Monday, November 1, 2010

Sepiachord: An interview with the band by A.E. Flint

Another excellent interview by A. E. Flint with the people from our community that make up Sepiachord.  I should have posted this one earlier, but was too busy with some of our own projects to read the interview in depth enough to decide whether or not to mention it here.  It definitely deserves a look, so here is a short excerpt from the interview, just to wet your appetite.


What exactly is Sepiachord?
Mr B: Sepiachord itself is a genre of music that we describe like this:
“Sepiachord is the “genre that doesn’t exist”.
It is to music what “steampunk” is to literature and cinema: something that looks back to the past to comment on the present while looking sideways at the future. A cubist aural experience.
As goth & glam are the bastards of David Bowie, Sepiachord is the made from the genetic material sown by Tom Waits.
Sepiachord is assembled like a clockwork orchestra, from such elements of music
 Sinister Circus, Cabaret Macabre, Chamber Pop, Organic Goth, Celtic/Gypsy Punk, Mutant Americana, Ghost Town Country
It is the music our grandparents or great-grandparents would have listened to, if they were as off-set as we are.”
When it comes to Sepiachord.com the best thing to compare it to is music zine. We do interviews, record/cd reviews, show reviews, post photo essays and the like. The intent was for it to be a music portal for fans to find bands, for bands to find fans and for bands to find out that they weren’t alone, that there were other weird bands out there that they could work with to build a web of performers. To me Sepiachord.com succeeded the first time a musician informed that they met with other folks they created music with through Sepiachord.
We’ve been called “The Rolling Stone of Steampunk” but I really think we’re closer to a “Maximum Rock and Roll of Steampunk”.
Still I didn’t think anybody was really interested in what we were doing until I got the first CD in the mail that was sent to us for review (as opposed to us reviewing things that we had purchased). So a big nod of thanks to Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys for helping me realize that I wasn’t nuts.
The goal of Sepiachord was not to have anything to sell. We didn’t want volks to think that they had to buy something to be involved. But we’d be places handing out free stickers and pins to people and they all wanted to get there hands on a CD so they could have a palpable *something* to help them connect. At the same time musicians were asking us to put a CD out to help build this community.
We caved.
At first we put out a free comp CD (“The Sepiachord Field Guide Vol I”) that we made by hand & just gave away (Jennifer designed the packaging and assembled them all herself, our cohort Chris Roy did the remixing and I did the organization & producing). We quickly realized that we couldn’t keep up with demand and that burning of 200+ cds was killing my computer. We had to do one that we had to sell if we wanted to make people happy. That lead to “The Sepiachord Companion” which was released via Devil’s Ruin Records.
Now we’ve just released “A Sepiachord Passport” on seminal indie label Projekt Records.

 The full interview (also a review of their latest album) is available at Ms. Flint's blog at:  

http://trialbysteam.com/2010/10/23/an-interview-with-sepiachord/

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