Interview: The Madd Wikkid of Brassft Punk

The Madd Wikkid loves New Orleans. He loves it so much, he figures all that pass through will be made brass. Trumpets blare and hips swing all day and all night. What if French house cyborgs Daft Punk grew up in the French Quarter instead of Paris?

Producer The Madd Wikkid aka Earl Scioneaux III didn't wonder, he brought it to life. With his brass band project Brassft Punk, the producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist took to Kickstarter to bring the disco-future sound of Daft Punk back into the glittering jazz age. Here's what he had to say:

What was the genesis of “Brassft Punk?” Can’t really imagine too many jazz purists crossing over into French house…

Well, I don’t consider myself a jazz purist - at least not exclusively.  Just as new ideas disrupt purism,  purism hinders new ideas, and both are important.  I do think there’s value in capturing and maintaining musical traditions. I’ve certainly worked in that arena, including making a swath of records with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.  At the same time, I also think it’s important for any art form to have the capacity to push radical new frontiers, which is why I’ve been drawn to electronic music for so long.   

For years I was living in two worlds - one working with amazing live musicians, and the other full of  computer-driven beats and bleeps.   A couple of years ago, I decided to see what would happen if I tried to merge these two very different spheres.  I made a record, Electronola, where I brought a handful of the noteable great New Orleans musicians into the studio, recorded them doing their thing, and then reworked that material into electronic music.  It was an experiment, really, but result was quite a pleasant hybrid.

Brassft Punk is in some ways another experiment in this hybridization, but with almost an opposite approach. This time, instead of bringing New Orleans musicians into the world of electronic music, I brought electronic into the world of New Orleans musicians.  

I need you to explain two things. First, your stage name “Madd Wikkid.” Second, that brilliant mad scientist ‘fro.

First - It’s been so long, I can scarcely recall where that name came from.  I remember I’d been fishing for a moniker for a while, and I’d tried a few that didn’t fit.  One day in conversation someone described something as being “Madd Wikkid,” and I half-jokingly suggested that I’d use that as my stage name.  I tried it, and it stuck.  

Second - I think my hair speaks for itself.

How long did it take to get it all up and running from conception to execution?

After sitting on the idea for over a year, I think I launched the kickstarter campaign for the initial Brassft Punk EP from May to June of 2012, and then spent the next several months writing and relentlessly revising the arrangements.  The record was finalized and mastered the first week of November, so I guess it took about half a year from the time I acted on the idea, or close to 2 years if you count the time it was on the back burner.

On stage you rock a MacBook…is this normal? Or do jazz purists lean in to one another and quietly mutter disapproval?

No, it is not normal.  At home I rock three macbooks, but on stage I don’t want to look pretentious.

I don’t think I need to worry about too many strict purists coming to my shows - I think it’s pretty clear since even the project name is a hybrid that purity is not really an aspiration.

What’s the most challenging aspect of making electronic music human after all, pardon the pun.

Well, part of the “human” aspect of the Brassft Punk EP was that I wrote out all of the arrangements by hand.  The first purchase I made for the project was a nice pencil.  It ended up being a strenuous amount of writing, and upon completing the arrangements I ended up wearing a wrist brace for a short while.  I have no regrets, but I’ll be doing my arranging with software from here on out.

You ran a kickstarter for your great new "Get Lucky" cover - how did it go? Do you think crowdsourcing from "patrons" is the new way to go insofar music is concerned?

The “Get Lucky” campaign went well, hit 50% over the primary goal, and triggered a stretch goal where I made bonus track that is an electronic mashup with samples from the earlier Brassft Punk EP.  It was released on July 9th, and you can check it out here: http://maddwikkid.bandcamp.com

Kickstarter is an amazing platform in that it not only facilitates fundraising, but it actually provides tools to build a community around a project.  I think it's a great way to go for just about anyone with a creative idea that they're passionate about.

Talk a bit about your background: I know you’re from New Orleans but how did you break into this sort of scene as an arranger and producer?

I’ve played and studied music since almost before I can remember.  I started piano lessons at age four.  As a teenager I played with a lot of different bands -  rock bands, funk bands, and I even played trumpet in a ska band, all while studying jazz performance, classical theory, and arranging.  Somewhere around that time I got into recording.

I never set out to be an engineer - it just sort of happened to me.  I started learning the art of recording as a means of making my own music, but it didn’t take long before other people started asking me to help them make their records.   As different projects would come along, I’d often end up wearing a lot of hats depending on what the artist needed.  They would sometimes need me to work as more of a producer, sometimes they’d need arrangements, sometimes I’d end up playing piano.  It all just happened very naturally.


You released your covers last year and they’ve blown up in the wake of Random Access Memories. Did you expect the hype to spill over into your cups, so to speak?

Not really.  As I was making the record, I found myself frustrated at several points with various delays.  Ultimately, because of the release of RAM, the timing worked out really well. It couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it. It would have been impossible to plan, really, but I’m certainly glad things happened the way they did.

You opened Day 2 of the Alabama Hangout Festival; what’s the most notable difference in terms of atmosphere when you play the jazz covers as opposed to (what you may assume) a dance party?

A lot more sandals, fewer glow sticks.  In either case there’s a lot of dancing.

Is the rest of RAM ripe for a Brassft Punk treatment?

Maybe at some point.  I think I’m going to branch out and do some other things in the immediate future, and maybe I’ll circle back around to Daft Punk after changing it up a bit for a couple of projects.

Would you cover other French house bands? Air or Justice might be candidates. I mean, I’d want to hear a jazz album about a half-man/half-car hybrid.

I wouldn’t rule it out.  Justice seems really appealing.  We’ll see...

Was there a hope from you or the band that Brassft Punk would be a gateway drug into New Orleans jazz, zydeco, etc?

I honestly never considered it until you asked this question.  You see, in New Orleans the music surrounds us and is an integral part of life.  For example when someone well-respected passes away, people show up at the funeral with instruments and play their hearts out.  It’s such a matter-of-fact part of daily life that I sometimes forget that there are, our course, people out there who might be unfamiliar with New Orleans music.  

Thinking about it now, if someone finds my project, and through it they discover New Orleans music... well, that’s a pleasant thought.  I think they’re in for a treat, and I’m glad I could help.

Does Brassft Punk hope to take on originals? Do you think there’s a future for house/brass band crossover?

I’m exploring a few options for Brassft Punk.  One I’ve been considering is changing the name to simply “Brassft” and expanding the repertoire.  There’s definitely huge potential for other intersections of brass bands and house, and I’m not the only one who sees the relationship.  

After I started Brassft Punk, someone brought to my attention a piece of art by Jeremy Deller called “History of the World.”  It was an installation at the Tate Modern for quite some time, and is essentially a flow chart connecting acid house and brass bands.  Perhaps there’s a whole new genre waiting to erupt.

If two Gallic robots shuffled down New Orleans way and asked for collaboration, you would…?

I’d have them over for gumbo, take them around town to experience New Orleans music in its natural habitat, and see where things go from there.

 

More Madd Wikkid - Facebook

My Resistance is Useless

It was important that I met my Hapkido instructor, Ken. He texted me after three or so reschedules to meet him at a little café down a tree-lined street. I entered the faux-vintage butcher shop, finding him underneath an old wooden staircase, slurping down pumpkin soup. It was strange to see him in “civvies” instead of his black and menacing gi. Tufts of chest hair were escaping the top of his grey shirt.

“How’s it goin’,” he said. I replied with something phatic. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin and took a deep breath.

“The ting is Tahm,” he spoke in brusque Irish, “you’ve got your orange belt now.” His next words were placed carefully.

“You’ve hit a plateau, I t’ink. Ye can make it to black belt but you’ve got t’ push harder.”

His words hung in the air for me. There was praise in there, but I thought it microscopic. The criticism loomed as high and wide as skyscrapers. We talked some more and as we waded through diet, exercise and new techniques for training, a wave of realization crashed on top of me.

My entire fucking life was plateauing.

His words weren’t one scrawled tag on a distant corner of a wall. It was like a building sat with more windows broken than not, cracking at the foundations. No hint of collapse, mind. It all seemed fine, but it wasn’t great.

The nucleus of my being lies with words I write. I’ve been doing it since I was a child, whether I acknowledge it or not. I keep green and black striped books filled with nonsense and dreams of movies that would never get made, let alone make sense (I don’t think anyone would pay to see a convoluted sci-fi version of Ocean’s Eleven.)  It all sort of flowed out of me until it all got deathly serious.

It didn’t get “deathly,” let alone “serious.” It just did in my head.

Of late, I noticed editors expressing displeasure with my work. “I’ll be honest, I don’t understand this,” said one. “This is so weighed down with poetry it doesn’t work,” noted another. “Your copy’s crisp but not concise,” scolded one more. I saw a few snide comments on my overzealous use of adjectives.

So I clicked through the jungles of Amazon for tips. The Art of Writing, by my childhood hero Ray Bradbury. Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I cracked open my Writing for Journalists and Subediting for Journalists again. Help! For Writers. Choose the Right Word. My confidence felt so shaken I had forgotten everything I’d learned. Maybe everything I learned was bunk anyhow. I felt boxed in and shut down.

But the cardboard box flaps were taped up by my mind. I was the one holding the masking tape over my own mouth, not someone else. On the verge of giving up, I arranged to see my shrink, Geoff.

I entered his office on a warm day. Outside, yellowing leaves of trees began to flutter to the ground. I sat on his sleek, modern rocking chair and blurted, “I don’t think my writing is any good.”

He stared. He stared some more. I looked around his room at his chipped wooden bookcase and wallpaper made of degrees and certificates. We both bobbed back and forth in silence. He was still staring at me.

“I dunno,” I murmured, “maybe I’m not being honest enough.”

He flashed a smile; a seasoned poker shark would have been at pains to see it. He earned his $120, right there.

A few weeks back at my men’s support group I said the same thing. “I don’t think my honesty is where it is. I’ve been holding shit in that doesn’t need to be.” A couple of years ago, I was losing friends faster than investors did money in BlackBerry. I didn’t care, because I was fucking honest. I wasn’t pretending, I wasn’t faking, and it was all 100% genuine. I was climbing heights I never dared climb because I dared to speak my mind. For the past year I’ve been zombie-walking through life. I’ve not felt the bone-quaking fear of telling the truth.

I’m not going to get shit right. I have to let that go. I’m really afraid of getting it wrong. My face will be lit for hours by a bluish MS Word page with nothing on it. I’m 730 words in and it’s taken me less than an hour because I’m not bullshitting myself. I triple-check every fact and figure that goes into my work; nothing is unverifiable or false there. This is my headline: no one can engage with my writing because it’s coming from a bullshit place.

People are bullshit detectors. They’ve been ferreting out bullshit since the dawn of time. You can see corners of eyes wrinkle and arms fold when people are hissing virtues of snake oil and carbon taxes. I feel like a fucking fraud hitting “send” on my shit of late because its trying to be something it’s not. “I wish I could be more like X,” I secretly wish to myself. “Then I’ll finally be great.” What the fuck for? Let X be X. I have to let me be me.

Salieri was all pissed off Mozart stole praise that was “rightly” his. Why? Because his soul was dog shit. It’s the whole reason he confessed to a priest, framing the entire fucking film. Salieri was fine being Salieri; he just had to accept the gifts Mozart bestowed to him and move the fuck on. Same goes for me.

It’s been two weeks since Ken told me what I needed to do. I hung up a punching bag on my rickety veranda, scared shitless it’ll collapse on me if I take too hard a swing. I go to the gym more often, eat less shit and run, run, run. But what about pushing that which is most vital to me, my writing? There’s no black belt for writing. I’m gonna aim for Grand Master anyway.

Cos You Don't Wanna Miss A Thing: Twitter, music and predicting the present

If it’s good for celebrities, it’s good for you too. Endowed with mystical properties making their eyes gleam and teeth porcelain, they’re just better than us in every conceivable way. If you can convince them that Twitter’s new Music app is useful, the unwashed masses will stream it on to their tablet as if it was mana from heaven.

Maybe not.

It does raise a question in this new age of music you rent in perpetuity; what use does this new Twitter app actually have?

Having read media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Present Shock, he posits that media-as-a-culture is no longer preoccupied with “futurism” but centred on “presentism.” We’re interested more on what’s happening now than contextualising our experiences as distinct from past and future. For example, Twitter is only useful in the now (not borrowing too heavily from Eckhart Tolle) losing worth as time elapses. Furthermore, the now is such a diffuse, high-level abstraction it’s like attempting to catch a mosquito with a pin and a thimble.

Consider the mathematical equation. An equation is an expression of variables of which one is unknown. The unknown variable is found using mathematical principles flowing forward in linear time, from A to B. The solution is clear cut.

In computing and information technology, programs and hardware are thought of as panaceas for “problems” it’s not uncommon terming them “solutions.” These "problems" are not structural, i.e, the problem is not the inability to arrive at an unknown variable. The majority of problems lie in not getting it fast, cheaply or efficiently enough to stay relevant in the "now."

Simply, what problem does twitter’s music app actually solve?

It doesn’t solve anything – for the consumer. In the age of the present, app developers aren’t savvy problem solvers, they’re actually problem finders. They convince the market that there exists a problem, contend to have solved it and profit handsomely.

Apps such as Pocket or Evernote, as useful as they are, “solved” the problem of keeping track of links or writing notes previously inaccessible on one device when they were stored on another. There was nothing structurally wrong or overly inefficient with say, writing notes on pads of paper. Solutions readily existed.

Apps exist on your phone to solve problems that weren't problems until "realising" they plagued you. Not knowing the name of the song playing at the pub by Journey was never a life-threatening predicament, yet Shazam solves that problem for you. Easy.

But it cannily it does purport to have discovered a problem. Twitter is in the process of convincing us that emerging and popular trends in music are so complex and so amorphous you need an app to navigate this ever-changing terrain of current music. The problem is that you’re lagging behind what’s cool and what’s about to be cool. The solution is this app. Get it now, bask in the electronic water of fleeting musical omniscience.

Except this app wasn’t designed with you in mind. It’s another column in a vast data set powering predictive analytics. It tracks, in real-time, the influence of users and who is being influenced. What the influence channels users towards, and so on. Spotify and Rdio’s blindspots in terms of creating accurate big data sets is they don’t know who influenced what music is being played at any given time, nor to what level. No one gives a shit about your shitty indie band unless someone gives you a reason. Sometimes that reason is none other than “who” rather than “why.”

The dimension for the data set for playing Belinda Carlisle 40 times in a row is discrete and limited. Spotify will know I love Belinda Carlisle. If an external force influenced me, it has no real way of gleaning that information unless I directly clicked a link to the track from a certain page or twitter feed.

By using Twitter’s new music app, Spotify, etc. can track the locus of the influence. Music companies can make safer bets on pushing artists ahead of time. The guesswork on releasing a hit isn’t eliminated but it’s significantly reduced, again. Why sign ten acts to yield one hit when signing two or three definite winners is possible?

It does solve a very real problem, and that problem lies in the A&R departments at the major labels. The jump in music sales, the first time it’s done so in over a decade, is partially due to this new "taxi fare" or pay as the meter's running model. How does an exec fire up the sales from a simmer to roaring boil? You glean better data from more sources and tailor your strategies to the analytics.

So can this Twitter app really tell us what is really hot right now? Without the mind of Nate Silver and the processing power of CERN at my disposal, I don’t know. And neither do you.

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Read more: My post on the Spotify (counter-)revolution.