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: Kaki King
Song: Yellowcake
From album: …Until We Felt Red
Genre: Gossamer Acoustic Core
[Buy Until We Felt Red|Itunes Mp3s][Website]

The voice here is from the ghost of a baby bird, and the music is her afterlife-song about a dimly-recalled tragedy of life. To be fair though, she doesn’t remember it as tragic. In fact, with the haziness of the ethereal curtain it seems almost a blissful memory. The earth was giant golden waves of grain, and the sky a brilliant burst of indigo. There was warmth and comfort and a gentle slide into oblivion. Soon everything melts together in a glowing orange hum.

Now she goes around to other ghosts to tell them that there is another world out there, of indescribable beauty, maybe someday they will be able to see it.

Kaki King is apparently rather famous, if appearing on Letterman or Conan is a measure of anything, but I’m slow ok. One thing you should notice when you listen to this song and then watch those videos is that they are completely different. In the videos she is a virtuoso knife-fighter, amazing to watch and completely untouchable. In the song, she’s reaching out with worn and wizened hands to explain to you what she’s learned in her whirlwind fighting career.

I very much enjoy her previous albums for impressive guitaristry and sense of melodic beauty, but the new album: “…Until We Felt Red” is what you might call a horse of a different color. For one thing, there are other instruments in this cd, and a sense of experimental composition that even verges on postrockishness at points. It feels like she is satisfied with the heights she has attained, and can now feel free to relax and make things that interest her currently. For another thing, there is occasional singing which is the last clue that she is moving from technical to personal.

Overall I recommend all of her albums if you like any of this. Check out more videos on youtube, listen to the songs on herspace (especially the song “until we felt red”), and then buy everything! It’s all quality in my opinion.

Artist: The Great Rollingflower
Song: Yogi Tea
From album: Pop Cuts In Sensations
Genre: Rolling Jam Wave
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

Since I’ve never been surfing I can imagine The Great Rollingflower is like riding a smooth blue, crystal-clear wave that never ends. Well eventually it ends, but not with a mouthful of saltwater; and it probably won’t give you much of a tan either.

This song undulates like a wave though, like a series of waves really, peaks and troughs. It seems to work particularly well if you aren’t concentrating on it, seeping like salt air into your surroundings.

You will also find quite a few mp3s from live jam sessions on their website.

Artist: Takagi Masakatsu
Song: Girls
[Buy CDs/DVDs|itunes][Artist’s Site]

Found via “Film. Music. Philosophy.”, Takagi Masakatsu has instantly become one of my top favorite multimedia artists. He paints with video, over it, through it, around and into it. Watching his incredible moving paintings is like seeing into a world of true forms. In his world, everything is literally burning with life and color and emotional essence; the sky, the wind, everything. It’s all more real than one could imagine.

The miraculous movement and flow of his works is wrapped up in what he calls the missing color of sound; the expressive ambient musical compositions he writes for each piece. The song in this post is “girls” from his album “Coieda”.

Despite the Macsturbatory propaganda, the Apple Pro video piece on him is of a very good quality, and shows some excellent samples of his work. In this PopJam interview he talks a bit about his art, and there are several other nice clips, though at a much lower resolution. His own site has many many large stills from the works as well.

Simply put, this stuff is effing gorgeous. Links: [1][2][3][4][5]

Artist: Maps & Atlases
Song: Every Place is a House
From album: Tree, Swallows, Houses
Genre: Prodigy Taprock
[Buy CD $7.99|Mp3s][Website]

Maps & Atlases is what I might consider a very promising band, which I say probably because I like every one of their songs. There’s virtuoso guitar workmanship, creative melodic phrasing, unique vocal style, impeccable mathish and indieward sensibilities, a penchant for occasional employment of artful restraint, and all that other jargony blah blah.

What it boils down to is that they are consistently interesting; their songs are individual to an extent that hints at a large available reservoir of creativity. I’m definitely looking forward to more from these guys.

Also, you should listen to “The Ongoing Horrible” on their myspace page if you want to get an idea of the variety that they are capable of, even now in their first release.

Artist: zOoOoOm
Song: Rumble Bush
From album: Eight My Heart
Genre: Twitterfrolica
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

It seems that this song could have been recorded live over the course of a day, through the woods and streams of some sunny make-believe world. The sound crew would have followed the singer, this adorably frisky woodland nymphish creature, as she gallivanted and cavorted, cartwheeled and marched around her hilly countryside domain.

Sounds and words burst out spontaneously as little yelps and yells of discovery and curiosity, with occasional meandering musings on general jubilation. The overall result is a mood of frivolously innocent intensity and inescapable glow.

Artist: Hearts of Black Science
Song: Empty City Lights
From album: Promo 2006
Genre: “Pure Electro Gonzo”
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

This song reminds me of the feeling of waking up before sunrise. It’s a brisk autumn morning with a quick breakfast and an early start on a road trip in the imminent future. It’s a quiet inkling somewhere in your chest that there’s new excitement brewing.

You hit the road in the golden hour, and colors look more real than ever, as if the world was newly washed during the night. Falling leaves seem frozen with fire; everything drips with electricity and a feeling of anticipation tinged with melancholy. The wind whipping past you is cool and filled with abandon; and it floods the car with memories.

Hearts of Black Science is another good myspace find. The songs are lacquered with a restrained but deeply-present darkish sheen. It may be elusive at first glance, so you might have to look twice to see the true colors. Their influences range from Ladytron to Darkthrone, but what they come up with seems distinctly and un-self-consciously their own.

So basically Microsoft lost a lawsuit against a company called Eolas a long time ago; and now, unless you change your code and upload a certain script to your root directory, your Interactive Flash won’t work and will just look like a static image. Of course, if you hold your mouse over it for 2 seconds you’ll get a little “Click to activate and use this control” message, which effectively murders the convenience of the single click concept. This pleases me to no end, since it means I must change the code in every one of my music posts, and in doing so, manage to lose the review for Tokyo Police Club!

Apparently I missed the early warnings, so this issue seems to have only taken effect for me recently, like today? I have been able to use single clicks when checking in other browsers until recently. I did update Opera yesterday, so that might have kicked it in, but suddenly the problem is showing up in Firefox and IE as well, and on other computers, so I don’t know…

This is very excellent because it seems to mean that every piece of Flash and/or embedded media on the internet must be changed! The community is being brought together on a global scale by magnificent annoyance!

If you are having problems with embedded media doing this in your own sites, the following links have a few different fixes to the problem, which will allow you to configure your own content to bypass this little problem:

[“Quick and dirty” fix for “Click to activate and use this control” problem]
[Macromedia Flash Specific (and much more complicated) solution]
[Adobe article with another solution]

I used the first one, since WordPress apparently has issues with the Macromedia way, and the first solution is way easier anyway…
If you have any problems, just comment and let me know, and I’ll try to help you out.

Happy Fixing! (I’m not the only one having this issue right?!)