My Dear Disco

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Posted: 07/03/08

 

By Maggie Peterson
Graphic Staff Writer

It was hard for My Dear Disco to categorize their music, so they came up with a word for it -- dancethink.
The up-and-coming Ann Arbor-based group combines eclectic musical backgrounds and instruments into dancethink music, which is music for your feet and your brain. The group will be performing at Blissfest.
Bagpipe player, songwriter and founding member Tyler Duncan chatted with The Graphic about starting the group, what dancethink music is all about and some of the band's upcoming plans.

Graphic: You are a founding member of My Dear Disco. Why did you want to start this group?
Duncan: Well, first it started with the idea of having an instrumental band with a computer and sort of live techno drum and bass music with Irish bagpipes as the lead instrument because that was my background. As a child (I) was playing Irish bagpipes oddly enough. And so I started it out with that and it accrued members and went from being a three piece to a five piece and then eventually a six piece. And then our guitarist, Bob Lester, is an electronic musician, and he did a track with a singer. When we all heard the singer we were blown away, blown to bits, and that happened to be Michelle Chamuel. And then very quickly we found a way to get her to start singing in the band. So where it is now is definitely different than the way I envisioned it three years ago, which is when I started the very first grouping, which was called Toolbox. But it's been, the entire time, the thread of continuity has been making live dance music with a band that can really do justice to the way a largely recorded format works live because it lives in the hands of DJs most of the time. And kind of recreating that energy and that pulse live, but then applying all of our experiences and other kinds of music -- jazz, rock, funk and stuff -- into that sort of canvas of techno-y dance music.

G: You guys have got a pretty eclectic mix of instruments, like you were mentioning the bagpipes, and a didgeridoo. How'd you come up with that arrangement?
D: These are things that -- we want to make it interesting, keep it fresh for the audience and for ourselves, and it just happens that we have a band of musicians from some pretty eclectic backgrounds so we can just utilize those pretty easily, and say "Hey, why don't you bring that other thing you play? We'll use that on this tune" ... and then, there it is. We've got that happening.

G: How do you characterize your music?
D: We call it -- we decided because there are so many influences and it's getting harder and harder these days because all music seems to become an amalgamation ... We decided just to eliminate that and call it dancethink music, because it's a description of our music and it's also kind of a goal for our music at the same time. Dancethink music to us would be, I guess in the shortest way, it's about having music that's as good on the dance floor as it is in headphones, and striving to find that balance of music that's going to make you want to get up and it's also going to want to make you take that album home and enjoy it just as much when you're sitting down and really just taking in all the various subtleties and nuances. And obviously there can be a lot of kinds of music like that, you know? For some people it's Latin jazz makes them want to dance and go home. For us, the way we come up with dancethink music is through our influences in techno and drum and bass, and dance music and combining that with the aesthetic of composition and jazz and utilizing some of those more nuanced compositional approaches and songwriting and telling a story in there through the lyrics. So that would be the think aspect I guess of our music.

G: What are some of your influences when you're songwriting?
D: If I were to be specific, I think we are all very influenced by Michael Jackson because we all grew up listening to him when we were little kids. And then Stevie Wonder, Daft Punk, Cornelius, that's a Japanese pop musician, Brazilian Girls were a big influence, the New York band ... If someone were to listen to our music they could hear bits and pieces of all those artists in there.

G: What are some of your future plans?
D: Wow. Well, we're currently looking at releasing a full-length album, and that's a pretty big project right now. We're working on getting it mixed by an engineer in New York called Mike Saunders, who is a Grammy award-winning engineer. He mixed The Cure's record and Shiny Toy Guns record and he's a really fantastic engineer. And so we've been in touch with his studio and sending in mixes and working on stuff together, so that's a big part of our plan right now, just to get that happening. We're touring a lot this summer, playing all those festivals and venues ... including Blissfest, Hoxeyville, Dunegrass. We're playing the AE New (American) Music Festival with Bob Dylan and The Roots and all those guys which is really, really a great opportunity. So between gigs, getting a full-length out, we're looking at getting our music into licensing and commercials or movies. That's a really great avenue of income these days. So I think it's all striving for making the band a means of making a living right now. We're just building it from the ground up.

My Dear Disco will be performing Saturday and Sunday, July 12-13, at Blissfest. For more information and ticket information, visit www.blissfest.org or call (231) 347-7047.

Maggie Peterson can be contacted at 439-9397, or mpeterson@petoskeynews.com.