drew harris and his fmly

Drew Harris is a humbled Victoria, BC college student who I’d like to think represents the shift in our culture’s generational mindset. It’s refreshing to hear his connection to the local community, not only through acquaintances but through the natural landscape that surrounds him.

Outside of his degree in electrical engineering, Drew creates music under the alias Germany Germany and runs the website Distorted Disco. The site acts as a hub for his community of friends to release music and photography. I caught up with Drew for the release of the new Germany Germany album Adventures, which came out a week ago. My bad if you wanted one of the cassettes… It appears I have a week lag time, but it’s out digitally for only 5$!

Please join me in welcoming Drew and all of Distorted Disco into the FMLY.

Germany Germany – Natural ft. Donne of TLGLTP

Germany Germany – Take Me Home

Photos by Drew Harris

First off, wanna give us some background on Distorted Disco?

Distorted Disco started partly as an art project and partly as a web design idea I had. Initially, I bought the domain when I released the first Germany Germany, ‘album.’ [laughs]

I threw a couple tracks together and sent ‘em to this blog I followed in 2009. I guess it was 2010. Yeah, January 2010. I sorta guessed I’d use the name Distorted Disco for some other project in the future. So I bought the domain.

I didn’t really want to send any tracks around to other labels because it doesn’t really seem like that goes anywhere anymore. [laughs] So I just thought I’d start releasing stuff through DD.

Initially it was a zip file on a blank web page, finally I realized I had other friends who I wanted to release their stuff and maybe even make a label of it. At least that was the idea, when I first started it, but things got too busy; I lost the time and the interest to really go through with the free label thing.

Everything we released on there was free. I was getting frustrated at all the small bands who would make a demo, or like a small EP, and then post it up to iTunes and expect people to buy it. That doesn’t really make sense to me. For the smaller bands, it makes more sense to just give it away. So that was the seed of where Distorted Disco came from.

Did the visual aspect of DD start with that too?

Yeah, that was also part of the initial thing. I’m in engineering classes here in Victoria, and one of the things I wanted to do was get a little more experience with programming web stuff, and I wanted to create a photo gallery where anyone could really submit things, and people could comment on it. Keep it real basic; more like an art gallery than a Facebook type thing.

It was just a work in progress for programming things in PHP and stuff. Mostly just a friend and I who traded images on there. It was just nice to have a library of photos.

Like one time we were doing an experiment with designing live visuals and we had a gallery of around 300 images which we could cycle through. It’s just nice to have a library of images that friends and friends of friends have submitted. It’s still very much a work in progress.

Now I wanted to talk some Germany Germany. I have to say I’m a huge fan, you’ve single handedly helped me through multiple midterms. Radiowaves was the shit. Was that your first LP?

Thanks man. Radiowaves was the first big project. That song Radiowaves is really old, I made it a long time ago. A friend of mine was just playing around on an old Roland keyboard I got for 50 bucks at a garage sale; just playing with weird settings and we recorded it after a couple months. This electro blog asked us if we wanted to release it on a small label, explaining it’d be on itunes and blah blah blah. So it started as three or four songs at first and then it expanded from there.

That was the first big deal, and it was very stressful for me because I’ve never done anything big like that. I’d only every thrown some files into a zip, and this was like, send it to these guys and wait four months. As soon as I sent all the masters off I was stressing about changing them. It was just overall stressful. Y’know?

Funny thing, the version that leaked was updated past the version that was on itunes. And that turned out to be the one everyone downloaded. So I was happy with that.

You played one of your first shows recently right? How was that?

That was actually the second show, but it was good. It was a bit crazy because it was a four band lineup at this bar in Vancouver and we were the last band. They wanted us to play there before but it was just too hectic with school and getting everyone on the same time schedule. So this was the first one that really fit into our schedule. The guy who plays the computer and live electronics for Bear Mt. helped me out as well as the bass player from Bear Mt. and a drummer from TLGLTP , all from Vancouver. So booking around everyone’s schedule was crazy.

We ended up doing this show the day after our last exam. We didn’t really have much time to play together beforehand. We just booked it over there, practiced like crazy beforehand and played the show.

It was crazy because so many people came from Vancouver that I didn’t even know, and even a couple people I told to come were like “How do you have such a following here? It’s your first show in Vancouver!”

It blew me away really. Really just through the Hype Machine and all that stuff. It was really magical.

Yeah, the internet’s a magical place for that. And for the live shows do you just have those other people or anything else special?

We have these sign sorta things. A few giant card board boxes we built, filled with 50 LEDs in each box. Really bright ones. And a friend of mine cut out Germany Germany and put white plastic bags behind them and we have this micro-controller that connects to the laptop and from there we send MIDI data to the micro-controller in these signs so we can actually draw brightness levels in the signs and we can play a mini clip with all the brightness levels in these signs along with the songs so it’s sorta synched up. So we have these pulsing signs behind us the entire time.

The first time we tried it was so stressful because there were wires everywhere, but we nailed it down a bit more now. It’s just another live element to the show where I don’t see many people trying that sort of thing, and there’s more potential for different synched up visuals.

So are you a straight computer engineer?

Electrical engineer, but it’s fairly similar… [laughs] Me and the guy I mentioned early, who plays with the computer and keyboards, have built some signs together in the past. We both love playing with electronics. So we both wanted to do something with the live show and that’s what came of it.

Have you been able to use GG as a school project?

Sorta, we’re actually using the signs and working on a full technical report on ‘em. I’m totally putting that on my resume. I guess as a project, Distorted Disco works in there as well. It’s not strictly a school thing though. Unfortunately our school isn’t art based.

What school is that, if you don’t mind me asking?

University of Victoria.

You just finished finals, does that mean you’re a graduate?

Nah, our program’s around four and a half years long and I just finished my third year.

Summer school or summer break?

Summer break for sure. I actually just woke up, so I’m catching up on sleep as well [laughs]. (It’s around 1:30pm PST, I later learn he had woken up for the interview and then went back to bed because of my tardiness) So now I’m taking a week off to master the new album and I want to send it off on Friday [April 29th, 2011]. Fingers crossed.

And are you doing the mastering personally?

Yeah, I do all the mastering myself. I’d like to think I’m getting better at it [laughs] every time I master something. I was really stoked on ‘Take me home’, it was the first time I read some guides and tried to get the volume levels up to whatever they’re up to.

Radiowaves, I ‘mastered’ it I guess [laughs] but I really had no idea what I was doing. I like the way it sounds, but it’s around 2 or 3 decibels quiter than everything else on the market. Not great, but it worked. Poorly mastered is sorta the thing to do now though.

It’s a phase. As people get use to the whole internet-DIY scene there’s going to be a flux between the lo-fi/no-fi/fi-fi thing [laughs] and the condensed clean recordings of latter days. But it’s all personal preference anywho.

So GG’s songs feel like they carry a melody all the way through, like they’re one concise train of thought put into song. And a lot of the Radiowaves songs are vocal-less, are you trying for anything new in the coming album?

Actually I was just talking about this with one of the bands Saturday. Before the internet revolution, some sort of amateur bedroom producer couldn’t really get their music out there, so the only real bands in the mainstream were talented writers or talented vocalists or talented instrumentalist, that seemed to be the way the industry worked. And now there’s been an influx of bedroom producing people who wouldn’t consider themselves the ‘band leader’ type. I don’t personally see myself as a very good song writer. I would like to sit down and write something super coherent, it probably comes out in the music, but I don’t have a good grasp on the way lyrics are suppose to happen.

I really like the way they’re laid out in very sparse arrangements, so I guess I’d consider the vocals almost another instrument. I would like to move to a more vocal based arrangement, I guess? But… Fuck, that doesn’t seem to be the way my brain works.

What sort of music were you drawing from when you started GG?

When I first started the ‘Project’ [laughs], in 2009 I went through an electro phase, Digitalism and french electro. I started DJing parties at my house, which were ridiculous [laughs]. But then I was like, ‘Yeah, I can make these tracks, I can make electro.’ So I came up with the worst moniker ever and made some electro tracks.

They weren’t terrible but after a while I wanted to change the style of it. So the first Distorted Disco album was put together partly through that influence and partly through this experimental music class I had taken at the university. The projects were along the lines of ‘make something musical out of something non-musical’ and stuff like that. So that was another big inspiration.

I don’t know if you’ll be able to tell, but for the most recent album the influence was mostly drawn from Dntel. His production style was really inspirational. Really different. So the new album drew on Dntel and the Postal Service.

You can definitely see some resemblance between the two, but your stuff really has it’s own personality. Not like that Owl Farm bullshit or whatever, who basically just ripped off Postal Service and got a #1 record out of it.

[Laughs] Owl City. Someone actually just posted about Germany Germany with the triangle bracket <Owl City>. I just laughed. It wasn’t the most flattering thing in the world.

That was the record industry at its greatest right there.

Totally. Just ripping off a previously functional formula, adding some auto-tune, and throwing in a lot worse lyrics. It really seemed to work with the 14 year old girls though.

You get any weird groupies yet?

Not really, some emails and whatnot but I try and stay detached right now because it’s really just a hobby for me. I don’t want to get too involved in that. I would hope that I don’t attract the same fans as Owl City, but there’s nothing I can really do about it.

Sorta an arbitrary question, but I like to see where people get inspiration from non-human sources, do you have a subject of interest that you draw most your inspiration from?

Mostly just nature in general. That’s kind of a theme of some of the songs I’m working on now. Where I live in Victoria is a beautiful place; beautiful city. Like a three minute walk from the ocean. So whenever I was going through stressful times in school or whatever, I’d grab the songs I was working on and put them on an iphone and walk to the beach and take pictures and listen to the songs. I found that really fulfilling; getting out of the cramped space I’m use to and walk around, but still be able to work on my songs.

So that’s where most of the inspiration comes from. If you look most of the photos are from the same beach, which is the beach right by my house.