Beats Antique put a little of everything in their music and then mix it all up. Horns, drums, Eastern and Balkan influences, and sounds of the circus absorb into their sound like nothing else you’ve heard. And it is gorgeous. The Oakland, CA trio visits Seattle this Saturday, January 28th for an appearance at Showbox SoDo, promising dancing, electronic and just damn sweet music for your delight. Last year saw the release of Beats Antique album four, Elektrafone, which featured beauties such as “Cat Skillz” and a remix of The Glitch Mob’s “We Swarm.” I talked with Beats Antique’s Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel and David Satori yesterday about the circus (of course I had to ask!,) and those incredible masks, plus other topics. Read along. Lots to see here.
Tommy, I was reading that you had a marching band in Serbia?
Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel: Yeah, that’s my old band, Extra Action Marching Band. Me and Zoe [Jakes] were in that band together.
Did you bring inspiration from that into Beats Antique?
TSC: There’s a lot of inspiration going on all at once with Beats Antique. But definitely, that was one of them. I was there [in Serbia] on a music trip seeing brass bands [at] a gypsy brass band festival in the Balkan Mountains.
What are some brass instruments you both particularly like? I am guessing trumpet.
TSC: We’ve had a lot of trumpet. We have a baritone saxophone and clarinet on the road with us – a musician named Sylvain Carton.
Great! Are you bringing others with you?
TSC: We have another dancer with us named Auberon [Shull] and she’s doing performance art.
Beats Antique – photo by Sequoia Emmanuelle
Who makes those animal masks you wear?
David Satori: People in China do. Those are masks that we order. We order these latex masks, but there are different masks we got from a prop shop that were handmade at a costume shop in East Bay over in Berkeley. We went to this costume shop that was going out of business and we bought these big crazy masks.
How did you decide who would wear the horse mask and the person mask?
TSC: It’s more like how you feel for the day when we first got them. But then it became, “who’s good at what character?” I was good as the grumpy old man.
DS: Tommy’s been a horse many times.
TSC: I’ve been a horse, I’ve been a Mexican wrestler, I’ve been a robot.
When you write songs, do you think about how they’d be live?
DS: We do it both ways. Now since we’re doing so many shows we do sometimes write based on how we think it’s going to sound live, and what’s going to be good for a show. On the other hand we still produce tracks without thinking about it all, and then we have to learn how to perform them, which is a good way to do it because you do things that you normally wouldn’t do if you were going to compose for a live show. You’d sit in a formula. When you make a track on the computer, you do all the things that you want to do, it’s sort of limitless. Then you have to figure out how to bring it to the stage. We go at it from both angles.
