El Ten Eleven: Tonight @ Middle East
by Andrew Phan (Pharmacy), published September 15th 2010
If you haven’t heard of El Ten Eleven, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard them. Their instrumental music is a fantastic blend of electronic and post-rock, driving dance beats. Add that up with an innovative and memorable live set-up and placements in several TV shows and films and a DIY work ethic, it equals one hell of a force in the independent music scene.
Tastemakers Magazine (TMM): How would you describe your live show to someone who’s never heard of you before?
Kristian Dunn (KD): There’s a guy on stage, me, with a double neck (bass and guitar) and I play a bassline and I loop it with a foot pedal, we call them loopers, they record sound and play them back indefinitely. So I record a bass line then a guitar line on top of that. Then my drummer (Tim) is playing drums and electronic dums and maybe he’ll loop an electronic drum party and play drums on top of that. It’ll get a little crazy. There will be another part where I play bass and guitar simultaneously. It’s kind of like watching people juggle I guess. Musical juggling.
TMM: The double-neck seems to be a very important part for the set up of your sound. Is this something that was there from the beginning or that developed over time?
KD: That’s a good question. When we started the band, I just had a guitar and a bass and I would loop one instrument at a time, set the guitar down pick the bass up, set the bass down pick up the bass. One day I was watching Vh1 Classic and I was watching the music video for that band Genesis and the guy was playing a guitar-bass doubleneck. A lightbulb went off in my head and went straight on to eBay. So I found it was easier to play both guitar and bass, and also that I could play both guitar and bass at the same time by developing a new technique. It’s all Genesis’ fault. If it wasn’t for Phil Collins man’¦
TMM:I don’t even know how I found your music, probably through last.fm for Explosions in the Sky or something, a lot of my friends in college know of you from your work in Helvetica How do you feel most people find you or are attracted to your music?
KD: It’s a combination of things’¦your story is not unique. It’s really exciting because we aren’t really mainstream artists. We don’t need radio or the traditional music business anymore. People are finding out about us from last.fm or Pandora or one the movies we’ve scored or just word of mouth. There’s so many different ways to discover great music these days that doesn’t involve any of the traditional sources like FM radio or MTV. Those are dead now. Nobody gives a shit about FM radio. You don’t find new bands from there unless you’re a little kid who finds outabout Katy Perry or something. This is a super exciting time to be in music.
I’ve had 7 record deals. Major deals. Indie deals. I’ve done the traditional thing so many different times and it doesn’t really work and now when we’ve decided to do it ourselves, that’s when we started to find success. Actually there’s a song on our new record called ‘Ian MacKaye was Right’ and that’s what that’s about. Actually we’re in Washington DC right now, perfect. (Ian MacKaye was a member of DC punk pioneers, Minor Threat, as well as the post-hardcore band Fugazi who went on to co-own and co-found Dischord records.) All these non-traditional streams of discovery add up to a bunch of different types of people finding us.
TMM: Can you elaborate on your previous experience in the industry?
KD: The last one before El Ten Eleven was called The Soft Lights. We had a deal with Universal and nothing really happened. We did pretty well in Australia, Japan, and Europe and got to do some cool shows overseas, but it never really caught on. Because we had that deal we never saw a penny, literally not one penny. We didn’t spend any money, we were flown to these places to play shows which was really fun, but there was just no money so it kind of ran its course and kind of ended without any fanfare. That’s why I SO prefer how we’re doing it now. When you buy one of my CDs from me I see all of the money. We had the initial that we need to recoup and it’s so much more direct and we’re in much better control. There were a bunch of different times when we were in The Soft Lights where different TV shows and movies wanted to license songs and we were into it but Universal flat out said no because there was a benchmark that they needed to make off it. Now it’s just our manager and us, ‘are you into it?’ ‘yes’ boom it’s done.
TMM: Getting your song placed on an MTV show or the Twilight Soundtrack- do you think that’s a viable arena for smaller bands to get discovered or make money as compared to the ‘traditional’ streams?
KD: The money is the best part, but the exposure isn’t what a lot of bands expect. I think they think ‘oh if I make the Twilight soundtrack I’ll make it and I’ll have a great career.’ And it’s just not true. It helps, but it takes a lot for those types of things to catch on. It’s like a lottery ticket, sort of like Explosions in the Sky and the Friday Night Lights soundtrack. Those things don’t happen very often. Even if you do make a soundtrack, it doesn’t happen for a lot of people like it did for them. The money is good. The money from licensing helps us out a lot, it bought us a van for this tour. It is an important part of being a professional musician these days. 20 years ago people maybe would have said we’re selling out, but we’re just trying to make it, make it easier to make our art.
Check out El Ten Eleven tonight at The Middle East.
El Ten Eleven – Jumping Frenchmen of Maine – 4.12.10 Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, MA from L0UDM0UTH on Vimeo.