INTERVIEW: THE GLITCH MOB ~ AFTER THE FACT
The Los Angeles-based electronic music production collective The Glitch Mob just recently finished up their first national tour in support of their debut album, Drink The Sea, which is really amazing. Shortly before their North American tour came to an end we caught up wit Boreta to talk about the group, the new album, the tour, and their fans. Starting in July The Glitch Mob head over-seas for a European tour.
La Famiglia – How did the three of you coming together as a group come about?
Boreta – Well essentially we all live in Los Angeles now, I used to live in San Francisco, and there sort of a West Coast underground music scene that we were all performing in as individual DJs. We were actually friends before we decided to do anything together. At one point we just decided to as opposed to just performing as the traditional one guy in front of the crowd DJ thing we decided to try it together. It started as a really fun experience so we just took it from there.
La Famiglia – Collectively as a group, what would you say some of your musical backgrounds are?
Boreta – I don’t think that necessarily there is one major influence that we all have in common because we have very diverse backgrounds. I guess what I could say is that at the time that we formed the group, what we shared in common from our past was a very strong love for hip hop, underground hip hop. Sort of classic era hip-hop. When we were all growing up in high school I think we were all big fans of stuff like that, rap and punk. But we all come from a very musical background as far as growing up around different kinds of music.
La Famiglia – When you sat to write this album what was the groups focus and ideas behind it all?
Boreta – We had been messing around with a lot of ideas for quite a while. I would say for about a year. We had been doing remixes and getting ideas for how we wanted the album to sound like. Prior to writing the album we would do this stake where we would all write a song everyday for a month at a time and put them in a shared folder then go back and listen to them and just toss out sketches here and there. But when we finally sat down to write the album we threw all that out the window and started from scratch.
We really thought about it a lot in the conception stage. Previously we had been doing a lot of remixes, a lot of singles, and more dance oriented stuff. And we decided we wanted to make an album that was in more of a listening stage, a collection that all bled together as like a full album. So the concept behind it was that we had a single emotion or feeling behind each song that we wanted to express. So we started with a really basic feeling and then wrote sketches of the song.
La Famiglia – Have you guys talked about the next project?
Boreta – Yeah, we’re starting to conceive of how that is going to come together and we are going to do things a different way this time. We like to experiment and try new things. When we do that we are going to travel and rent a house somewhere to write the album, get out of L.A., and try something different.
La Famiglia – How do you feel the fans have perceived the album?
Boreta – They’ve been really perceptive and supportive. I think that there’s been a lot of people that have been surprised where we took the album. I wouldn’t say that it is a major departure from what we’ve done in the past. But it’s enough of a departure that there were some fans that were surprised and confused because we’ve done a lot of more dance oriented tracks in the past. Not to say that it’s not a dancey album, but it’s definitely more on the listening side of things. But overall the response has been great.
La Famiglia – is there anything that you would like to know from a fan or listener’s perspective, what are some things that you would really appreciate hearing from a fan?
Boreta – I can speak for all of us, we all really like getting notes and messages from fans about how they hear the music and what it means to them. It’s always really interesting because we try to not spell out what the songs mean. It’s really fascinating to hear from people. Like yesterday on Twitter some girl wrote us and said that the song “Bad Wing” was helping to heal her broken heart. That’s the best part of this whole thing. Hearing how it inspires and helps people. We love hearing that stuff.
La Famiglia – Is there anything that the media has not really gave you a chance to touch bas on that you would like to relate to people?
Boreta – I think something that we like to touch on in our personal discussions is that even if people hear this album and don’t like it, but they’ve been a fan in the past, we’ve still have a lot of love for them. We’re just doing our thing and telling our story. We’re not trying to be a certain leader of any genre or movement with this project. We’re just telling our story and that’s the heart of it.
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