Indieish : Guerilla video production for the web

Today I’m revisiting a recent artist with a pick from the new Rock Plaza Central CD, which is called “Are We Not Horses?” Rock Plaza Central songs can be a simple and built around a guitar and can also grow to become epic in theme, tone and orchestration. As bonus I have an email interview with the central figure of Rock Plaza Central, Chris Eaton, where he talks about the new CD, the band, the music industry and how sharing music is good. So take a listen to “My Children Will Be Joyful” and the interview is after the jump.

Rock Plaza Central on Myspace

Rock Plaza Central - My Children Will Be Joyful

Interview with Chris Eaton
What is the new CD about?
The new CD started developing almost immediately after we released the last one. Somehow, while completing an entire album (the world was hell to us, 2003) in two days, we wrote six songs while in the studio. And so the lyrics were written mostly on the first night, while everyone else was asleep. They seemed to tell a story about a war between humanity and angels, and a band that has to travel the earth keeping up morale while searching for their own lost loves.

And then I just kept writing, except there was something different. Still a lot of angels, but also visions of machinery and horses. And this story started emerging about robotic horses who thought they were real horses. They are used by the humans to fight and kill the angels, and then begin to wonder if they fought for the wrong side, as the humans keep trying to tell them they aren’t real. Then, one horse (there are no flesh horses left to compare themselves to) falls in love with an angel who managed to avoid being killed, and the two who should be enemies go off to find a place where they can be who they want to be without persecution. They’ve heard of a place off in the distance, and they can see the lights, so they run towards them. Only, the lights are just stars, and they keep running forever.

What is Rock Plaza Central?
A band. A man. Madam I am Adam. Do you mean where did the name come from? Or what is the nature of the band? At one point it was just me, and then became a larger entity (for the disc Quantum Butterass in 1997), and then became me again. I used to book a lot of shows as a solo performer and then gather musicians from the other bands at the gig. Sometimes this worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Then, in the summer of 2003, a group of us were on stage and it worked better than it ever had before. We recorded the world was hell to us about a month or so later, and we’ve been a band ever since. We had our first practice last week

How do most people hear your music?
Live shows, mostly. Or people hand it off. I received an email not too long ago from someone who found our myspace page and said he’d been a huge fan for about ten years, even though he’d never seen me play. How? His brother wrote reviews for a magazine that received one of my discs, and one time he brought home a box of discs they never reviewed. Ours was the only one he kept.

Lately people seem to be finding us through myspace a lot. We’ve had several hundred hits a day for the past few weeks, which is still nothing compared to a larger band like even the Decemberists or Will Oldham, but crazier than it has been. And people from all over the world seem to be buying the new disc without knowing what we even look like. Last week I mailed to northern Ontario, France, Seattle, San Diego, Arizona and Nova Scotia. And someone from New Zealand told me we were her favourite band in the world. If the Internet is good for anything, it’s for stroking my ego.

How do you define yourself as an artist?
I make things. Lots of different things. From music to books to once I had an exhibit of drawings/paintings that I made with my good friend Melissa Marr. She’s an artist in Halifax. Brilliant. I also worked for one summer in construction. I get similar feelings doing that. Making stuff is fun.

How do you fit into the music industry?
I want to fit in, but I’m usually too shy, so I stand by the fence and watch the other kids running around, and i secretly want to trip them.

Honestly, I have such little understanding of how the music industry works that I have no idea what my part is. I just hope that I can make things that I like, and then other people like them, and then I get to make more things. And I love the people in the band I’m playing in. In our industry, I am the wacky uncle.

Is sharing music good?
Yes. Definitely. Burning CDs and downloading songs is a way people communicate with each other. And people who can’t afford music should have music. That said, people who can afford to pay for music should also do so. Otherwise, our favourite bands can’t find the time to make more music. Perhaps this is where my understanding of the music industry should come back in. I would like to see it as a music community, and by that I don’t mean a bunch of musicians who hang out and drink together, I mean a group of people making music together. Some people are writing the songs, some people are playing the songs, some people are cheering wildly and still others are contributing a part of what they earn to keep it all going. If you remove any part of that community, the community suffers. But if it’s all there, then you don’t have to worry about labels or distribution or downloading or anything. Everyone is contributing and everyone owns the music. Musical communism.

Tags: No Comments