What is there to say about Photophore? We make music, we drink beer, we are sarcastic, and probably most prevalent we are just silly. Our music is not for all, and probably not for most. I don't think you would label us an "indie" type band because we mock love of cheesy 80's music and our sick love of old country with such respect, that it has become what we are. Also, we don't whine with acoustic guitars like I picture most indie bands doing. I certainly, probably, most likely am wrong in my assumption of indie bands, but I digress...
Fifteen years ago I started my first band with a buddy of mine. He had gone away for the summer and came back with a brand new electric guitar and two months worth of guitar "training". I had no training whatsoever in any instruments, and decided for no other reason than it sounded like the easiest instrument to play, that I would play drums. I bought the cheapest, ugliest, most ghetto drumset I could find and people had compared it's sound to pots and pans being banged together with a weedwhacker thrown in there for good measure. But, we had our first band. What at the time I think we called something gay like "Purple Haze" or some other such terrible, unoriginal name like that. We played mostly bits and peices of covers, and had a few little originals that my friend had made up. I was just happy to bang on the drums way off-time with him. My love of playing music at the time went no further than that. We played we he would come up with and he would spend the night. Amazingly my mom and dad allowed the terrible sound in there house for hours at a time. I can sum up the rest of the story in two short words. We sucked.
A few years later my friend and I had long went our own seperate ways. I still played drums to my cd's and tried and best I could to get better. I never was, and never will be a good drummer, but I did headbang and bounce around alot so there was always the "Hey look at that idiot go" factor to my drumming.
Anyway, when I was about seventeen I had a girlfriend that introduced me to a bass player. He was quiet, had long hair, and smoked pot. Yeah, typical bassplayer. This was my first introduction to the bass guitar. I'm sad to say that at the time I had no idea the difference between a six string and a bass guitar. I feel better to know that a lot of people who don't play an instrument don't. We played in my bedroom and I got my timing a bit better. He introduced me to a funk/slap style that just blew me away. We played for a month or two and got introduced to a guitarist and my first "real" band Paradigm was born.
We mostly played some funk and a newly born (and terrible) emo music. As it was explained to me at the time it was short for emotional music. It still to this day confuses me exactly what that means. We played a few shows at friends parties and people would come over to watch us practice. The bass player and guitarist made up all the songs and I just played drums. The idea that I could write didn't really even occur to me. I was just the drummer I would always say and I was happy with just that.
Around this time a super cool, quiet, sarcastic, and beautiful girl came to watch us play. In short, I was knocked on my ass by her. Quickly after we met we started dating. She played bass guitar so we would practice together from time to time, but it was mostly just me and the band. Shortly after meeting this girl, Nina, the band replaced me with a better drummer. I'm certainly not saying it was meeting Nina that prompted this action, but rather my aweful skills at the drums. It stung a little, but the band members and I still stayed very close for years after that.
This is when the infant Photophore was born, although we wouldn't be known by that name for many years to come. Nina and I played together and started writing a few simple songs. Mostly influenced by her love of sublime at the time. We had many band members that we tried come and go throughout the next year or two, but nobody seemed to fit with what we wanted to do. We wanted to play experimental music. A weird mix of casio keyboard trumpets, weird 80's synth, and country twang. We wanted to play all genres and at times combine them. It made for a confusing, yet sometimes catchy and fun, odd mixture of music. Nobody got what the hell we we're doing, and I'm not saying that in the way that we we're musical geniuses and beyond comprehension...we just we're, us.
After a while of doing instrumentals we moved on to putting odd, quickly written, and usually stupid lyrics to our odd mix of music we were doing. It didn't really make much sense, but it gave us some fun times on our 8 track that we used. We mostly wanted people to laugh at us, because we were laughing at ourselves on a daily basis. We realized that finding band members was a hard job, and keeing them together even harder. So, we leared to play more intruments. I stopped playing drums and we used our casio keyboard drums (there were only 100, out of those maybe 50 were usable) to play percussion. Nina learned to play the keyboard, and I leared to play guitar and keyboard. Our sound grew a bit and we leared in full force how to write music.
We needed a name. But what name? We had no idea. We tried many: Granny Plucker's Homemade Jam Band? No, too long. String Theory? No, too hard to explain. De-mutate? No, just a rip off of DEVO. Cage and Aquarium? Yes. A song from a band that influenced us more than any other at the time, They Might Be Giants. We had a name. For years we made music under this name. Nina and I went crazy writing hundreds of songs. We had metal, grunge, techno, silly, sad, strings, country, jazz, funk. All the things we loved. Cage and Aquarium was a genre mess.
For years we played this way. Confusing and delighting our few fans. Around 2004 we had dropped the 8 track for a more updated means of recording: a computer. This gave us more tracks to layer on and added a whole new dimension to our music. Around this time we found the newly popular Myspace and decided to add our music to a band page and get a few fans more than what we had. I remember being happy when we got over a hundred plays and had 50 fans. It was amazing! Because it was just the two of us we never played live so no one except close friends and family had ever heard our music. This was a brand new means for home studio bands like us to get our music to the masses. It surprised us even more when over the course of the year we got over 5,000 fans and a total over over 20,000 plays on our songs. I think this more than anything changed what we would later become. I started taking much more time on our music. Instead of writing 5 stupid, quickly written songs in a day, I started taking much more time and thought about what we were saying and what we were writing. Our songs still remained silly at times, but they took on a more polished edge.
We we're still confusing. People don't generally like or understand a band that plays too many genres of music. Our first CD sounded like 10 different bands and although we took pride in that, we had no genre to call our own. It was at this time I got my first drum machine/ synthesizer. Nina and I loved Devo, The Cars, Duran Duran, The Buggles, and many other cheezy 80's synth pop bands. It had always been a part of our band from the start. I started a new band on my own called "The Chaberlains Air Conditioned Meteor" which had a much more club-electro feel than our previous attempt have had. I wanted to do something so different that Nina would'nt recognize who was playing. I put it up on Myspace, and showed it to her. She had no idea it was me playing the music. It was a Sci-Fi mix of electro and weird sounds and clips from old Sci-fi movies. We liked it. I brought Nina into the CACM and our electro sound was born.
The name was too long. Damn, we hated having to tell people that name. After the word Air people's eyes started to gloss over. We needed a shorter name. A one word name preferably. After searching the internet, I wanted a name that was bright and cheerful, yet had a darkside to it. Bioluminescence was on my mind. I liked the idea, but the word was too long. So I searched some bioluminescent sites and found the word photophore, which is the light emitting organs on jellyfish and other glowing sea creatures. It was perfect for our new sound.
Our style got less experimental and more synth-pop. We had hooks to our songs now. We took months to write them. We were proud of them. We got many more fans. Then myspace sort of died out. Facebook was king. Over to facebook Photophore goes.
Our music in the last 5 years or so got more and more dirty. We swore more, and almost every song was about sex, or sexual postions. We loved the word penis. We wanted to write music that wasn't exactly beyond the point that most people were comfortable with, but damn close. We wanted to be that dirty little secret people had when they listened to us. A laugh by yourself. Everyone thinks sex is funny. I mean let's face it, it is. We want people to be able to feel comfortable with the fact that they certainly didn't think of the nastiness Viz and Nina are spouting, but glad it's there. Somehow along the line, we became a dirty, sarcastic, sex band. That isn't all we do, but by far it's our most popular. We enjoy it as well. So many studio sessions are spent laughing at ourselves and how nasty and silly we can be.
Wow. That wasn't supposed to be such a history lession. Sorry about that. I hope the one or two people who read this found it at least somewhat interesting how our band became what it is today. Still a group of idiots having fun, making the music we love.
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