Interview with Kyle from E.V.A and his very cool ambient electronic project. This project will take you to space and drag you into a black hole
Q: Who are you and what do you do?
A: My name is Kyle Kozlowski, I am a
multi-instrumental musician from New Jersey. I have been making Experimental
Electronic music under the name E.V.A (Extra-Vehicular Activity) for over a
year now. Before that, I was in a rock band called K.D and The Damn Kids, an
Experimental Improvised Jazz band called
Hum Of The Monoliths and when I was 15,
i played drums for a Metal band called Eternal
Sin. I have been making noise since I was a child using various everyday items
like buckets and pans, eventually upgrading to drums when I was 12 or 13 and
moving up to Bass, Guitar, Piano, etc. I have been involved with local music
for 6 years and am currently booking shows in NB for all of the artists I meet.
Besides music, I am an avid gamer and vinyl collector and spend most of my time
quoting Tim and Eric and making weird noises with my mouth. Oh, and I love Dogs
more than most human beings.
Q: What are your musical influences?
A: Boards of Canada, B12, Frank Zappa, Tool,
Brian Eno, AFX, Orbital, Mogwai,
Casey and His Brother, Sun Ra, Skip Spence, Solo
Andata,
Roy Buchanan,
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Mooncake, 90's Television shows and
anything nostalgic.
Q: How do you feel about the current state of
music?
A: As a listener, I think music is at its
finest point. There is complete and total freedom to listen to any style of
music or noise being made all around the world. Especially with the rise of
independent musicians through Bandcamp and Soundcloud, If you want to listen to
music that makes you hate, love, or feel anything at all, you can find it on
the internet. If it wasn't for Soundcloud and Youtube, I do not think I would
be the musician I am today. As a
musician though, I think its one of the hardest things to be now a days. You
deal with rejection and self criticism on a daily basis. Sometimes it feels
like your projecting a rainbow for people and all they want to see is money. I
think its more important for the musician in this current age to be self employed
and release music for free, or even a buck or two. Get a shitty part time job,
save your money, and release records and movies instead if charging people $10
to $15 for digital. Be a true artist and push yourself beyond your music rather
than simply trying to get in the music industry by charging people to simply
listen to your music.
Q: What are your goals in life?
A: To play music for humans and animals around
the world, convince the education system to support music and art as much as
they support English and math, buy an acre or two of land and let it run as a
dog rescue, learn to hunt, survive off the grid and die somewhere in the middle
of the woods. Also, to convert churches into concert venues instead of
religious gatherings
Q: How do you plan on achieving them?
A: Simply by shutting the fuck up and doing it.
Q: How do you feel about drugs in music and
drug culture in music, especially in
electronic music?
What other people do is their own buisness. I
do not think that you need drugs to enjoy music or become more creative, it
just makes it easier for some. I have written some riffs while I was tipsy or
high that I winded up keeping, but mostly destructive to the creative process.
As for concert goers and fans of musicians, It really depends on the setting,
for example, if its an EDM festival than I understand why people are on drugs
because its one giant party with music, and not a concert. If your going to a
concert, you should respect your favorite band or artist your about to see and
try to have fun on your own, maybe smoke a j and have a beer, but try to be sober
enough that you can actually enjoy music in its truest form rather than
filtered through your drunk or hallucinating brain. For me, I only smoke weed
and drink. I have done shrooms twice in my life, firsg time was great, second
time I called my mother and thought I was a ghost. Being that I play electronic
music currently, I have had multiple people assume that im constanly on acid
while im playing music. I do not like the fact that people assume that making
anything psychedelic or trippy sounding means I had to of taken acid to create
it. It makes it sound like what I did means nothing when I had to work hard to
create that sound. Everyone assumed Jimmi Hendrix was high and tripping his
whole life, when in fact he was sober during most of his recording sessions,
and I always felt bad for him in a way that he would probably hated most of his
fans for relating him towards drugs more than his creativity and imagination.
With or without drugs, anyone can still be creative in a psychedelic way
without using hard drug
Q: Do you think the earth can sustain the human
population for the next 100 years?
A: Yes, In my own opinion, I think the earth has its own way of
balancing things out. Even though ill be dead by then and I wont really care
whats going on in that existence, Id like to think the earth will have its own
way of controlling the human population or humanity somehow changes as a whole
and quits screwing around with politics and money.
Q: Tell me your thoughts on the current state
of movies in America? DO you like them? Do you hate them?
A: I honestly like them in any genre except
Horror. Sci Fi and Horror where my favorite genres growing up, Horror being
most of what I watched when I was a child. I have seen almost every horror
film, even foreign ones from Japan and Italy. For the past 15 years, there has
not been a single good horror film thats true to the genre. Most of them are
Slasher/Gibblets and Gore movies or Paranormal Thrillers yet none of them are
horrifying to look at. You never feel desperate for the characters and none of
the villains are even close to being disturbing or intimidating. Its a shame
that there aren't more movies like Carpenter's Halloween or Barker's Rawhead
Rex. Don't get me wrong though, I loved 80's and 90's Slash and Gore flicks,
just when its over the top disturbing and using lots of bubble gum and corn
syrup make up effects.
Q: What is the music scene in New Jersey like?
A: Pretty alive but narrowed down to maybe 2 or
4 genres, like Heavy Rock/Hardcore/Punk/Acoustic. There is alot of great bands
around here, you just get sick of eating the same sound every night. The cool
part about playing a different and almost unheard of style of music around here
is there are other just like me, trying to contribute something completley
different than the norm. New Brunswick actually has a pretty lengthy history
with noise musicians and bands. We have had a few noise acts come through here
like Hatchers, who have been playing out of NYC for over 10 years and played
tons of basement punk shows here during that time. My main goal for this year
and next year is to bring more diversity to the shows around here and help
build a stronger musical community with all different types of genres in one
show rather than keeping them seperated and isolated in their own genre
settings.
How did you come up with the name for your
project?
A:
Before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be an Astronaut. I watched
alot of Discovery channel shows and documentaries on astronomy and space travel
when I was a kid and I remember watching a program on astronaut engineers who
repair the outside of space shuttles after the reach space and before they
return to earth. Some where tethered to an oxygen cord and others would fly
around in jet packs. Obviously sounds like fun and looked beautiful so I wanted
to do that but I was young and you want to be everything when your a kid. So
later in life, after i had decided to become a musician, I went to school in NY
for audio engineering at the Institute of Audio Research. I took a few classes
on MIDI and Synthesizers and I had this super cool tutor (Connor Martin) who
hooked me up with alot of plug ins and tips for using Reason and Logic. As I
was learning all of this, I would take it all back home and apply it to my own
creativity. One of the first tracks I made was called E.V.A and it just stuck
with me. From there, I came up with the concept of E.V.A being a musical
sequencer for astronauts to listen to as they forfill there duties in outer
space, reparing space crafts and upgrading satellites, and completley
seperating myself from it, as if I where the engineer aboard this space craft.
Q: What bands are you currently listening too?
A: Plaid, Tim Buckley, Gordon Lightfoot, Solo
Andata, MPHIAT, Monoliths, My Bloody Valentine, Source Direct, Prodigy, Sting.
Any last words you want to say?
First off, Thank you for interviewing me. This
is a first for me as I normally don't like to talk a out what I do, but this
experience as certainly opened my shell a little wider. Im sure my family is
not aware of this side of me so of your reading this, I dont apologize as this
is who I am and I think youll love me regardless of who I have become. For all
the musicians and artists out there, whether you make music or write
books, keep doing what you are doing.
Stick to it, dedicate your whole life to it, learn from it, and harness it as
if it where your own superpower. If you just keep calling yourself what you
think you are, you will eventually become it.
-Zack
Bandcamp!
