Neu Sweet Bulbs

We have a chat with Mike from Brooklyn quartet Sweet Bulbs, on a train ride home.

Tell me a bit about how you all got together; from where do you spring?
Me and our drummer Ray have known each other for a while, and he was doing another band for a while and I was in a hardcore band, and we had always been friends, played shows together, and I was hanging out with some friends one day and I got really high and my friends kept on playing music videos and they were attaching their laptops to TV screens and I thought that was so cool. So I go out later that night and talk to my friend who is a show promoter and was like ‘hey I have this really cool idea for a show. We should have these TV screens everywhere and that would be crazy.’ My friend Joe Ahern books shows in Brooklyn a lot and is very DIY and he is like the best guy in the world, and he was super psyched about it. At that point I didn’t have a band any more because Michael Jordan broke up and I thought I was going to play it by myself. After thinking about it, like two days after I had created the plan I thought it was a shitty idea. I had always wanted to start a more pop oriented group so I asked Ray if he would do it and he didn’t want to for a while and then he finally said yeah. Jack I had known, he is a lot younger than us, he had been playing shows with his younger friends but we had always seen eye to eye on what kind of music we liked. And then Inna was a girl that I had gone to school with and she was into music journalism and we talked a lot about the 60’s, Charles Manson and stuff and I had randomly asked her out of the blue. Now her and Ray should actually thank me because they are dating, but um… Then we played the show and it was a mess. Half the TVs didn’t work and I was sweating and shaking and nervous the whole time. So it was humble beginnings.

But something in that mess made you want to keep going?
[Laughs] Yeah. It was a shaky first show but we really like each other and it was an excuse to make music. For Ray and I, our bands at the time were no longer and we had always wanted to play with each other so it seemed to make sense even though it didn’t feel practical. I think that’s the best way to put it, it seems that it all came together even though it was a horrible idea.

So you went from hardcore to far poppier… was that hard?
Um, it wasn’t actually difficult for me because I sang and played drums for the hardcore band and I wrote some songs but it was really the other guys who were pushing us to be more like The Melvins and even though I love that type of music, I don’t know, I had a softer side I guess. And finally when I didn’t have peer pressure to sing really brash vocals, it was a little easier not to.

It does seem exhausting to be in a hardcore band.
Maybe that is the truth of it, we were tired so now we play poppier music.

So do you have specific influences, that aren’t confined to music?
Totally. Ray is super super into cyberpunk. We went on a really brief tour with a band from the UK and Ray was forcing me read all of these William Gibson short stories in the car and stuff. So we have a cyberpunk thing going. I really like Cranes, how their guitars sounded. We all have a similar pop sensibility. Trying to make pop music that doesn’t really sound like pop music. We are really into abstract art and stuff like that so there is a lot of thought like that in the music…

You guys are working your way through the NYC scene, do you find that overwhelming?
I love that it keeps producing bands. From the side of the spectrum where you are setting up shows, it’s super great to have all these small awesome bands trying to break out and play as much as possible. I always love that. And it’s a little disorienting, I don’t know if all the punks are going to the noise shows or the teeny boppers are seeing any hardcore and stuff like that. That might be my biggest grievance with that; there isn’t really any inter-arts communications. When you go to certain places in Europe the painters will be hanging out with musicians and you don’t really see a whole lot of that in New York. Everyone does art but you are trying to make it in one thing and you need to stand by the people who are doing that as well. I don’t know, there are just a lot of really awesome bands and I’m just happy to be around people who are trying to make positive music.

So, the TV’s, even though they didn’t work the first time, have you tried it again to make it work?
No. But I have this giant gym bag full of all these blank CD’s. I had this crazy idea that instead of charging people at the door, I would ask them to bring a CDR of images and I was going to try to put those images on the TV‘s. That’s where the problem was we did it haphazardly last minute. The show was packed and we were still trying to put it up, it was awful. But yeah, I have a bag of CD’s with random images that 200 people brought me one day. I definitely want to do something with it but I haven’t had the energy.

That’s awesome; it sounds like a 1980’s music video! That is so cool.
It was really random because some people would drag every image on their computer onto the disc because jpegs don’t take up a lot of space. That was brutal because one or two CDs that we actually got working were like images of peoples whole lives, like them going on vacation with their family, it was basically what they have been doing with their lives for the last 15 years or whatever. Other people were more strategic about it though; I almost appreciate that a little more because it’s a little more thoughtful. But whatever, it was supposed to be an onslaught.

So what kind of images would you have brought on the blank CDR?
I probably would have watched TV for a series of hours and taken different stills, if you are putting it on TV anyway so it would be great to have sitcoms in awkward positions behind you, there would have been a lot of Fresh Prince of Bel Air still images I imagine.

That’s some serious Meta self-referencing there. On that note, thanks so much!