Interview - echostream - NekoCon 2008
During their appearance at NekoCon, the members of echostream sat down with us to answer a few questions.
WOLR: Can you guys introduce yourselves for us?
Tony: Hi, we’re echostream.
WOLR: ......Yeah. Alright. (all laugh)
Tony: Hi, I’m Tony. I’m the leader, keyboard player, and producer for echostream.
C.J.: Hey, I’m C.J. I play electronic drums and wacky sounds.
Ryoko: Hi, I’m Ryoko. I am the singer.
Tomo: Hi, I’m Tomo. I’m the guitarist.
Jen: Hi, I’m Jen. I’m the acoustic drummer.
WOLR: How are you guys enjoying NekoCon ’08 so far?
Tony: It’s awesome!
C.J.: I’m loving it.
Ryoko, Tomo, Jen: It’s great.
WOLR: Is there anything in particular you’d like to do here at the con, aside from your concert, of course?
Tony: I always enjoy looking at the costumes. It’s so far been very very cool.
C.J.: Video games.
All: Oh yeah!
Tony: But they close the video games at one, so we gotta get there quick.
C.J.: (dejected) Oh yeah.
Tony: That’s too early [to close].
WOLR: Maybe they’ll keep it open just for you guys.
C.J.: I doubt it. (all laugh)
WOLR: How did you guys come to meet each other and decide to form echostream?
Tony: Ryoko and I met in London in 1997 and moved to Japan in 1999 and started working on music in Japan. We picked up Tomo along the way in Japan and were working on some other bands with him as well. Then we moved back to America in 2004 and encouraged Tomo to move back around 2006. Then Jen and C.J. joined the band; Jen was first, then got C.J. on board as well. Basically I just tricked everybody into forming a band with me.
WOLR: That’s an awesome way to form a band: through trickery!
Tony: (laughs evilly)
WOLR: Your songs, most if not all of them, are very sad and poignant, yet still with an edge of rock. How difficult is it to reconcile both the sorrowful and the edgy?
Tony: Not difficult at all, actually. It’s difficult for me to write happy music, so these are the songs just kind of come naturally. I’ve worked other artists and sometimes they’re like, ‘oh, let’s do something different’, and that’s really difficult. echostream has progressed from the first album to the second album and into the future we’ve got some definite ideas of where we’re going with our music. For me, the biggest thing is to keep changing it up every time. So, balancing everything like you’re talking about the edge and the sadness and all that, the first album it’s a lot more sadness and overall more of a chilled out album until the end of it. This album I see as a continuation of that; where that was going this has come to, the Duality of Courage, our second album. It’s actually got a lot more of Tomo’s involvement and Jen and the whole band has come together a lot more for the second album, whereas the first album was mostly me and Ryoko working on a lot of songs together. The second album has become more of a band experience, and so balancing that we’ve got the darker parts, but all of us in the band enjoy the duality of offsetting the heavy stuff with the darker, more chilled out stuff. So it’s.....difficult’s not the word. (laughs)
WOLR: That’s interesting. So, would you ever write a happy song like as a gag? Or a hidden track on a future album?
Tony: Oh yeah; I don’t know if you’re ever gonna hear it. (all laugh)
WOLR: I’d like to ask about your look. You don’t look like a typical band...not that that’s a bad thing! It’s a good thing! You each have your own style that just happens to match. Is there any reason in particular why you don’t go for a more uniform look?
Tony: That’s actually something we talk about a lot. As you may know, we come from different backgrounds; I’m more of the electronic background and classical. Ryoko also has a very classical background and electronic as well. Jen and C.J. are more from the heavier rock side of things, Lamb of God, stuff like that. Tomo has been in a lot of visual kei bands, some very famous bands; he’s brought in the visual aspect of things a lot more because for me, I’ve always been into Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy, stuff like that where they definitely get up on stage in white powder and stuff like that, but that’s like your normal Goth fare. And all I ever said was I just wanted everyone to be in darker colors, which is pretty easy for us. (all laugh)
C.J.: Yeah, I wear black most of the time anyway.
Tony: But other than that, I’m not really into visual kei so much, so I try not to have a uniform look to it. But Tomo is definitely in charge of helping to unify the look of the band. And when it comes to the makeup, we have a makeup artist we work with, Mariko; she’s been working with us for a little while and Tomo and Ryoko help her guide the look of the band.
C.J.: I think the individuality of dressing goes with the music, too. Like the music doesn’t fit a category, but we come together as a band, so it kinda works.
WOLR: Yeah, it works very well from what I’ve seen. You’re already a unique group, but you go a step further and have two drummers. Why two drummers?
C.J.: Two’s better than one. (all laugh)
Tony: You can never have too many drummers! I wanna start beating things on stage, too.
C.J.: Actually, Tony had a project called Unknown Frequency that he was gonna try and bring back over here and start doing stuff with and I was going to play acoustic drums for that. But he decided to focus all his attention on echostream and said, 'I've already got you on board, and we’ve got the first album, so why don’t you learn the tracks and you can play the sequence parts from the album live’. I’d never done anything like that before and I said ‘wow, so I get to be like a human drum machine, basically’. Everything that’s on the album you just break up and every song is different so I’ll have vocals in some parts and I’ll have actual drums, so it was a challenge, something that I said, ‘yeah, cool! Let’s do it!’
Jen: He gets all the cool parts. (all laugh)
Tony: He gets very excited about this geeky stuff! We now know who the geek in the band is. (all laugh)
C.J.: Besides you. (more laughs)
Tomo: We are more like an electronic rock band and we just want to play as much as we can. So we don’t want to play just a sequence during a show; we’re playing a while sound.
Jen: We all come from backgrounds based around live performance so it’s very important for us.
Tony: Yeah, the live aspect is the most important thing for us. Ryoko and I come from really heavy classical backgrounds and Jen has a jazz background and C.J.’s got classical, and Tomo’s been playing in bands for years that don’t have any sequences. So, to make what’s very electronic work out, we could just work with a sequencer and push ‘Play’ and it’d be okay, but it’s just so much cooler; even if we played the exact same song with C.J. or without C.J. it’s always cooler to play it with C.J. playing drums. Even if he were to play everything perfectly, exactly how it’s recorded there’s just something that you’re getting there because the rhythm has slightly changed because you’ve added the human element. Even when I’m programming a lot of stuff in the studio I don’t like to just lock everything in like a machine because you get that human element that is really what we try to go for on stage.
WOLR: So it adds more emotion to the music.
C.J.: (nods) Besides the visual aspect.
Tony: Yeah. It’s been a challenge, though. I mean, two drummers and everything.
Jen: Yeah, I think it took us a little while to get used to it.
Tony: It took us a long time to get the technical stuff set up, too. What you’re seeing when you see us play is REALLY....I’ve been developing this kind of setup for the past five or six years, even before echostream started performing live in America it was Unknown Frequency who had very similar stuff.
WOLR: Wow, that is really interesting! I was not expecting that answer. I was expecting more like C.J.’s first answer. (all laugh) I asked this of Jen and Tomo earlier this year at Otakon, but I’d like to get everyone’s answer to this: who or what was the inspiration for you to begin a career in music?
Tony: Well, y’all go first and let’s see if the answers are still the same. It’s a quiz, you better know what you said last time (all laugh)
Jen: Well, I started playing in elementary school and I really liked it, but it wasn’t until I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, I saw Dave Grohl’s hair going all over the place and I was like, ‘I have to do that!’
Tony: How old were you?
Jen: ........
WOLR: Who’s giving the interview? (all laugh)
Tony: She’s the baby of the band. She keeps our average age down. (all laugh)
Tomo: I like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Bjork. And also HIDE from X Japan because I really respect what he had done; and also he came to America and worked with some American bands.
Ryoko: I like Tori Amos, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Sigur Ros.
C.J.: As far as what inspired me to start playing music, I really don’t know; it just kind of found me. I started when I was ten years old. I mean, you always bang pots and pans when you’re a drummer, take forks and spoons and knives from the kitchen table and get yelled at, but one day, like Jen, I was in elementary school I went to the school programmer and I said I wanted to play drums. Something in my head one day just clicked and that’s what I wanted to do; ever since then I just kept playing. As far as musical influences, bands that I like, it’s a pretty broad range of bands; I can go from house to techno to reggae, ska, you can throw in death metal, black metal; I’m all across the board. It’s hard to pick, but I can pick and choose from each category, which helps me as a musician because you have to keep your mind open and you become a better player because you absorb so much more. If you keep your mind closed you’ll be in this one section, but if you have a broader range you have more of an arsenal so you can expand yourself and expand yourself musically.
Tony: I come from a musical family...kind of...my mom was a pianist, so I’ve always been around that and started playing piano when I was eight; I hated it. When I was in high school I got into bands like Skinny Puppy and that blew my mind wide open; before that I’d only heard hip-hop, Led Zeppelin, and classical music, then I heard Skinny Puppy. Then I saw their live shows and I was like, ‘I wanna do that’; I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a live show of Skinny Puppy’s like their older live shows, but it’s basically a theatrical performance. So that’s what got me into electronic music was Skinny Puppy and seeing what you can do with electronics. It just kind of kept going from there.
WOLR: Going from the past to the future, are you guys working on a new album at all?
Tony: We have plans.
WOLR: That’s all you’re gonna say, isn’t it?
All nod
WOLR: That works, that’s fair enough (laughs) Where are guys headed next in terms of live shows after NekoCon?
Tony: We’ve got a bit of a break until January; we’ve got a show at the end of January in Albany, New York. Then after that we have a couple shows lined up for February...which I can’t talk about. But that will be pretty cool. Next year, we’ve got a couple things on the table, but mostly it’s just too far off right now to have any definite answers, but for right now this is our last event for the year, then take some time off. I’ve just revealed a small part of the plan.
WOLR: Do you have anything you’d like to say to your fans? (awkward silence) No one at all? (all laugh)
C.J.: Well, thank you! We come to shows and sometimes there are people sitting outside in the pouring rain in garbage bags just waiting to see us, sleeping outside overnight. So, yes, thank you very much to everyone. We love you guys, and stick with us: we’re gonna be here for as long as you want us here.
Tony: Probably longer *all laugh* Whenever we go to any conventions, we love to meet the fans. We love to hear the stories, we love to know you. It helps us, so don’t be afraid to say hi. If you see us don’t be shy. I know sometimes people are shy; I’m shy.
C.J.: You? (all laugh)
Tony: I’m shy!
C.J.: You’re funny. (more laughs)
Thank to NekoCon and echostream.
Interview and Photos by Mistress Mu.
WOLR: Can you guys introduce yourselves for us?
Tony: Hi, we’re echostream.
WOLR: ......Yeah. Alright. (all laugh)
Tony: Hi, I’m Tony. I’m the leader, keyboard player, and producer for echostream.
C.J.: Hey, I’m C.J. I play electronic drums and wacky sounds.
Ryoko: Hi, I’m Ryoko. I am the singer.
Tomo: Hi, I’m Tomo. I’m the guitarist.
Jen: Hi, I’m Jen. I’m the acoustic drummer.
WOLR: How are you guys enjoying NekoCon ’08 so far?
Tony: It’s awesome!
C.J.: I’m loving it.
Ryoko, Tomo, Jen: It’s great.
WOLR: Is there anything in particular you’d like to do here at the con, aside from your concert, of course?
Tony: I always enjoy looking at the costumes. It’s so far been very very cool.
C.J.: Video games.
All: Oh yeah!
Tony: But they close the video games at one, so we gotta get there quick.
C.J.: (dejected) Oh yeah.
Tony: That’s too early [to close].
WOLR: Maybe they’ll keep it open just for you guys.
C.J.: I doubt it. (all laugh)
WOLR: How did you guys come to meet each other and decide to form echostream?
Tony: Ryoko and I met in London in 1997 and moved to Japan in 1999 and started working on music in Japan. We picked up Tomo along the way in Japan and were working on some other bands with him as well. Then we moved back to America in 2004 and encouraged Tomo to move back around 2006. Then Jen and C.J. joined the band; Jen was first, then got C.J. on board as well. Basically I just tricked everybody into forming a band with me.
WOLR: That’s an awesome way to form a band: through trickery!
Tony: (laughs evilly)
WOLR: Your songs, most if not all of them, are very sad and poignant, yet still with an edge of rock. How difficult is it to reconcile both the sorrowful and the edgy?
Tony: Not difficult at all, actually. It’s difficult for me to write happy music, so these are the songs just kind of come naturally. I’ve worked other artists and sometimes they’re like, ‘oh, let’s do something different’, and that’s really difficult. echostream has progressed from the first album to the second album and into the future we’ve got some definite ideas of where we’re going with our music. For me, the biggest thing is to keep changing it up every time. So, balancing everything like you’re talking about the edge and the sadness and all that, the first album it’s a lot more sadness and overall more of a chilled out album until the end of it. This album I see as a continuation of that; where that was going this has come to, the Duality of Courage, our second album. It’s actually got a lot more of Tomo’s involvement and Jen and the whole band has come together a lot more for the second album, whereas the first album was mostly me and Ryoko working on a lot of songs together. The second album has become more of a band experience, and so balancing that we’ve got the darker parts, but all of us in the band enjoy the duality of offsetting the heavy stuff with the darker, more chilled out stuff. So it’s.....difficult’s not the word. (laughs)
WOLR: That’s interesting. So, would you ever write a happy song like as a gag? Or a hidden track on a future album?
Tony: Oh yeah; I don’t know if you’re ever gonna hear it. (all laugh)
WOLR: I’d like to ask about your look. You don’t look like a typical band...not that that’s a bad thing! It’s a good thing! You each have your own style that just happens to match. Is there any reason in particular why you don’t go for a more uniform look?
Tony: That’s actually something we talk about a lot. As you may know, we come from different backgrounds; I’m more of the electronic background and classical. Ryoko also has a very classical background and electronic as well. Jen and C.J. are more from the heavier rock side of things, Lamb of God, stuff like that. Tomo has been in a lot of visual kei bands, some very famous bands; he’s brought in the visual aspect of things a lot more because for me, I’ve always been into Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy, stuff like that where they definitely get up on stage in white powder and stuff like that, but that’s like your normal Goth fare. And all I ever said was I just wanted everyone to be in darker colors, which is pretty easy for us. (all laugh)
C.J.: Yeah, I wear black most of the time anyway.
Tony: But other than that, I’m not really into visual kei so much, so I try not to have a uniform look to it. But Tomo is definitely in charge of helping to unify the look of the band. And when it comes to the makeup, we have a makeup artist we work with, Mariko; she’s been working with us for a little while and Tomo and Ryoko help her guide the look of the band.
C.J.: I think the individuality of dressing goes with the music, too. Like the music doesn’t fit a category, but we come together as a band, so it kinda works.
WOLR: Yeah, it works very well from what I’ve seen. You’re already a unique group, but you go a step further and have two drummers. Why two drummers?
C.J.: Two’s better than one. (all laugh)
Tony: You can never have too many drummers! I wanna start beating things on stage, too.
C.J.: Actually, Tony had a project called Unknown Frequency that he was gonna try and bring back over here and start doing stuff with and I was going to play acoustic drums for that. But he decided to focus all his attention on echostream and said, 'I've already got you on board, and we’ve got the first album, so why don’t you learn the tracks and you can play the sequence parts from the album live’. I’d never done anything like that before and I said ‘wow, so I get to be like a human drum machine, basically’. Everything that’s on the album you just break up and every song is different so I’ll have vocals in some parts and I’ll have actual drums, so it was a challenge, something that I said, ‘yeah, cool! Let’s do it!’
Jen: He gets all the cool parts. (all laugh)
Tony: He gets very excited about this geeky stuff! We now know who the geek in the band is. (all laugh)
C.J.: Besides you. (more laughs)
Tomo: We are more like an electronic rock band and we just want to play as much as we can. So we don’t want to play just a sequence during a show; we’re playing a while sound.
Jen: We all come from backgrounds based around live performance so it’s very important for us.
Tony: Yeah, the live aspect is the most important thing for us. Ryoko and I come from really heavy classical backgrounds and Jen has a jazz background and C.J.’s got classical, and Tomo’s been playing in bands for years that don’t have any sequences. So, to make what’s very electronic work out, we could just work with a sequencer and push ‘Play’ and it’d be okay, but it’s just so much cooler; even if we played the exact same song with C.J. or without C.J. it’s always cooler to play it with C.J. playing drums. Even if he were to play everything perfectly, exactly how it’s recorded there’s just something that you’re getting there because the rhythm has slightly changed because you’ve added the human element. Even when I’m programming a lot of stuff in the studio I don’t like to just lock everything in like a machine because you get that human element that is really what we try to go for on stage.
WOLR: So it adds more emotion to the music.
C.J.: (nods) Besides the visual aspect.
Tony: Yeah. It’s been a challenge, though. I mean, two drummers and everything.
Jen: Yeah, I think it took us a little while to get used to it.
Tony: It took us a long time to get the technical stuff set up, too. What you’re seeing when you see us play is REALLY....I’ve been developing this kind of setup for the past five or six years, even before echostream started performing live in America it was Unknown Frequency who had very similar stuff.
WOLR: Wow, that is really interesting! I was not expecting that answer. I was expecting more like C.J.’s first answer. (all laugh) I asked this of Jen and Tomo earlier this year at Otakon, but I’d like to get everyone’s answer to this: who or what was the inspiration for you to begin a career in music?
Tony: Well, y’all go first and let’s see if the answers are still the same. It’s a quiz, you better know what you said last time (all laugh)
Jen: Well, I started playing in elementary school and I really liked it, but it wasn’t until I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, I saw Dave Grohl’s hair going all over the place and I was like, ‘I have to do that!’
Tony: How old were you?
Jen: ........
WOLR: Who’s giving the interview? (all laugh)
Tony: She’s the baby of the band. She keeps our average age down. (all laugh)
Tomo: I like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Bjork. And also HIDE from X Japan because I really respect what he had done; and also he came to America and worked with some American bands.
Ryoko: I like Tori Amos, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Sigur Ros.
C.J.: As far as what inspired me to start playing music, I really don’t know; it just kind of found me. I started when I was ten years old. I mean, you always bang pots and pans when you’re a drummer, take forks and spoons and knives from the kitchen table and get yelled at, but one day, like Jen, I was in elementary school I went to the school programmer and I said I wanted to play drums. Something in my head one day just clicked and that’s what I wanted to do; ever since then I just kept playing. As far as musical influences, bands that I like, it’s a pretty broad range of bands; I can go from house to techno to reggae, ska, you can throw in death metal, black metal; I’m all across the board. It’s hard to pick, but I can pick and choose from each category, which helps me as a musician because you have to keep your mind open and you become a better player because you absorb so much more. If you keep your mind closed you’ll be in this one section, but if you have a broader range you have more of an arsenal so you can expand yourself and expand yourself musically.
Tony: I come from a musical family...kind of...my mom was a pianist, so I’ve always been around that and started playing piano when I was eight; I hated it. When I was in high school I got into bands like Skinny Puppy and that blew my mind wide open; before that I’d only heard hip-hop, Led Zeppelin, and classical music, then I heard Skinny Puppy. Then I saw their live shows and I was like, ‘I wanna do that’; I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a live show of Skinny Puppy’s like their older live shows, but it’s basically a theatrical performance. So that’s what got me into electronic music was Skinny Puppy and seeing what you can do with electronics. It just kind of kept going from there.
WOLR: Going from the past to the future, are you guys working on a new album at all?
Tony: We have plans.
WOLR: That’s all you’re gonna say, isn’t it?
All nod
WOLR: That works, that’s fair enough (laughs) Where are guys headed next in terms of live shows after NekoCon?
Tony: We’ve got a bit of a break until January; we’ve got a show at the end of January in Albany, New York. Then after that we have a couple shows lined up for February...which I can’t talk about. But that will be pretty cool. Next year, we’ve got a couple things on the table, but mostly it’s just too far off right now to have any definite answers, but for right now this is our last event for the year, then take some time off. I’ve just revealed a small part of the plan.
WOLR: Do you have anything you’d like to say to your fans? (awkward silence) No one at all? (all laugh)
C.J.: Well, thank you! We come to shows and sometimes there are people sitting outside in the pouring rain in garbage bags just waiting to see us, sleeping outside overnight. So, yes, thank you very much to everyone. We love you guys, and stick with us: we’re gonna be here for as long as you want us here.
Tony: Probably longer *all laugh* Whenever we go to any conventions, we love to meet the fans. We love to hear the stories, we love to know you. It helps us, so don’t be afraid to say hi. If you see us don’t be shy. I know sometimes people are shy; I’m shy.
C.J.: You? (all laugh)
Tony: I’m shy!
C.J.: You’re funny. (more laughs)
Thank to NekoCon and echostream.
Interview and Photos by Mistress Mu.
