Here in Ohio there’s a little saying that most college football fans are fond of. While unfit for print, it generally implies that Ohioans couldn’t care less about anything from the state of Michigan.
But now Otto Vector, a Detroit-based electronic rock band, has given people south of the border a reason to rethink that sentiment.
Founded at Eastern Michigan University about three years ago by Mike “Sonic” Glaser and Andrew “Ginseng” Lemanik, Otto Vector mixes heavy beats, electronic funk, catchy pop, melodic vocals and a rock sensibility to create some of the most unique music available today.
For the second straight year, Otto Vector has made it into the top 25 bands in mtvU’s “Best Music On Campus” competition. The winner of the contest gets a record deal with Drive-Thru Records and a video on mtvU.
Last year they made it into the top five, and Glaser thinks they have a good shot at winning it all this year.
“I think we do. I mean the amount of people we have voting for us, friends and fans, I’m pretty confident that yes we do,” he said.
But when Glaser and Lemanik first started messing around with a synthesizer, creating music inspired by video games and cartoons, they didn’t expect it to be anything more than a fun way to pass the time.
“We were just screwing around,” Lemanik said. “We got together and made music we thought was funny,” he said.
Soon they would feel the need to play some of their “joke” music live.
They enlisted the talents of keyboardist William Daviddi and drummer David Lee and began playing shows. Soon after, vocalist Renee Miller would sign on to complete the Otto Vector sound.
Glaser, now a graduate student at BGSU, said that while most of their gigs are in Detroit he hopes to play in Bowling Green again sometime in the future. They played at last year’s Dance Marathon, winning the battle of the bands.
But in a college town that features mostly “college rock” acts it may be a while before that happens again.
“It’s kind of hard to break into the scene down here because we’re not like a lot of bands playing around here. Everybody is just used to guitar driven rock,” Glaser said.
It may be true that Vector’s frantic electronic beats may seem more at home at Skybar than at Howard’s or Nate and Wally’s but there is something about their music that is unmistakably rock.
Inspired by such bands as No Doubt, Duran Duran and Berlin, Otto Vector leaves listeners pondering whether they should break out the glow sticks or start head banging – and both would be appropriate.
Glaser, who is studying music composition, hopes to turn this into a full-time job once he graduates.
“I really enjoy doing the whole band, the production of it, writing the songs,” he said. “It’s just a really fun thing to do and it would be nice to do it as a career,” he said.
Voting for the top 10 bands in the mtvU competition ended yesterday, so Glaser will soon know if he’s made it to the next level.
Students can log on to http://bestmusiconcampus.com to listen to Otto Vector and all of the other bands in the contest as well as vote for their favorites.
