William: Teeny pink pick!

OHMS: Yeah, looks like a Barbie doll pick

OHMS: Wow, another good show! - Interview with Suran Song in Stag, 15th of February 2002, that’s early in the year. A lot of time left you know.

I was reading on your website, I tried to do a little research so I’d not ask you the same questions that you probably always get asked, so I read your background, that you met one another in 1995, got married in 1998...

Suran: That’s right

OHMS: And you’ve done a lot of projects together, and the “in Stag” is because you usually have another gentleman working with you… so far have I done my homework right?

Suran: That’s right!

OHMS: One of the things I found the most interesting on your website is that you finance yourselves, you do everything yourselves, and your reason behind that is what I found compelling, and that’s because so you can control the message that you give, and not have someone else controlling it. And with all that in mind, what’s the message behind Cowboys and Indians?

Suran: Well, I really think that it’s about bullyism and from a really tiny level, from just on a playground all the way to economic bullyism, that we engage in with our government, and with corporations. So it’s really about looking at just even games that happen on a playground, and looking at how those can become adult habit, and just then trying to kind of tinker with those rules that seem to take at a really young age and they don’t get uprooted but actually get encouraged, it shapes the world that we live in.

OHMS: That’s a really interesting point of view, that you’re taking the children as an example of bullyism, because that’s one thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to give children sainthood, automatic sainthood, because they are children but you forget about the kids making fun of ya on the playground and all those things, and those same kids have grown up. Is that kinda where you’re comin’ from?

Suran: Absolutely, yeah…

William: You’re a teacher.

Suran: Yeah, I don’t know how or when its happened, but it seems really within the past maybe three years things have really changed with how kids are really given a sort of carte blanche to just not have to think about how their actions have consequences on the people around them and on their classmates. Empathy is not really put forth as a model so we get people growing up that just don’t know how to behave to one another in a civil way. So, it’s definitely something that we look at - I was a teacher for a while, I taught in inner city schools they call “at risk” - it was really evident there at how there was no way to ask, to have a principal who will enforce codes of just what you don’t do to one another, people were afraid of being sued for it, there’s no adult indoctrination at all, it’s really, it is, you know we talk about terrorism, the terrorism is in the schools, at that level, it goes all the way out and up.

OHMS: Very interesting message. (to William and Doug) Do you have anything to add to that? Jimi?

Ok, well just to give you a little background on what we do, and to lighten up the subject a little bit, Jimi has done Ohio Hystairical Musick Society for years, and I’ve been helping him the last six months or so getting things on the internet and things like that, his libraries…

Suran: I saw the website, it’s great, and his banks of videotapes too…

OHMS: Lots of them. But one of the things he’s been focusing on with OHMS is youth, projects of youth, things that come from kids being creative, going together, and coming out with something new. And we’ve kind of like to know each of you, what your first project was when you were young, what you consider the maybe song of your youth, or whatever.

Suran: That’s interesting

William: Wow.

Doug: The first project I was doing was a really bad hardcore band when I was in high school.

William: Oh yeah?

Doug: We were terrible, but it was a lot of fun.

Suran: What were you called?

Doug: Uncertain.

All: Uncertain!

Doug: Jokingly referred to as the Pizza Hut band cause all four of us worked together at Pizza Hut out there in….

OHMS: Where at, in New Jersey?

Doug: No, very close to Jersey, Newtown, Pennsylvania, just northeast of Philly, about 25 miles from the center of city. I think we played for a year, I played drums and then wrote a couple of songs, wrote the lyrics and sang the songs cause no one else would.

OHMS: So you had a club to play at there?

Doug: No, we played at my parents, we practiced at my parents' house, we played at a couple of high school graduation parties in peoples houses, I think we played one gig in Reading, Pennsylvania, that’s it, there’s no club there.

William: Do you mean band projects?

OHMS: Yeah, band projects, or art projects, theatre, music, whatever, like that.

William: Cause I mean the first thing I thought of was I used to build tandem bicycles with my friends, and we used to, it was very informal, it wasn’t for anything but ourselves really, but it was just sort of like building the bike from scratch was what we were into, and also at first it was a regular bike and then it was like how many people can we fit onto one bike. And the more people you’d try to put on the angles and the physics of how you build the structure itself have to adapt to how long it gets, the weight, and those kind of things taken into account. So I don’t know, that was the first thing that sort of, when you asked that….

Suran: How old were you when you did that?

William: Well, I think I was probably around, I was about 14 or 15, I guess? My friend’s father was a home improvements guy and he had an arc welder?…the electric, is that arc welding? And he would have killed us if ever found out we were using his arc welder. We managed to sneak it out back, and sort of like put these bikes together. I don’t know, it was a lot of fun. And there was a lot of teamwork, not just figuring it out, but riding the bikes was really hard, at first they were wobbly and stuff.

OHMS: You were like the Wright Brothers.

William: Yeah, it was, it was cool. It was a different sort of like figuring out how to work with other people.

OHMS: That’s great. How about you Suran?

Suran: I think the first project that really got me was on the neighbor I used to play with a lot, his father was an archeologist and an Egyptologist, and he could read hieroglyphics and everything, and he would tell us the stories of what these tablets had in books and things, and we really kind of sunk into that whole world and built like a replica of tombs and things out of just like watermelon seeds and popsicle sticks and we’d make these elaborate things in the back yard. I was really interested in mummification processes and we got to mummify a rat that somebody brought home from the lab, and you know you put it in the salt and then buried it, and the just the idea of leaking back and knowing we were doing something that was done thousands of years ago, that was great.

OHMS: Neat!

Suran: I’m into it.

OHMS: Sounds really cool. I have a question for Suran about your singing. You have a beautiful voice, a really strong, powerful voice.

Suran: Thank you!

OHMS: Have you always been a singer, or was it something you picked up when you were older, did you stand up on the bar stool and sing when you were a little girl, or is this new?

Suran: No, no, just my parents and my sister were always pretty encouraging, I think when I was small I used to babble and vocalize a lot, and they would just let me do it. I’ve always liked the voice, it’s my favorite instrument. I like all sorts of instruments, but there’s something about it just being from the body, that just is, it’s almost like that feeling of doing something that comes from thousands of years ago, it just seems like a really ancient source for communications, I love it.

OHMS: Yeah, in a band that small your voice really has to be an instrument. What gave you guys the nerve to go ahead and just do bass and drums?

William: It just happened out of necessity, we used to have guitars, and drums, we were a full four piece rock band at one point, and then just the guitar player and drummer we were with at the time had other obligations, we ended up actually paring it down to just bass and vocals for a while. We did a record like that, and a tour like that. We had all these songs and we didn’t want to wait until we finally got a band together to get the work out there. We just felt like we had to get the songs out, and so we just did them like that. We tried to figure out how can this work, just bass and vocals, it was really tough for a while, it was a lot of really gnarly sessions listening to rehearsal tapes again, like oh, man.

Suran: Yeah, you really hear yourself.

William: So we did that and then we wanted to bring drums back in to really pump it up and get it rocking again.

Suran: Dancing is such a result of drums, so it’s really fun to have that energy.

OHMS: Yeah, that’s good too, probably with a small group you have more room to dance too!

William: Guitar, that’s clutter on stage.

OHMS: We interviewed a group a few weeks ago, Lords of the Highway, and they have a female upright bass player, they’re a 3 piece also. She made that comment that she likes the small band, cause she’s got room.

Suran: With an upright bass that would probably get….

OHMS: Yeah, she rolls around with it, it’s pretty interesting.

OHMS: Suran, what’s action art?

Suran: I guess it comes from Germany in around the 50’s, there were artists who wanted to do living paintings, and do living sculptures, and use the body again and the voice to put forth narratives that have been happening in paintings all throughout history and to live in the moment with it, rather than it being about something that you put on the wall and frame and it being a separate experience. I think action art is that, an actual living two dimensional object, it’s like a fourth and second and third dimension all in one.

OHMS: Almost transitional? It’s here and it’s gone? Like Burning Man? Have you read about Burning Man?

Suran: Yeah! It really is about being here and now. Every time we do the show it’s pretty choreographed, and there’s the same slides, the same chunk of songs, but every time we do it I feel like it’s different. You know sometimes like when you’re praying or something you say the same prayer over and over again, but it’s always, it’s different every time you’re focusing on something else even if it’s the same words that you’re saying and the same benefosense that you want to invoke, it’s always a different thing. That’s what I feel like it is with this action art, that it’s a chance to draw energies that would be more static in a painting or something, and live in them now, bring them to life, metabolize them. If that makes any sense….?

OHMS: Yeah, it does. Would one of the examples on your show be for instance when you have the faces on your dress, and your pour the blood down and it goes over the face….

Suran: Yes, there’s an image of Jim Lehrer from the Newshour, he’s a talking head newscaster, and I remember watching him when I was little, and there he was again on the TV, just an image, and he was really pretty liberal then, then Robin McNeil left the Newshour, and PBS changed and started becoming more of a corporate funded interest, and then he really switched his politics. You can hear it now on his interviews, how he interviewed Chaney or any of those guys. So the chance to use the blood going over his image every time I do that it makes me think about my own cycles of idealism, and what is a belief. Is it something that stays with you your whole life or is it something that just changes depending on who’s giving you the money, and what time. Which all goes back to why we just fund ourselves and do everything ourselves because I think once you start to get on that road it’s really hard to remember who you are and what you’re doing. And our action art helps us stay rooted way too, with our music, always remembering why we’re doing it.

OHMS: Yeah, that’s a real good point. Do you do other types of art, do you paint, do those types of things, graphics arts, does anybody in the band?

William: Doug’s a man of words.

Doug: I do a small zine.

OHMS: I bought it, I haven’t read it yet, I just got it yesterday.

Doug: I do that now and then, and write songs, and play guitar too.

OHMS: You could get a job on TV as a cowboy too, you really look like a cowboy.

Doug: I’ve only ridden a horse once in my life and I hated it. I’d flunk that part of the test.

OHMS: William, what’s your art?

William: I actually went to school visual arts, I was a fine arts painting major, so I did the whole canvas stretching, slinging oil paint, and all that. I haven’t really done much of that lately. I’ve been doing a lot of web type stuff, like getting into the coding side of web stuff, and multimedia type flash, that kind of stuff. Not that I don’t like doing the painting anymore, it’s just where we are living right now it’s kind of hard to find time to do that, a suitable place to do it in. Eventually I’d really like to start doing it again, there’s a lot of ideas that I’d like to sorta pick up on where I left off, but…in time……

Doug: He’s doing handmade shirts for this tour.

William: That’s true, handmade shirts.

OHMS: I have one. Okay, now, I think when we were in the gallery out in Kent the other day, I heard someone come in, I can’t remember who I overheard talking, but I heard someone ask something about, “Oh, you guys are from New Jersey, were you near the World Trade Center when all that happened”… and I think I heard somebody say that they worked near it, or that their office was closed at that time?

Suran: Yeah….

OHMS: Well, lemme finish the first…. I kinda want to know, what impact it had on your music, and also if it had impact on how much you’re touring.

Suran: Yeah… well, we could see smoke from the towers in the town that we live in, we were walking to the post office and the barrel of smoke coming over the… we live kind of near a swamp…so you can see this barrel of smoke coming over the swamp…

William: You can sorta the tops of the tallest buildings in Manhattan from just over, just over the landfill where we live.

Suran: Which is above the swamp.

William: Yes, there was a lot of smoke that morning, and it’s pretty scary, but it definitely affected how much we’re touring now. It actually allowed us to sort of like go forward with and tour more than we had anticipated doing at the beginning of this year. And actually at the end of last year too, because we do a lot of design work like web stuff, and also print work for clients who were down in that area, and since their focus has sorta changed from….

Suran: Their offices were gone.

William: Yes, their offices were gone, but others their offices were shut down and actually just reopened again.

Suran: It was good though because I think it made us realize that you can’t really wait to go do what you want to do, you have to go do it. And that was the biggest thing for what happened this fall, I think maybe we were a little too practical before, just trying to do things but not do things to the point to where it was maybe too risky or something, but you’ve got to just be here now and just go do it, cause you never know, what’s going to happen. I think we were worrying also about pension and retiring, and you can’t be that way. It can be like the cruelest joke too, that’s the thing, the way the stock market is, I see a lot of our friends who are just so focused already on retiring, they’re like putting this money away and the cruelest joke is that it could not be there by the time that they want it, then they’ll have spent their whole lives not really doing what they wanted to do.

OHMS: I don’t know, it’s a terrible thought.

Suran: Just can’t think that way, that’s really dangerous. And that’s actually maybe an upshot of what happened this fall. But it’s pretty grim. And our show too has sort of an apocalyptic content to it which was there before it happened, so after it happened we getting sort of funny about it, we started touring at the end of September, so it was only about 10, 12 days….. A week after it, is it appropriate to be putting the content that we have out….and we decided yeah, it’s okay.

OHMS: Probably more appropriate than ever, really. While everybody’s thinking.

Suran: But we did it and I’m glad that we did it.

OHMS: I was gonna say, I got to listen to the WFMU, it’s archived, so I got to listen to it. I missed it the day it happened, but I listened to it, it sounded good, I liked it, it was a good show.

William: Thanks. That was a lot of fun. Their studios there are great. We love going to WFMU.

OHMS: Yeah, when our band goes out that way I hope to go. How long did you have to get ahold of them, ahead of time, how did you arrange that? It’s not part of the interview, but it’s a question.

William: I think it’s a little further in advance, I think you have to start trying to schedule something a month or two in advance now.

OHMS: That’s okay.

Suran: That station is great too, I mean they own themselves…

OHMS: Oh, I love that station.

Suran: They don’t have to do fundraising, they have their patrons, their sponsors….

OHMS: I can’t believe how much they archive, it‘s amazing, and then every day they are adding more. Cool station.

Suran: Yeah, it’s cool, it’s a great thing.

OHMS: So, you guys are not finished with your tour yet, right?

Suran: Nooooo.

OHMS: Where do you go from here?

All: Ysplanti, Michigan…. Kalamazoo…. Indianapolis…. Dallas…. Chicago…. Cincinnati… Morgantown, West Virginia…. Baltimore…. Rochester….

OHMS: Morgantown is usually a good show.

William: Yeah, yeah, we’ve had really good shows there. That’s a really good town.

Suran: It’s a great town, we really dig it there. Good people.

William: Rochester… and….

OHMS: Cincinnati should probably be really good too.

William: Yeah, yeah we played there once before too. That was a good show too.

Suran: Yeah, I like it down there. I think Cincinnati seems really different from like Cleveland or Akron.

OHMS: All of Ohio, oh, all of Ohio.

William: It seems more southern or something.

OHMS: It’s more like Kentucky. It just happens to be on this side of the river. It’s definitely more like…. let’s say the Bible belt. It’s different.

Suran: Columbus still seems like north to me too, even though I know it’s close to Columbus.

OHMS: No, it’s really a different, different area. So, is there anything else you’d like to tell everybody that may read this on the internet, or see it on video….

William: Go see live music.

Suran: Go see live music. And make music. Don’t wait, do it now.

OHMS: Do it now, that’s always a good quote.

William: Yeah, follow your lists….

OHMS: Ok, do you have anything Jimi, I’m done?

Suran: Thank you, those were good questions.