Electric Turn To Me
DIY - Electric!

Electric Turn To Me have paid their dues, and now they're coming for you. This Brooklyn-based band is currently set to release a highly anticipated album that's been in the works for most of the year, most certainly to be followed be regional and national tours and international stardom, a la The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

But with fame comes sacrifice. "We don't have personal lives anymore," said the four-member band during a recent sit-down on the lawn (or, rather, the dirt) in Union Square. "The last four or five months, we've been making our debut record, and we've been playing a lot of shows on top of that. We've been doing a lot of organizational stuff, a lot of business-oriented stuff with the band. Most people don't see all the shit that goes on behind the scenes that actually makes the band work. We do really have very limited personal lives, right now."

Who needs a personal life when you've got each other, though, right? Electric Turn To Me (ETTM) are a true cohesive unit, living together in the same building where they rehearse, all showing up on a sunny afternoon for the interview, and all contributing their own songs. "Usually somebody starts with some sort of theme, it gets developed to the point where that person is comfortable with the chord change," they say, describing their cooperative process. "Behind the chord change is melody, and it comes in various different forms of being finished. It starts with a seed from an individual, and then we all pitch in after that."

"We're all four of us on the record," they add. "There's stuff that all of us have initiated. All four of us are represented that way. We're developing a group sound…we've killed each other, and we've hugged and cried together and laughed. We've been to the extremes. It's very much like family - in the real sense of family."

But how the individuals of this band - singer Silke, drummer Blake Fleming, keyboardist and saxophonist Marcus DeGrazia, and guitarist Kai Fiedler - get on with each other is not necessarily indicative of how they get on with the local music scene. "The scene is comprised of bands that sound like Gang of Four, and there's the whole garage rock thing - those are the two that are most prevalent," notes the group. "There are a couple of bands that are doing more progressive stuff like we are, and we get a lot of offers from other bands, but musically, we don't really 'fit' at all."

"Most of the bands we'd like to play with are a little bit bigger that we are. We'd like to play with The Secret Machines," the band says, only half-jokingly. "But they're a little busy right now."

ETTM's first tours were, like most indie band's, fraught with difficulties, mostly due to lack of preparation and lack of experience. But they've learned their lesson, and are vowing to be a lot more organized next time around. "If you show up in New Orleans on a Wednesday, and no one knows you're going to be there, you just end up playing for whoever happens to be in the bar," they attest. "You need to do a proper tour to get the most benefits that you can from touring. If it's set up correctly, you can benefit a lot from it."

"The first tours were more about just getting from point A to point B," they say. "But in the future, we'd like to go out with another band that's compatible with us. It's just about having some kind of support. At that point, we were just a band by ourselves. The clubs hadn't even hung up the posters we sent."

"To go as an opening band for a bigger band would be the most beneficial thing for us right now, they continue. "To go around headlining at our level is almost pointless right now. We can do that in certain parts of the country, but it would be better with some support. Because when we gone out on tour before, we just lost our asses. You come back and you're like, 'Shit. My whole life is falling apart. I have no money in the bank."

Regarding local shows, however, the band has had a bit more luck. Although complaints of less appreciative hipster audiences are common among NYC bands like ETTM, who have risen to the status of doing mostly weekend gigs, this band looks on the bright side. "At least it's a crowd that we wouldn't normally be exposed to," they say. "And we have been accumulating fans from playing shows on the weekends. It's definitely not been all bad. It's a little weird when half the crowd has on baseball hats or something, drinking Miller Lite, but they're all potential people to buy a record or tell their friends about the show."

So how important is image to music, anyway? "In New York and L.A., image is very much a part of the music," observes the band. "You don't see that in places like Chicago, where there's a really big scene also. It's more like an anti-image, 'cause people are more Midwestern, and people are really into being 'Midwestern'. But on the coasts, fashion has almost gotten to the point where it's more important to sell the music through the fashion, for a lot of bands, than it is about the actual music."

With ETTM, attendance at a single live show will indicate their side of that issue pretty clearly. Although they still dress like they're in the same band (which isn't as common as you might think), each member certainly has his (or her) own personal style. "Like, they're cute boys and they wear cute clothes, and this cute girl comes in and says, 'I want to come see them, because they look like I would want to look.' That's something that for us, always comes secondary," they say.

"I think it's cool to look cool, and feel cool, but some people take it to an extreme, where it overshadows musicality. Fashion magazines are just as much music magazines, nowadays, as music magazines are fashion magazines."

Lightening up on the issue, though, the band clarifies. "We don't want to judge people, obviously, we don't care what they wear. But I'd almost rather have a normal person, than any poseur, who I can't believe anyway, come up to me after a show and say they really liked the music."

But in the DIY tradition of things, bands can create themselves in their own image, and should. "We did pretty much everything by ourselves," says ETTM. "Every show that we booked in New York, every flyer we put up, every website we made, every poster we hung up, whatever - everything we would wear, doing the photos. Everything I can think of, we didn't have help. Caleb [Orion, the band's manager and all-round go-to guy] just joined us this year. I think every band should go through that at some point, because it kind of manifests your own image."

Total DIY like that, though, is only sustainable for so long. "After a while, it gets where you just want to focus on the music," they say. "Obviously, we're not at the point where we're making money off it - I mean, we all have jobs. And I'm all up for DIY, but you can only go so far on it in this day and age. It was a different climate in the '80s and '90s where DIY was as much an art. There were more microscopic things throughout every city, but now that only seems to exist for hardcore bands, it doesn't really exist for any other kind of music."

"But definitely every band needs to go through that," they add. "It helps you develop character. We feel it's important, but we've set up enough groundwork now that we're in a very prime spot to find 2 or 3 people to help who have backing and connections or the money.

So what is success for a band coming from strong DIY roots? "It's not having to have other jobs," they all chime in, emphatically. "To be able to concentrate on what we do best. We'd love to see us be able to focus on this, to be able to just enjoy each other's company again."

Having already garnered a lot of attention - and credibility - from indie press for their visceral melodies and soaring guitar noise, ETTM chalks it all up to…well, simply life itself.

"It's just natural - we're very into dramatics - it's reiterating, like, life. There's very high highs and very low lows."

"We're all very passionate people," they explain, "so that just makes sense in our music. Our music and our lives are pretty much strictly about tension and release. Living in New York City is fucking always about tension and release. I think a lot of it is our relationships with each other, and our relationships with the world. New York is very different from any place we'd ever lived before."

"We've come a long way over a lot of shit, and it's been hard, and it's been beautiful."

A. Koledin