Bob Mould and Rich Morel host July 4 BLOWOFF dance party at Vinyl
July 3rd, 2009 by Chad Radford in Music news
Chad Radford: You are coming to DJ a dance party at Vinyl in Atlanta on the Fourth of July…
Bob Mould: Yes, The party on Saturday is called BLOWOFF. It’s an event that Rich Morel and I have been doing for about six and a half years.
CR: So, you aren’t playing music, just DJing?
BM: Yeah, it’s a series of DJ sets across the entire night. It’s a pretty fun party, I mean it’s club music. House music for lack of a better term, but I think within that there is a lot of variety to what we play.
CR: DJing is one of the most rewarding gigs out there. You don’t have to load heavy equipment; you’re just spinning your tastes and your ability to keep a party going and people treat you like a hero.
BM: Yeah, it is kind of like a rock star without moving stuff. The real heavy lifting is the amount of research that I do. I have to spend a lot of time keeping up with new music and I find that if I put in a lot of work up front, it makes the work part of the party a lot easier.
CR: You used to work as a script writer for professional wrestling, correct?
BM: It was for WCW, which is Ted Turner’s wrestling company out of Atlanta.
CR: When I think of Bob Mould I think of Hüsker Dü and Sugar, and things like that. Did working with pro-wrestling, which is meant for entertains a mass audience teach you anything different from what you learned playing in Hüsker Dü and Sugar?
BM: Pro-wrestling is like a Madonna concert or Nascar. Those kinds of grand spectacles. You know? With Madonna, what you think is happening may be really isn’t happening. With Nascar it is a lot more dangerous than it looks.
CR: Things like Hüsker Dü or Sugar have a little more punk rock, or artistic credibility lent to them as opposed to something like pro-wrestling which is meant for a larger, dumber audience. It’s an interesting juxtaposition for you.
BM: When I went to WCW I tried to bring my taste in there and um, was met with a little bit of resistance.
Bob Mould and Rich Morel’s BLOWOFF comes to Vinyl on Sat., July 4. $15. 10 p.m. 1374 W. Peachtree St.
CR: I bet.
BM: But, it was a good experience. Entertaining people is the key and there are a lot of different ways to do it. My traditional style is a little more visceral, and I don’t know if “authentic” is a good word, but pro-wrestling or a Madonna show is a bit more of a spectacle than what I’m used to.
CR: BLOWOFF’s press release says that it isn’t just another gay dance party.What does that mean?
BM: Rich and I are both singer/songwriters, we are both producers, our entire lives have been about creating music and shaping music. So you know, for us, it is very much about trying to get our musical sensibility across to people. I think the thing that sets it apart from other gay dance parties is that we try to stage our events in live music venues. To me that’s the biggest difference. The setting that you listen to music in is really important. I mean, if you went to a gay bar and they were playing classical music, it would be a little bit odd. So, we are careful with our setting. We look at it as a music event that we take to music rooms. In DC we work at the 9:30 club. In Chicago we work at Metro, in Atlanta the Center Stage facility is a concert hall with two more music rooms upstairs. What we are trying to do is keep the emphasis on music. Having said that, of course it is a gay dance party.
CR: Tell me about the selection process for the music.
BM: I spend time online, looking at what other DJs are playing, and blogs that specialize in dance music, sifting through 200 tracks, trying to find 2 or 3 that I might like, but structurally there is sort of a mid-tempo dance thing that I’m trying to achieve with it. Melody and clarity of song is important because I’m a songwriter. I think we are doing five hours on Saturday, and across those five hours, we go a lot of different places inside of mid-tempo dance music. You know putting stuff together, being a songwriter, I’m really conscious of key and feel, and how I juxtapose things. I put a lot of care into it. I do a lot of construction work before I get on site. It is not random, not grabbing things out of thin air. I mean, I love the guys that do that kind of thing, but I’m more methodical with putting stuff together.
CR: Are you spinning vinyl or are there CDs and computers involved?
BM: I just moved everything over to CDs and work from that. It seems to be the most stable set-up as far as live. I wish I could handle vinyl. I’m not that good!
CR: It’s interesting to think of you as a songwriter and Rich as more of a house guy…the kind of chemistry that that creates is pretty interesting.
BM: It is really good. We got together seven years ago to start writing music. When I moved to Washington I didn’t really know anybody here and Rich was one of two people that I knew. We started writing music together and it was really great because I was coming out of Modulate which was a pretty ambitious project that with a little bit of help might have been a whole lot better. So it was nice to get together with Rich who had been doing a lot of work with Deep Dish, and had been doing a lot of mixing work with the Pet Shop Boys and New order and stuff like that, so I think we were able to complement each other, he on the beat side and me maybe more on the guitar side. And the music we were making together was really fun because we were just kind of learning and making stuff up as we went. The intersection of it was really fun. I mean the BLOWOFF artist record that came out in ’06, I’m really proud of that record. It got overlooked, and we tried to get people to pay attention, but it was hard to get a foothold.
CR: Do you take requests?
BM: [Laughs] Um… If somebody comes up and it is something that I can fit in and that I have, I don’t really have a problem with it, but if it is way off base then…no.
(Photo by Jeff Smith)
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