The indie-electronic band My Dear Disco rolls into Bowling Green to blast their own brand of dance music through the ears, and into the minds, of patrons to the Clazel tonight.
My Dear Disco formed four years ago while students at the University of Michigan Music School in Ann Arbor. Riding on the early influence of Michael Jackson, then later Daft Punk, the five students formed a friendship and began gathering in basements for jam sessions that would produce the act that would eventually become the poster-child for their department.
“In a rebellious celebration of all things non-academic, we came together to make evil, evil dance-pop music,” said synthesizer and bagpipe player Tyler Duncan, who preferred to go by Mudwarrior.
These celebrations of “all things non-academic” did not always sit well with the faculty of the music department, however. The band talked of some of the struggles they endured in their strained relationship with the school, as assignments began to take lower priority to the growing demands of managing the band.
Guitarist Bob Lester described the relationship between the band and the music school as an “interesting dichotomy,” in which chastisements for their priorities were often muffled by the sounds of their success’ growth. As the band’s prominence began to become more undeniable, bringing in crowds dwarfing those of other music-school acts at their university (which reflected positively on the music school), the band members said they were allotted a certain degree of slack.
Within the wiggle room the music school allowed them, My Dear Disco managed to cook up a sound with enough spice to cause it to significantly stick out from others acts within the dance-music genre. Melodies driven largely by a combination of keyboard and guitar bounce lightly over either steady drum-kit or pulsing synthesizer rhythms; forming a musical announcement that pushes the word “dance” on listeners as a verb-in-command. Lead singer Michelle Chamuel’s soothing vocals put soul into the ensemble, at times hooking up with synthesizer effects that can give the songs a feel resembling elements of trance – a genre of electronic dance music. In the song “Clubbin,” Mudwarrior brings to the stage an electrified Irish bagpipe to add in a sound truly original to their recipe.
All sounds heard in the band’s songs are original and member-composed. The band coined their own genre, “dancethink,” to attempt to categorize their music. Chamuel explained this to mean it is music you can lose yourself in on the dance floor, yet at the same time, if absorbed and analyzed more deeply, the meticulously methodical arrangements of the rhythms and melodies become appreciable.
“It’s sort of a combination of the aesthetic you would get at a club, where you’re dancing, it’s very intuitive; you don’t really have to think about it. But it’s combining that with a very thoughtful approach as well,” she said. “At the end of the day though it’s really supposed to make you shake your butt; and your butt doesn’t think.”
After all the band members graduated, they set out touring across the country on a used shuttle-bus fueled by waste vegetable-oil, playing shows from Alaska to Boston. In the blur of the hard work, excitement and inspiration of the process, the path to success seemed so all-of-a-sudden to Chamuel that the process seemed to overtake her, which she allowed it to do in full.
“I felt like I got totally swept into it and the excitement of it,” she said. “It wasn’t really like ‘why can’t this happen,’ it was like ‘why wouldn’t this happen; let’s do it!'”
The band’s hard work and dedication paid off, and even landed them a spot on this year’s Lollapalooza lineup; an experience Lester described as being “like living in Rolling Stone magazine for three days.”
“In all the preparation for that show, it never really hit me how big it was until we took the stage that day,” he said. “It was really cool.”
Yet unsigned, My Dear Disco has managed to form all of their success without relying on the support of a label. Instead, the band has tried to use its live performances as their strongest means of promotion.
“We put on as good of a live show as we are humanly capable, and we are constantly looking to improve it,” Lester said. “We just want all of our shows to be these like musical-experience explosions for people that you just walk away from thinking about, and wanting to talk about.”
The band is so dedicated to their shows and their fans that when inclement weather caused their set at a music festival in their hometown Ann Arbor to be cut short, they staged a guerilla concert in the storm shelter they found themselves seeking refuge in, shoulder-to-shoulder with fans. The video for the concert can be found on Youtube and shows an intense enthusiasm on the part of the fans, followed by their extreme disappointment when the local police department did not share in the appreciation, shutting them down.
The ripples the band is making in the music pond have reached far enough to arrive in Bowling Green prior to their coming. Rohan Bhimani, Senior, said he heard a lot about My Dear Disco from a growing buzz about them online.
“It’s really not like anything else that’s out there,” he said.
Opening for the band tonight will be the experimental, electronic-rock band Phantasmagoria. Bhimani is a longtime friend of the band’s keyboardist, and believes the two will come together and blend well.
“I think Phantasmagoria will be a good opener,” he said. “They are kind of like a more mellow version of My Dear Disco, without the vocals.”
The show will begin at 8 p.m. with doors opening at 7p.m. Tickets are available for advance purchase at Finder’s Records downtown for 10 dollars, or 12 at the door. Samples of the band’s music can be heard at their website, Dancethink.com, and are available there for free download as well.
My Dear Disco was hesitant to make any solid predictions on the Falcons’ upcoming football game this weekend against the band’s homeschool Wolverines, with Mudwarrior saying only, in jest: “You better just be grateful that My Dear Disco can’t play football this weekend.”
