Over the past few months, there has been quite a buzz going on about a certain band from Brooklyn
Looking at peoples charts and threads on music forums one name is cropping up again and again, and that band is Escort. The recognition is well deserved, starting off with three 12 on their own label and more recently putting out some great remixes for the likes of Tracey Thorn and Isabelle Antena, Escort are definitely a band who just arent going to stop
As a live outfit, there can be as many as fourteen people on stage at one time. You just know thats going to sound amazing. But how did they all get together in the first place, as Eugene explained, Dan and I went to college together where we both took Electronic Music with Dana McCurdy. Dan met Darius a few years ago at a bar and they were wearing pretty much the same outfit. Zena came down from the heaven's and everyone else we met at a bar.
As mentioned, the past few months have been pretty hectic so far, Escort have been busy playing live gigs and have already burst their way into many top ten lists of 2006 with their debut track, Starlight There is also an album in the pipeline as Eugene explained, We want to hide our new music for a while and save it for an album, hopefully at the end of the year. Until then we have some great remixes and edits that we think people will dig. We will play occasional shows too.
But you wont have to wait until the end of the year to hear any new Escort material as Dan points out, there are also new remixes coming out by Escort too. We've got a 12" that we just released called A Bright New Life. We'll have one more 12" out in late March/early April and then, yes, we're hibernating until the LP. We did a remix of Tracey Thorn recently. Also of Isabelle Antena. I guess we try to do remixes that respect what the artist did to begin with. But we rarely use any of the instrumentation from the original track. Generally just the vocal and then we write and record new music that we think suits the vocal. As far involvement, it really depends on what the track requires--the remix for Tracey Thorn didn't require an especially big line up. But for Antena's remix we had a small horn section, and Mark introduced us to a great Brazilian percussionist.
Its interesting to hear how their tracks get put together, given the fact that there are so many people in the band as Eugene explains, Sometimes is just jamming. The seed for Starlight came from Darius and Dan drinking beers and playing to some looped up drums. Lyrics are usually written by one person. Once we get the basic idea of the song down we produce and write it at the same time. Often exploring lots of different ideas by recording and orchestrating them pretty fully. We could probably produce a bunch of decent tracks by stitching together all out unused bits. The average rehearsal is packed. Its hard for us to get the entire band together at any given time. Most of the compositions are stitched together in the studio rather than played all at once, so we spend a good deal of energy trying to recreate what we put down in the first place and then adapting it to what we feel will translate best in a live setting.
The live shows are a real treat. We usually have 14 people up there jamming. I still get a kick looking next to me on the stage and seeing that many great musicians. Its funny because a lot of the classic dance acts that we like never played with full live instrumentation. So its pretty special when we get it all going complete with horns, strings and percussion. We played a PS1 Warm-Up show this summer that was intense. There were thousands of people bouncing around. Some people have expressed interest in getting us to play outside of the states, but we don't have any plans yet. Explained Eugene. I seriously hope there are some European/ Australian promoters reading this
Dan continues, Yeah it's weird, a lot of our musical heroes were primarily studio acts. I think we always intended to play live eventually, but it after "Starlight" came out we started getting booking requests because we don't use samples and so it was assumed we could play live. We had to rearrange a lot of stuff to make it work live but it's been a ton of fun. So far we've only played locally. The logistics of a band this large makes it pretty hard to play out of town. At some point we'd love to tour.
Escort - A Bright New Life is available to buy now and look out for Escort remixes of "It's All True" by Tracey Thorn (Virgin), "Seaside Weekend" by Antena (Permanent Vacation), and "French Girl" by Turbo Crystal (Tiny Sticks).
www.myspace.com/weareescort