All my creative energy is going into work at the moment, and having co-won a recent contest at StG I thought it might be beneficial to re-invest my winnings in a contest here.

I have been meaning for a while to come up with some interesting interview questions to submit to bands, finding the traditional gamut of queries to be rather dull and moth-eaten so to speak:

“So, who are your musical influences?”
“Well, um.. we pretty much create music purely from the ether… b-but we do like the Cure and Iron Maiden.”
“Wow, so do I! O-ok, how did you guys meet?”
“Well, we met in highschool… and just uh, decided to play music… from boredom.”
“Great!… Highschool!… Wow…”
“Yeah.”
“Well… thanks for coming out guys! Great talking to you!”
“Word.”

So the object of this contest is to come up with a list of interesting interview questions that I will try to submit to various bands/artists that I post about.

The questions can be eclectic, eccentric, or bizarre, but they should be thoughtful and creative, not just silly or random. The real goal of the questions themselves should be to provoke and elicit emotional and thoughtful replies from people instead of lists, like in the case of: “What are your favorite bands/movies/artists/etc.” or bland historical facts as in: “how old were you guys when you first met”.

I want as much as possible to cull the possibility of automatic, trite, or memorized responses, and instead try to give no escape to those interviewed except through genuine introspection and/or creative improvisation. Since these interviews will be conducted electronically for the most part, they will have time to think about their answers without the pressure of an immediate response.

So here are the basic requirements:

Come up with a list of thoughtful, intriguing, unusual questions.

Make the questions applicable to anyone, not just people in bands.

Try to make questions that elicit a genuine personal/creative response.

Post your submissions in the comments or email them to: interviewcontest at reduin.com

And everything else is up to you. This contest will go on as long as it has to, but I will tentatively set the end date as October 1st, 2006. If I haven’t found enough by that time I will extend the contest. Send as many questions as you like, ask your friends and lovers for ideas, ask a hobo, the more the merrier (especially since I don’t have a ton of visitors), but don’t just crank out quantity over quality; remember, these should be difficult but interesting to answer.

Whoever sends the most questions that make it into the final list wins the contest and shall receive Sub Pop Records promo-pack of: Chad VanGaalen‘s album Skelliconnection, a Sub Pop sampler with actually a lot of good songs, a few stickers, and a Chad VanGaalen button (all pictured above). If by some unforeseen happenstance this is not your idea of a party, fear not! The REAL reward will be discovering how various artists and musicians from all over the world will answer YOUR marvelous and fascinating questions!

Everyone is a winner. Let’s go! ????~~~~~?

Artist: OMR
Song: Stood the Test of Time
From album: Superheroes Crash
Genre: Quiet Altsynth
[Buy this album][Site]

I imagine this song as a dark-haired girl, sort of shy and unassuming. She’s at a point in her life where she’s going to clubs to be alone. She’ll linger in a dim corner and try with all her might to absorb some kind of meaning from the tide of feelings and perceptions that make up her reality. If you catch a glimpse of her, she’ll be looking straight through you. Some faces bid, “come hither” but hers says, “do you see?“

Artist: At Dusk
Song: In the Background
From album: You Can Know Danger
Genre: Wandery Tumblechordia
[Buy this album][Site]

Good day mateys, and welcome back I say. Today you are getting a deftly stumbling gait of a song. It starts on a morning of typically spanking newness, but soon you’ll realize that it has plans to use its day off for supremely venturous exploits; certain endeavorous enterprises. The sounds, they gallop from cobbleystoned neighborhood streets to wide nature roads with airy space that you can hear and feel. They round a corner and suddenly dive into a somersault at the end of which they jump up, and into the air in a, “reaching for the sky” position with a twist that gets a cumulative 9.5 from the judges.

What I want to say is that the song feels like a rapturously restless amble through everyday spaces and feelings. The kind of feelings that are only possible in the amalgam of remembering certain days of intense living. Maybe then you were wrapped up in heartbreaky drama, but looking back you just remember it as a sort of sepia tone mixed with the feeling of the sun against your skin. It’s an odyssey that feels like it should end with you, exhausted and glowing, sauntering into a convenience mart for a catharctic frozen beverage of your own design.

You can download this song and its 9 brothers and sisters and more than several cousins on their site. And soon you can also buy it, on everyone’s favorite anthropomorphized music buying place, cd baby. Perfect for anthropomorphized songs I would imagine.