INTERVIEWS
Cypress Hill Spark Another One
We live in an era of premature anniversaries and nostalgia-fueled hagiography. But Cypress Hill deserves every glowing retrospective. B-Real, Sen Dog and DJ Muggs have licked shots at pigs, rivals, and the DEA for 30 years. They’ve earned the right to reminisce, to remind you to genuflect before you enter the Temples of Boom or lay a blunt atop their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Cypress Hill sound was inimitable and irrepressible from the beginning, a bicoastal sonic hybrid complemented with bilingual lyrics and localized slang. Muggs dialed back the Bomb Squad’s sonic maximalism, creating a barrage of psychedelic funk with a West Coast bent that would become progressively stranger and layered with each album, forever toeing the line between ominous and zany. The self-proclaimed...
Encanto Composer Germaine Franco on the Magic of Collaboration: “We Felt Like We Had This Amazing Gift”
A Zoom malfunction meant we had to restart midway through our conversation, but Oscar-nominated composer Germaine Franco was more than understanding — because Encanto was a COVID production. “Usually you want to be in the same room so everybody’s listening to the same mix, the same speaker, the same environment,” she tells Consequence via Zoom. “But I was presenting cues on Zoom, and everyone had different headphones. It was so tricky to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to play this. I have no idea what it sounds like on your end.’” Prior to Encanto, Franco’s film work included The Book of Life, Dope, Tag, and Coco — her Oscar nomination this year, for the lively Colombian-influenced score of Disney’s latest animated feature, makes history, as she’s only the sixth woman ever to be nominated for...
Japanese Breakfast and Alton Brown on Cooking, Music, and Cooking While Listening to Music
What do celebrity chef and TV host Alton Brown and Grammy-nominated indie rock star Michelle Zauner (AKA Japanese Breakfast) have in common? Quite a few things, believe it or not; both have a passionate love of food, with Alton Brown hosting multiple Food Network shows and Zauner exploring the relationship between food, love, and grief in her memoir, Crying in H Mart. Not only that, they’re both musicians; Zauner released her excellent third studio album Jubilee last year, whereas Brown is currently trekking across the country with his “ABL: Beyond The Eats” tour, which features him fronting a live band every night in addition to food science experiments, live cooking, and more. Together, they’re both ambassadors and sonic enthusiasts for Fender’s new futuristic and visually stunning...
Josh Klinghoffer Gets on With ‘The Show’ on New Pluralone Album
When it comes to Josh Klinghoffer’s musical output, it helps to have Google and Wikipedia handy to keep track of his voluminous work on dozens of projects by everyone from PJ Harvey and Gnarls Barkley to his own bands Dot Hacker and Pluralone. Of course, the 42-year-old Los Angeles native is best known for his 10-year stint playing guitar in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which ended in 2019. Since then, he joined Pearl Jam as a touring member and wrote and recorded with Eddie Vedder on his latest solo album, Earthling. And in tandem with Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and producer/guitarist Andrew Watt, Klinghoffer just wrapped a short U.S. tour with Vedder in support of the project, during which he was forced to miss a Chicago show after contracting COVID-19 on the road. Klinghoffer had pl...
Living the Electronica Dream
So, here’s the thing. Whether you know it or not, a lot of musicians work at music publications. And ours is no exception. This week, our creative director Danny Klein and his “ultimate creative manifestation” as he likes to call it, Robot Sunrise, is heading down to SXSW to close our main stage lineup on Thursday, March 17 at Austin’s Stubb’s-Bar-B-Q. His dreams of a life in music started in childhood, and over the years he’s racked-up some impressive credits, including co-writing and performing with Grammy-winning artist Really Doe and appearing along with Kanye West as a featured vocalist on Doe’s 2009 album First Impressions. With his electronic duo dreamfreak he’s co-written with Grammy-nominated Télépopmusik. “Robot Sunrise is electronic music. Sometimes dance, sometimes minimal and ...
Greg Daniels on How Jim and Pam’s Romance on The Office Inspired Season 2 of Upload
“You’re familiar with my last two years of life, then,” is how Greg Daniels responded when Consequence told him, at the beginning of a Zoom interview, that I’d seen both new seasons of his current TV shows: The Netflix original comedy Space Force, which he co-created with Steve Carell, and the latest installment of Upload, the futuristic rom-com now making its debut on Prime Video. Both seasons are second seasons consisting of seven episodes each, and both were shot with, as Daniels explains below, a lot of the same crew up in Vancouver, Canada. But while Space Force is a workplace comedy set within a satirical version of America’s newest branch of the armed services, Upload is first and foremost a love story. That’s the element which made Daniels excited about telling the story of a not-t...
Drug Church Goes Melodic (But Not That Melodic) On Hygiene
On the surface, Drug Church is just another hardcore punk band. They play fast and loud. Vocalist Patrick Kindlon often sounds angry. It’s the kind of music your grandma would probably hate. But underneath their aggressive facade, the Albany quintet’s catchy melodies and dark humorous takes on current societal and cultural issues make their tunes — like the ones on their brand new album, Hygiene (out now on Pure Noise Records) — as profound as any more “mature” artist. Drug Church is able to sing about topics and connect with fans who would likely be turned off by some self-righteous band with a “message” so to speak. Hell, even Kindlon himself doesn’t want to hear about his lyrics being anything of particular importance. “I think any profundity in music is best when it’s accidental,” Kind...
The Dropout Creator Liz Meriwether Took on the Elizabeth Holmes Story With a Writers’ Room Full of Lizes
The Dropout creator Elizabeth (or Liz) Meriwether is pretty open about how, before taking on the story of famed entrepreneur-turned-fraudster Elizabeth Holmes for the Hulu limited series, she didn’t know too much about the world of entrepreneurs, or science. “It was totally new for me,” she tells Consequence in a phone interview. “I had to really learn a lot.” Holmes first became a famous figure as an anomaly in the Silicon Valley tech sphere: a young, conventionally attractive female innovator, whose big ideas for a blood-testing device that could lead to a massive uptick in early detection of medical issues led to magazine covers as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in investment funds. However, her innovative ideas turned out to be based on lies and deception, leading to the end o...
Bashment YC On Seoul’s EDM Scene, K-pop Influences, and New Music
From Seoul to Los Angeles, rising DJ and producer Bashment YC is weaving the threads of a promising career in dance music. The South Korean young gun recently released “Real Good,” a collaboration with Illusïn and popular French producer Valy Mo released last month. The funky house tune was produced remotely, with Bashment working in South Korea and Mo chipping away in France. All said and done, they hit the nail on the head by dropping a thumping club track. To celebrate the release, we caught up with Bashment YC to chat about new music on the horizon, his influences, and EDM culture in his hometown Seoul. EDM.com: What’s the story behind this track? How did it come about? Bashment YC: The track was released on Will Sparks’ label Teamwrk Records...
Post-Hardcore Hellions Alexisonfire Return With Otherness
“Band practice has always felt the same,” swears guitarist/vocalist Wade MacNeil about reconvening with his colleagues in post-hardcore aggregate Alexisonfire. “We’re just trying to make something that feels like us.” After going on hiatus in 2012, reuniting for a tour in 2015 and writing, recording and releasing three new songs, the quintet spent their pandemic quarantine creating Otherness, the follow-up to their 2009 album Old Crows/Young Cardinals. “I think what we felt we owed to the fans is, if we’re ‘back,’ then let’s be back. We want people to know this isn’t some nostalgia trip or victory lap. We’re playing because we love it and we want to be on the road playing those songs for the people that have allowed us to do this for the last 20 years.” Of course, it’s not like America eve...
From Broadway to the Highway
It took Anaïs Mitchell roughly a decade to create her Tony and Grammy award-winning Broadway phenomenon Hadestown – a retelling of a Greek myth set in The Netherworld. And with that, she became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical (which then ran for 16 years). Now, she is looking to the future — cradling that Grammy, and eight Tony Awards no less. She has also been dubbed by NPR as “one of the greatest songwriters of her generation,” an article in Acoustic Guitar magazine called Mitchell “fearlessly emotive” and compared her to Bob Dylan, and then there was that Time Magazine 100 List in 2020. No wonder when I last spent an afternoon with her in New York, pre-pandemic she was all smiles. Then again, I think she’s just the smiling ty...
Young Guv’s Blessings and Curses
Young Guv’s Ben Cook briefly sums up the year he and his band spent in Taos, New Mexico, writing, hiking, cooking and experiencing the paranormal. “There’s just a lot of weird shit out there,” he says. Cook, the nucleus of the power-pop band, along with most of his live touring outfit and co-writers and producers, did what pretty much every other band did in the spring of 2020 – called off the tour. They were in El Paso, Texas, and rather than return to their homes in New York, they decided to experience true isolation somewhere new. The idea of Taos, New Mexico, an artsy, hippie-and-artist-friendly paradise a little over two-and-a-half hours northeast of Albuquerque, seemed like as good a spot as any to hunker down and figure out their next move. Originally, it seemed like more of an inco...
