Einstein said that when there are no more bees the world would soon end. Well, as of now the honey bee is an endangered species does that mean that we’re all about to die? And if we are, have we done what we were put on this Earth for or have we just simply wasted time? Andre Mistier, lead singer for NY-based band Ism, questions all of us on the group’s sophomore release through STM Records, Urgency. A call to arms, Urgency spits in the face of all of the bad we see on a daily basis, and puts forth the idea of change, asking all of us to reevaluate what’s really important in life.
Of course, this answer differs amongst the people of the world, and Andre took the time to tell us about what’s important in his life, as well as what’s in store for the band as they head out on tour in support of Urgency.
So where are you guys right now?
We’re in L.A.
And how’s the tour going so far?
Good. We had one show but it went really well. We played at the Viper room.
I’ve never actually been to L.A but I could imagine that its awesome.
I’ve always had a really good time in L.A., but I don’t think I’d ever live here. Not really my kind of thing.
Really? A little too slow?
No, it’s a little too superficial. Some of those stereotypes are true. But that being said there’s still a very vibrant-it’s a weird mix I feel like-part of the city is very kind of superficial and fake, but at the same time there’s a very vibrant, burgeoning art scene. Clearly there’s the movie thing, but there’s so much music and there’s a lot of art and painting and sculptures and that kind of stuff going on. So it’s cool.
So you described your music as ‘music for the dance party at the end of the world.’ Can you tell me about that?
One of the types of music that I really feel the most is music that kind of has that soaring quality to it, of which, you know, U2 is the first example that comes to mind, but I think there’s kind of soaring in somewhat of a positive sense and soaring in somewhat of a darker sense, and I would say, to me, like Radiohead has that same feeling of soaring as U2 does, but in a much kind of darker meaning. For some reason that kind of darker soaring has always felt vaguely apoctolyptic to me. I kind of describe it as like apocalypse rock. And I feel that our stuff very much fits into that same category.
At the same time a lot of the content and meaning behind this album is the idea of it were your last day on earth…
What would you do?
What would you do and what are the things that you currently do that you would still do?
That theme in the album, is that because of a personal experience of yours? Where did that come from?
It came from, for me, actually, a few years ago my dad died.
I’m very sorry.
Thank you. I appreciate it. It ended up being a really-its weird to say this-but it ended up being a really positive experience for me in the end. I don’t mean the death, but in terms of how it related to my life in that I kind of felt that all the ways in which I was like him were presented to me like a mirror, and it was so clear which things of me came from him that I was able to keep them or change them because I couldn’t look away from it. And the next logical feeling to me was like, ‘Alright, well if that true for my dad then maybe everything that I think and value and feel about the world comes from somewhere else. Maybe its from my dad it could be from my mom, you know, school, tv, commercials, friends-whatever, take your pic-so how do I know that any of things that I feel are what I really feel or what someone has given me to feel?
Wow. That’s deep.
(Laughs) So I went up to California to kind of have a primal experience off in the woods and basically I got the point of, ‘Alright, I’m just starting over, I’m gonna have babied eyes of the entire world. And from the ground up I’m gonna build what I think about everything. And it doesn’t mean that everything is different from how it worked before, there are a lot of things that are exactly the same, there are a lot of things that are different. But, the difference for all of it, is that I know why I feel everything that I feel and I know for a fact that they’re what I feel.
Well good for you because a lot of people don’t, I know I sure as hell don’t always know all the time.
(Laughs) Yeah its hard and unless you have the time and the impetus to actually dedicate yourself to that-and if my dad hadn’t died I wouldn’t have done that- you can’t just like hope that happens, you have to dedicate some time and some space in your brain and your heart to do that otherwise its not gonna happen.
So after that I kind of, to some extent this album is kind of my guidelines, my process, for starting over and most of the album is what I’ve seen in myself and in other people throughout the process and I think that the biggest thing that I found is that people aren’t very conscious of their deeper motivations. And that’s kind of, I think really what this album is about, is getting conscious with your self. And these are the kind of things that like, its not that they’re that difficult to do, they’re that difficult to set aside the time to do.
Right. Well, because everybody’s just so busy, you know?
Yeah, totally.
Life actually gets in the way.
Yeah, but what are you really busy with? You know what I mean?
Meaningless crap.
And to me its more worth your time, I think you actually end up speeding up your life and probably achieving your goals much quicker if you take some time and stop and rather than just go with your head down, take a moment and figure out what you really want and why that is and get, basically, if you clear out the clutter you can walk in a straighter line. And so I use the idea of the end of the world is, to me, like the best possible metaphor for ‘Do it now,’ because you may be completely clear as to what you think happens after we die, in which case great, good for you, but I’m not. I’m very debatable on that idea and unless you’re 100 percent clear, and debatably even if you aren’t, you have to conclude that when you die, to some extent, the world ends for you. Right, so whether this is, you can talk about modern political stuff and modern environmental stuff and worry that the world is actually getting closer to an end, but to me this is really about a personal idea of the world is ending. Basically if you say, ‘Figure out your shit now,’ you just say that in the regular world, people go, ‘Ah, I have time I can do other stuff.’ But if you say, ‘This is a fictional context, if you don’t figure things out now, you’re going to die and the world is going to explode,’ it suddenly has a different meaning.
You said this is kind of a new beginning to you. Your music from the last album to this one seems to have shifted a little bit into a more electronica-infused type of sound, so why did that change come about?
Actually the experience I had with my Dad was before the first album and I feel that as I look back into the earlier music that I did, and that album as well, as kind of the progression of getting to be at the point skill-wise and understanding of myself-wise to actually say it, it took a while to digest the whole thing. And I think that even if I was trying to kind of say some of the same stuff in the last album I feel that I both figured out how to say it and figured out what I’m trying to say by now.
We’ve always been interested in mixing rock and electronic stuff. Kind of the idea as I describe it is to speak to modern ears you need to use the spectrum of sounds that modern people hear and I think that as humans we all respond to the human voice, we all respond to a piano, you know organic instruments have this residence for us so I think they always will. But at the same time we live in a world of-I mean I’m talking to you from a cell phone-there are elevator booths there are construction noises all over, there are these electronic beats, words, cracks, whatever in our world and I think to not use both is to not fully tell the right story to people today. And I think really looking back, the thing about the first album is that we kind of used the wrong pieces to tell the wrong pieces of the story. We put the live instruments down first and then put the electronics up on top of it but that meant that the live instruments had to fit very tightly into a grid because the electronic stuff is very tight and on a grid and to put that on top afterwards, the rock stuff had to be a little lighter. What we did to play that stuff live is we took the electronic stuff and triggered it live and had it as kind of a base and then have the live instruments on top of it and that really I think was the beginning of all of this stuff making sense and being right. Part of that was we took away some of the electronic sounds and tried to see what we could recreate ourselves live and see what either was the same instrument and same sound or if not the same sound the same feeling and then what things should we keep with electronics. And I think we really started to get an idea of that but also it’s the idea that the live instruments were on top and kind of had the room to be free and the electronics stuff was kind of the repetitive foundation below it and it just made sense. And that’s what we did with this album was put the electronic stuff down first and played the live stuff on top and I feel like, to me, this album is actually both more rock and more raw and more emotional and more electronic at the same time. I think because those pieces are in the right places now and they both have the freedom to do what they’re best at.
Why did you guys choose Sacred Cows as the single?
Huh. I mean, I think, I’ll be honest that was a joint decision between us and business people, but it’s clearly and immediately catchy. We’re staying out here with a friend and he listened to our stuff and he’s a musician as well and the line sacred cows just keeps catching in his head and he wants to say it, it comes up in the second half of the chorus, and every single time, even though he knows it by now, every time it comes in the first half of the chorus he sings that anyway, and so I said to him that’s the mark of a good chorus is that its getting caught in him before it even gets there. So that’s great. If you pick one song to kind of express what this album is about, I think there are a few songs that do that well, but I think that ‘Sacred Cows’ is one of the best of those. It works as kind of a call to arms to wake up.
You guys worked with a new producer this time around. Last time was Mike Rogers and this time Phil Blaney. How was that different?
Well, Phil Blaney did a great job. I’m very grateful for what he brought to this project and part of that is just, you know, he has so much experience, I mean he worked with The Clash, he worked with Prince, he worked with the Beastie Boys and its not just that he has this experience and this wealth of knowledge to come to, he kind of has seen and experienced enough music that, I think, the best thing a producer can do is not to redo what you’re trying to do but kind of to listen to the ideas that you’re doing and to help them actually come to life more than you could before. And sometimes that means that we did things that were completely different than what we thought we were doing in the first place but the moment that we’d hear it, it was very clear that that’s what-that made the idea that we were trying to do even more clear than what we thought we were trying to do and I think that he kept our idea very much in mind and with kind of drawing from his breast of experience and wealth of knowledge, he knew how to bring out some of those ideas best.
Well I read that you have some prior experience with production as well, so were you very hands on with this or did you kind of give the reigns up a bit?
No, no, no. (Laughs) I was very hands on. I mean, he definitely produced but I was involved in every step of the way. I really think that the right way to do an album is to have somebody objective in the process, and I’m sure this is different for different people, but for me, um, I have such a specific idea of what I want of this that I don’t think anybody else doing it separately might get exactly the same thing.
What happened with Mike because he played drums on the album but not you replaced him with Greg Evans.
Yes. Not Mike Rogers, Mike Higgins.
Right. Can you tell us why he left?
I’m actually completely still friends with him. I had dinner with him a couple weeks ago. Its totally cool, its just kind of different directions and stuff. He wanted to pursue his own writing stuff for a bit. There’s kind of nothing more simple than we just needed to go in different directions.
And do you think that you guys will ever come back together in this project or even in another one possibly?
I guess I could say I have no idea. But my first thought is, the direction since then, which seems to be in the way that made sense more split, once both sides got free to do what they were wanting to do, it seems to just make more and more sense because of what people wanted to do is more different. I don’t think that will happen, but its certainly possible.
Up to this point you’ve had a lot of success. How does it feel to be received so well?
You know, now it feels great. Its interesting, I remember the first song I ever had on the radio was even actually before an album was even done, this was actually how we met our label, when Mike and I recorded some earlier stuff we released a song called ‘Monkey Underneath,’ which ended up being the title track of our first album in a different form, it was a completely different version of the song, but the early version of the song was released on the radio and it started to get some success and after that happened I couldn’t write. For three to six months I could not write a thing. Everything I tried to write was terrible because I had this idea in my head that everything I wrote had to be a hit. And I had this external judge that made it impossible to listen to myself. And that was really kind of an important idea to me, I really learned how useless that is, so now that, this is actually working much more now, I’m much more comfortable with it.
The other thing, though, is this is the first album we’ve done that sounds to me to be completely right. This sounds 100 percent like what I want it to sound like, and in any music I’ve ever made I never really felt that way before and its really changed my feeling about it. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I don’t care at all what anybody thinks about it. It sounds exactly like what I want and so if somebody doesn’t like it, that’s a disagreement of opinion, whereas I think if it didn’t sound 100 percent like what I wanted and someone didn’t like it, I’d think well maybe this isn’t good, but now to me, if this was somebody else’s music, I would be really excited to listen to it. Its just music that I like, so that changed everything.
What are your plans for after the tour?
Well, in the next couple of weeks we’re gonna be shooting the music video for ‘Sacred Cows’ actually out here in L.A. and then touring, I mean, this is just the very beginning of the touring. We’re out here for a month, then we’re coming back east and then we’re touring in the mid-west and Ohio for a bit, we’re gonna be kind of going up and down the east coast, but our touring has just begun, we’re gonna be touring for a while.
I’m actually, I’m finishing up the soundtrack to a movie that’s going to be coming out so…
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