.  That’s our motto.

CONFRONT:  Would you use those samples for a track on the next album?

PAUL:  Oh I think so.

CONFRONT:  Mute Math featuring Grandma?

PAUL:  Grandma King.

CONFRONT:  First of all, I wanted to ask you guys, for the readers who do not know you, how did you guys meet and how did you come up with the band.

PAUL:  Well Mute Math initially started as a side project just with the drummer and myself.  I was playing in another band at the time and I was getting these demo CD’s with some instrumental tracks from Darren and I was impressed so I invited him down to New Orleans to set up and record some songs and things kind of clicked.  I thought it would be a great side project; we weren’t sure of what was going to happen.  A couple of months later, my band broke up so Darren and I kind of built things around the songs we had started on and ended up becoming Mute Math songs; one of them was “Typical”.  So over time, we played a couple of shows as a two-piece, just drums and keys, and then shortly after Greg joined the band and we became a three-piece and made some more songs and Roy joined the band.  So it was building block by block into what became us.  It’s been a good ride.  I think we started Mute Math with a bunch of ideas of what we wanted out of a band and just talking to friends of ours with management and record companies, I guess this small community we could build to kind of let this band build itself.  We are thankful for the Internet because a lot of people were interested in the music that we were making and kept us going.

CONFRONT:  So you guys as a band exist since like 6 or 7 years?

PAUL:  More like three years as Mute Math.  Four actually.  I have known these guys for ten years because we played in and out of different bands, but it’s good to be in a band with musicians that respect each other and we consider ourselves very fortunate.
CONFRONT:  Let’s talk about your self-titled CD.  How was the recording and writing process for this CD?

PAUL:  Painful.  Long and arduous.

CONFRONT:  Are you kidding?

PAUL:  No!  It was very exciting.  I think um…You know, it was one of these things where we had done an EP and it was mainly electronic and we had started touring as people were joining the band.  I think that while we were writing for the album, we were recording ourselves live to try to really learn what our band sounds like; what we do good and what we don’t do good.  I think that all of that just kind of shaped the kind of goal of what we wanted to achieve with that recording and try to bring some of these elements that we did live.  So yeah, it was recorded on the road, on the bus, back in the studio in Nashville and hotel rooms and it kind of assembled itself over the course of a year; touring and breaks and during mix down, getting seven song ideas and going back to doing whatever.  When we finally finished that record which was right after Christmas in 2005, it was just a great sense of relief.  We were going through some problems with Warner Brothers at the time so with our own little CD, we tried to mix it and mastered it with a small budget and cut corners.  It was very exciting because we had to get it out before we started touring for the album release and sell the albums just at the shows.  That was the turning point for the band because we were able to finish the record and go out and do the touring on our own; I think that it proved to ourselves and showed us what we could accomplish.  The support of the fans was incredible at that point so it really was like the pivotal moment for us and it helped solve everything with Warner Brothers and was able to release the album nationally and properly and get us to Canada…

CONFRONT:  Do you think that the next album will be as painful to write and record?

PAUL:  No, I don’t.

ROY:  We might share some of the pain with other people.

PAUL:  Yeah.  We’ll start off this summer.  We try to pace ourselves and we’ll be taking some off time for some blocks of time and really try to get the majority of it done.  In and out we have been writing and we have been trying some ideas on tour.

CONFRONT:  Want to release something by the end of the year?

PAUL:  Probably next year.

CONFRONT:  I bought your album a couple of weeks ago and I still have a hard time classifying it into one music genre.  I think that the alternative connotation fits your music the most but how would you describe your own sound?

PAUL:  Join the club!

ROY:  I think I like alternative rock because it simplifies everything.  If you try to go into too many music genres, you just get lost.  Why even go there, I mean, it’s alternative, it sounds like what we were listening to when we were growing up radio wise.  In the live shows, I think that there is a huge rock element and those are the two strongest adjectives to use.

PAUL:  I think that the danger of seeing a lot of people trying to really describe every little thing and put it all together is sometimes they just seem to be way into the kind of experimental avant-garde sort of quotes.  We write pop songs and it’s still all about hooks; we still kind of think in those parameters to a degree and I think that we tend to go off hand here and there.  Yeah, I guess we never thought that out in the beginning and I think that there is a part of that that keeps our minds free and we do not try to over think that part of it.

ROY:  What are we really?

PAUL:  It’s really based on a feeling.  We know when we get something of a Mute Math song because it’s a feeling we all get.  Hopefully, in a couple of albums, people will just classify it as Mute Math.

CONFRONT:  Do you think that the media tends to put too many music genres into a band or an artist?

ROY:  Especially now.  I grew up listening to my dad’s albums by The Beatles, The Doors, The Kinks which is now considered classic rock, and then I got into punk and hardcore music and that’s all it was, like punk-rock and it was more of the attitude.  Now, we played on the Warped Tour recently and I was just confused by all these screamo, emo, post-hardcore.  When did this all happen and why?  It’s just so pointless to me and I think there are way too many genres that do not mean anything and they just need to be simplified; that’s why I like the alternative rock.  I remember what alternative rock used to mean like 10 years ago, 20 years ago.  It was The Cure, R.E.M, The Smiths; it was 120 minutes on MTV; that’s what I was listening to.  I remember my dentist asked me what kind of music I was listening to and he was working on my tooth and I said alternative rock and he said ‘What, like Little Feat?’.  When Nirvana came out, all that explosion of bands with Pearl Jam and Soundgarden took on the alternative mindset but to me it’s all a way of life, a way of approaching music and it’s just an alternative to mainstream but now alternative is a part of mainstream so now who cares anymore.  It’s all confusing now, it just doesn’t matter.

CONFRONT:  Talking about mainstream…what what what?  (looking at both of them)

PAUL:  You just pissed us off!  (laughs)

CONFRONT:  What would be your own definition of mainstream?

ROY:  Definitely popular.  Something that is in the popular culture at the moment.  People think of pop as minimalist thing but I do not think it is; it’s underrated in that way.  I mean, I used to think that way, because I was listening to R.E.M and other stuff.  I thought that anything that was in the Top 40 was a joke.  Growing up, my opinion changed because I like the Beatles and they were pop because they were popular.

PAUL:  Some of my favourite songs ever written are pop songs.

CONFRONT:  I will be attending your show tonight.  What could we expect from a Mute Math concert?

PAUL:  Blood, guts, sweat. It’s a whirlwind, there is some extreme ballet…I mean, all I can say is that you’re going to have a damn good time.

CONFRONT:  Does the set list differ from one place to another?

PAUL:  Not for now.  We usually change it up from tour to tour and at the beginning of the tour, we usually mess with things but now we have a good segment at this point.

CONFRONT:  Last question now.  We have a section in the magazine called Daily Urges, where we give to our readers the chance to discover one artist or one band each day of the year.  What are your latest musical discoveries?

ROY: David…(I cannot hear the full name)A lot of people do not know that he is a legend in his own right.  Even for us recently we discovered his catalogue.  You have probably heard his music being sampled by other artists…

CONFRONT:  It’s David who?

ROY: Axelrod.  That’s someone everybody should know about.  He just put out a DVD and it’s brilliant.

PAUL:  Everyone should go to school and watch that.

ROY:  There is also Richard Ashcroft.

CONFRONT:  Cool!  Well, I’ll let you go. Thanks a lot guys.

PAUL AND ROY:  Thanks.

Although this interview was pretty short, I really enjoyed talking to Paul and Roy and hope that they will remain as cool and passionate as they are, throughout their career.  I urge you to buy their self-titled release and attend at least one of their shows in the near future because it is one hell of an experience.

Visit their MySpace page: www.myspace.com/mutemath

Review of the Mute Math/The Cinematics/The Reason concert at Club Soda in Montreal-March 10th, 2007

To tell you the truth, I did not expect much from this concert, simply because I had not heard much about the first two opening acts, The Reason (other than what was featured in CONFRONT) and The Cinematics and their music.  I did not know what to expect from Mute Math either since I had never seen them in concert prior to that night.  I was certainly hoping for a great show given that I totally dig their self-titled album but you never know.  Turns out I got quite a musical treat from all three bands.

First, let’s talk about Mute Math since they are the main subject of this Beat Bazaar.  The guys started out with a bang, playing my two favourites of the album: “Typical” and “Chaos”.  About the musicians stage set-ups, singer Paul Meany was in the middle, which is a classic, and bassist Roy Mitchell-Cardenas and guitarist Greg Hill were not too far behind; but what was cool was the fact that drummer Darren King was in front of the stage next to the Paul, which gave fans the chance to really see the performer’s craft.

The band did most of the songs on the album performing for roughly an hour, which I think is a bit short; but at the same time, they gave the audience so much during the show that it didn’t really matter.  They are really into music and they are certainly not faking it.  The singer was constantly moving across the stage and even jumped on his piano.  The drummer was completely nuts (in a good way) and the other guys were amazing as well.  For me, it was like seeing a crossover between U2, The Police, Radiohead and Blue Man Group.  The music was great but it was also amazing to admire the theatrics of it all.  Really beautiful to watch and it definitely kept my attention.

If you do not have the chance to see this amazing band in concert, I urge you to buy their live DVD entitled ‘Flesh and Bones Electric Fun’; you are going to be blown away by their performance.

As for The Reason and The Cinematics, they both gave some great performances.  The Reason kicked some serious ass and they were super energetic. The Cinematics introduced themselves to the Montreal crowd with a sound that was reminiscent of Franz Ferdinand.  Not necessarily original, but catchy.