Standing on Each Others Shoulders

When Two-Man Giant Squid's self-titled third album dropped through the hypothetical Outsideleft letter box we couldn't help but notice it.  That name is fantastic for a start, but so is the album, and we said so in no uncertain terms.  They hadn't appeared on our radar previously, but we will be keeping a close eye on them from now on, for sure. Outsideleft caught up with band founder and inspirational leader, Mitch Vinokur, through the magic of Zoom at a sociable hour for once.

OUTSIDELEFT: Great album, and a great name. I think that the name was what really caught our attention, because there's so many releases, literally hundreds of them, that come in every week, so we have to kind of scan down and see if something jumps out. And Two-Man Giant Squid, how can you not notice that? We thought the ‘Weird Recordings..’ single was a great single, got hold of the album too, and here we are.  Before anything else, I have to ask you about that name.  There are more than two of you, you are not all men, and none of you are squids!

MITCH VINOKUR: Obviously, it was not meant to be taken totally literally. This wasn't really ever meant to be a band, so I wasn't even expecting to show anybody that knew me what my music was. So I just kind of wanted to create a very strange moniker that had nothing to do with myself, and was also, like you're saying, a little eye catching. Because, you know, there's 1000’s of people a day who decide to make music in their bedroom and send it off to somebody, so I might as well give it a crazy name that people are going to look at. The way I thought of it was not really anything crazy. I remember thinking of the name Two-Man Bobsleigh. I have no idea why, but that name popped in my head. Maybe I was watching the Olympics. I had also been thinking of a name about something sea dwelling, like a giant squid, and decided to combine the two. Now, the name is out there, and it's a thing. When I think of a two-man giant squid, I think of when in cartoons two kids stand on each other's shoulders, and put on a trench coat, and pretend they're an adult. But instead, you're pretending like you're a giant squid with tentacles and everything!

OL: I can get that actually. You just need to find an animator to make you a cartoon. I can imagine a Ren and Stimpy/Spongebob Squarepants type of cartoon being made about that, You are probably aware that there is a British Alt-Rock band called Squid, who are a different to you, not quite as good actually, but do you think maybe you should have chosen something that would not get confused with them?

MITCH VINOKUR: There is always that risk, whatever band name you choose. You know, it's very hard to be completely unique. But I think the good thing about mine is that I didn't have to worry about there being another Two-Man Giant Squid out there.

OL:  The new album has quite a lot of variety on it. Some of the tracks are much more lyric heavy than others, some have a psyche/psychedelic feel, you've got a slightly twisted version of a Spiritualized song on there (I will ask you about cover versions in a moment) Were you looking to challenge your listeners, as lot of bands try to create a single, distinctive sound? They want people to identify with them and their sound.

 MITCH VINOKUR: I think you're onto something there with us. I don't like to create one sound and go “alright, let's turn out eight songs that fall into this sound”. When I sit down and write music, something completely different strikes me. Maybe this is a lyric based song, maybe this is a very beat based song with drums and stabby guitars, and maybe this is an electronic song. What isn’t important to me at all is creating one single, tunnel view of how a song should sound. The song should sound however it comes together. That's the interesting part of putting it under the one umbrella title of our self-titled album. So people think this is an album that's also a band, and this is an album that's going to take risks, that's going to venture off on a detour. Maybe they'll come back, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll go off left field for a few songs, and maybe they'll come back, or maybe they won’t. It's the not knowing and the unpredictability that has been the MO of this band from the start. The whole thesis behind it was be unpredictable. Don't go to simple song structures. If somebody's expecting a chorus, give them a bridge. If they're expecting a bridge, give them a chorus. So, I am always kind of trying to punch from outside the frame.

OL: You have included a cover version of ‘I Think I'm In Love’ by Spiritualized. What do you think about cover versions? I've got kind of mixed feelings about them myself, in that I understand why people do them, but I also feel like they should just do stuff of their own.

MITCH VINOKUR: That's a great question. I was actually just writing a response to this for a similar question. Normally, I don't like cover versions. I don't like it when bands put out covers that are like the exact same thing, That's not interesting to me at all. We were covering this song as a live cover. We were using it to open up our set, and we were doing it in a very specific way. We cut out basically the first two minutes of the Spiritualized version and we dive right in to the lyric version, which I really wanted to dive into. We created something that builds to something rather than the Spiritualized original, which just lays it out there as a nice, melodic, psychedelic thing that kind of just cycles through. I knew that our version was really different, and I thought that if we can home in on that, it would be a great recording for the album, because I like it when bands put their own spin on things. I think that type of cover is phenomenal. What's interesting is when you put your own flavour to it, and I think our cover has that flavour. It's got a different type of arrangement. It's more focused on delivering that big ‘whoa!’, psychedelic boom, rather than the mellow thing that Spiritualized was really great at capturing.

OL: For a three-minute song, the intro is almost a third so it feels like it is just getting going and then it stops. That lends itself, I think, to maybe a slightly more extended version, or maybe an extended re-mix like some people do, which leads on to my next question - you see how smoothly I'm going through this! - which is about remixes. A lot of bands try to prolong the life of an album with remixes. Are you planning to go down the remix route, getting others to remix your stuff?

MITCH VINOKUR: I would love to! I think it's not as nearly a popular thing in our scene here in Brooklyn as you would think. It might be more of an English thing right now, but I grew up with a DJ background, as you know, from the track ‘I was a DJ in 2015’. I love that sort of thing. You know, do a take on it as a rock single or a psychedelic single, or something like that.  I would love to remix somebody else's stuff too. I'm just waiting for people to send me some stuff. I don't have plans to remix anything from this record myself, but if somebody were to reach out, I would 100% tell them to go for it. I think the best way to do it is let them go crazy. I think if you have artistic control over it, then it's basically like another version of your own take on a song. I think the cool thing about a remix is have somebody else internalise it and spit out what they are thinking in their mind, which could create a cool, cool factor.

OL: There is a risk there in that when people put out a call for people to do remixes, and they put out an album of those. Everybody chooses the same one or two songs. If you released 15 remixes of ‘Don't go to Snare World’, you might think it's a bit much for people to listen to that many, so you might want to set some parameters around it.  ‘Album is a bit of an old-fashioned term anyway, because it's based on vinyl, isn't it? So is the concept of single. You can make vinyl albums and 7” singles still, but there’s no juke boxes to put them on, and bands often release almost every track off an album as a ‘single’, so both of those industry terms seem obsolete now.

MITCH VINOKUR: That's a good point. I don't know if the album is dying or if it's dead.  If it’s not dead, it's much less of an art form now. We are pressing some vinyls of this record, which is our first time doing so, and there's three singles taken from the album. One of them came out a long time ago. That's ‘I was a DJ..’, and the other two are being used to drum up excitement for the album rather than drop all of these songs at once, which I think for new listeners, for younger listeners, is a hard concept for them to grasp, unless you give them a little bit of a taster. I don't think I know too many bands these days that say ‘hey, we're putting out an album!’, and then drop 10 songs. I wish it wasn't like that. I don't like giving things away too much. Actually, going back to ‘…Snare World’, which is also my favourite song on the album, some people from our team wanted that to be a single, but I view it as ‘this is a nice surprise’. It's right in the middle of the album. If you've made it through the first three tracks and you like what we're doing, that's the song that's gonna put you on our side. That’s the song that's gonna say, ‘all right, this band is freaking crazy’. So, I wanted to save that as a surprise. I think if it came out at a single, you’d ruin the lustre of the album. So that's the way I'm preserving the art of album right there.

OL: I'm not sure people now listen to albums all the way through, unless they've got it on vinyl. They tend to pick tracks, don't they? Add it to a playlist and stream it, but they might not add any other tracks off an album. Yeah. There is something to be said for doing an odd single as well. Now there's a band, a Swedish band, called Les Big Byrd, who probably are the closest to your sound that I know, and they released a single which was a six-minute instrumental, psychedelic thing with no vocals, no limits at all, very un-commercial. Their PR person said to me “I don't know why they've done this!”. I said to her, but that's why I want to interview them, because they did something that was, completely, you know, ‘why would you do this?’ That's the best thing, because it stands out. Talking of standing out, the photo that we used in the album review has you and the rest of the band standing in front of a fence somewhere. And please forgive me for saying this, but it doesn't look like any of you have dressed up for the shot! Do you think there is a place for you to have more of a distinct image, as it’s very hard these days to stand out from the crowd?

MITCH VINOKUR: I think it's funny. The person who was taking the photo also was like, ‘Hey, what the hell? you guys just didn't really think about this at all!’. Some of some of the band, for a big show or a big shoot, they'll text in our chat and they say, ‘Hey, what are we doing? Are we coordinating our outfit? What's our image?’ Exactly what you're saying. I've always been a proponent that individual expression is kind of a lost art within a band. Yes, it's cool when all bands dress together in a suit or, you know, look like The Strokes or something like that. But we're a band of very different people, and I think it's good to showcase that. So, I've always been a proponent of individual expression. Wear what you want to wear. And that's kind of our image. Whether that comes across, I don’t know. Some people say ‘oh, they look sloppy’, or ‘what is going on here?’. But other people think we look interesting. So, I've always been drawn to individual expression within a band.

OL: You’ve talked about Two-Man Giant Squid so far always in the first person, but of course, there are four other people in the band as well. How much input do they have? Are you a dictatorial kind of person, where everybody else has to snap into line? Or is it more of a democratic approach?

MITCH VINOKUR: It's different within each song. The first album was kind of just a bedroom recording that I made by myself. Then I found the band, and things started being more doing things together. There's probably four songs on the album that have a good amount of input from the band. I kind of wrote the outlines of the songs, took it to a band practice, and they input. We played it very much as Two-Man Giant Squid, five people recording together. For other songs like ‘..Snare World’ I find the way that I can write those songs is by me sitting and working on the recorder and the computer, and going back and forth on takes and tweaking things. So, those songs weren't really written in a room together. The sound of the record is very put together, and somehow this thing that doesn't sound like it should work, works. We have some songs that we recorded all together in a live room. One take, boom! Done. ‘I think I'm in Love’ was like that. Other songs were just me scratching things out.

OL: You mentioned you used to be a DJ.  For the track ‘I used to be a DJ in 2015’  did you draw on the actual experience that you had?  

 MITCH VINOKUR: Its very true to the experience. If you listen to the song, the singer is very confused about how to feel about this point of time in their life. They're looking back on it fondly, but also with kind of like a tongue in cheek sneer at ‘what the hell were we doing?’  Why did everybody, when they were 21, drop everything and buy a mixer and start taking bad ecstasy at these crappy clubs and became DJs. I think with that song, there's always two sides to every coin. So, I was looking at it half as ‘wow, this was a formative time in my life. I was young, I was running around, I was exploring things, exploring music. But the other half of it was that we all thought we were part of some giant scene, and maybe we were, but at the at the end of the day, this wasn't like punk music in the 70s. We weren't really creating anything. We were just running around and taking drugs. So, it's fun to look at that time through both lenses.

OL: You use the phrase ‘scratch demo’ quite a lot in the blurb and the PR stuff that I've seen. It's not a term I've seen used very much. Are you using that to imply that the scratch demo is integral to your sound, almost like a Lo Fi element?

MITCH VINOKUR: I do find demos and scratch recordings extremely important. The traditional way people do it is they make a demo and they say, okay, here's a song, but it's recorded like crap. Let's really polish it up. Let's get in a room and let's record it all nice. Yet I think there are things that are lost in that process. When you first record your demo, the first time you're hearing the music in your headphones, the first time something's going to come out of your mouth, it comes out of your mouth a different way than it does the 12th time you've heard it. So, there are a lot of elements of our demos that I've grabbed as I will never be able to say this word the way I said it on this demo, so I'm putting it in the real mix. I take a lot of things from our scratch recordings and our demos, and I drag them actually into a real mix, whether it's a guitar or a vocal or sometimes entire sections of songs are from the scratch demo.

OL:I was also wondering about the life of being in a band these days, because it's become harder to make a living from it. Do you see this as a long-term career, or is it just one thing you are doing? Five people is a lot to split the take from a show with, and it's going to be hard to make ends meet if you're only doing relatively few gigs. I saw from your gig schedule that you seem to be playing largely locally in Brooklyn with only a couple of other places outside the NY area.

MITCH VINOKUR: I think it's extremely hard to be in a band these days and make a living. That's the reason why a lot of our shows are here in Brooklyn, to our fan base. Because we know we can get people to come out, come to the show, buy the merch. We know it's a safe bet for us. You know, those 40 date tours, that could be a really scary thing for a band these days. I know a lot of the bands we talk to in our scene, they tour overseas, sometimes in Europe, and they say the European touring model is much more adaptive to being able to make some money than the US touring model where they struggle with budgets and things like that. Touring in the US is very difficult. It's probably, the most difficult it's ever been. But there are ways to improve it. We're going down to a festival called South by Southwest in Austin, Texas this year that is going to showcase us to a broader audience, and hopefully touring will become easier after that.

OL: But when do you have the time to do touring? Presumably, you're not making enough from the band to eat and pay your bills?

 MITCH VINOKUR: If we were offered the right type of tour, I think we would all be able to make it work. But dropping everything and going on that 50 day run would be difficult for us. But, I think, given the right opportunity, we could make anything work. Basically, all our members have to have a way to make money while playing in the band and it'd be hard to drop everything.

OL: So, yeah, there's no answer to that. It's a tricky thing. You’ve talked previously about being quite obsessive about the band and music, and sometimes it damages your relationships. That sounds quite a harsh thing actually, because bands don't last forever, and you don’t want to be left on your own when the band's done, because you've got the rest of your life to live as well.

MITCH VINOKUR:  think that’s a bad thing. That's why I am writing songs about it, instead of sitting at home getting angry Sometimes the best way to get something out, is to put it into your art. That's a big theme on the album, the line between passion and obsession and where you are on that line, who it can affect, and whether it's a good thing to be on that line. It’s been very difficult for me to navigate my obsession over the sound and the music and the band and what's happening with the band, and how that constrains a lot of relationships, which is kind of a big theme of the album.

OL: Your fiance is in the band. Is that correct? Which could be a good thing or could be a bad thing, and it depends how fraught it gets but does that make it harder?

 MITCH VINOKUR: There are things that are easy about it. There are things that are difficult about it. I think without her in the band, we would not have been able to get where we were. You know, we live together, so we obviously have the same availability when it comes time to practice or it comes time to do a gig, which helps, right? Like you said, five people in a band is a lot of people, but it's almost like four, because we're like one entity. I constantly bounce things off her because she has a great ear for music, and, like I said, she's always available. So those things have been extremely helpful. And there's other things that are difficult, which is a lot of the things I wrote about on the album. You know, finding time for things other than the band. A lot of times we feel that the band is the most important thing in the world. But as you said, there's a whole life to live as well. So how do you balance those things? And I think the album does a good job of externalising my frustrations about how to handle that.

OL “The world is fucked. Let's dance!” you state in your Press Release. A lot of people are saying that at the moment. Should we just let Rome burn and just have a good old fiddle while it's burning, though? Or should we do something about it?

MITCH VINOKUR: I think we should definitely do something about it. The intention behind that statement isn't to say let's all stand in the background and whatever's happening is happening. That statement is about making music so that people can feel a little better about their day because there is so much fucked up shit going on in the world. I've always liked music that's kind of come at you with that. I don't like music that's like ‘hey, it's okay, and we'll be okay’. I like music that's saying it's not okay, and I know that, and you know that. So now we can connect and we can have a laugh, or we can think similarly about it. So the intention behind that statement is for people to know that there's, there's somebody else out there who's feeling the way that they're feeling.

OL: Do you think music can ever be part of the solution, or is it just the soundtrack to the problem?

MITCH VINOKUR: It's a good question. I think the act of people making music and making art can be part of a solution. That's never a bad thing, and if we lose that, then we might as well give up. I don't think that anybody's going to release a song that's going to change the world. But if enough people put their time and effort into something like making music or making art, rather than what they're currently putting their time effort into, I think the world could be a better place.

OL: A lot of bands are reticent to criticise other forms of music, but let’s face it, some music is just a bit shit. So, if you had a big vat of sulfuric acid, and you could drop a musical genre into it and just dissolve it away, what would that be? What would you get rid of, never to return?

MITCH VINOKUR: Really good question. Let me think on that for a second. I think the style of music that makes me the angriest is extremely poppy Country music. In the US, there are roots of Country music that are, I think,  important to music and to American music, but nowadays it's become the mashing of pop and auto tune with this image of ‘I'm just a Country guy singing’, and it's really horrible stuff. The lyrics are really terrible. And, yeah, I think I'd give that a big sulfuric acid bath.

OL: Previously, you also said were in some electronic bands. Were they full bands, or was it a bedroom band?

 MITCH VINOKUR: Yeah, just a bedroom act, producing the music myself.

OL: Okay, I just kind of wondered about that. Let’s end off with an odd question. What, right now, makes you really happy? And, in contrast, what really pisses you off at the moment? What are you not happy about? It doesn’t have to be music related either.

MITCH VINOKUR: What makes me really happy is people coming out to shows, to rock shows, letting loose, kind of finding that escape. And what makes me sad is, I guess, people who don't see that as important. And you know, like giant rock shows are kind of a thing of a past. You can't go see like a band you like for $30 anymore. Now the ticket to see somebody you care about is $150 and it's made it really prohibitive to go see live music, which I think is extremely important in life. So, I'd like to see people kind of prioritising live music as something that's important.

OL: I think there is an upsurge, actually. In Europe anyway. Thanks for talking to OUTSIDELEFT today and good luck with the new album. Hopefully we'll hear even more about Two-Man Giant Squid in the future. We will be keeping an eye, and an ear, out for you.