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Cheap sex in the future tense >>
The
science fiction affliction of 3.5 Megabytes
Mirror:
Explain what 3.5 Megabytes are all about. Alec Coiro:
We started out as just some kids who were into Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode
and stuff like that. We didn’t really intend to start a band, and
didn’t even have real instruments, just toy keyboards, but we had
some catchy tunes and people liked watching us, so we kinda played off
that and stuck around for a few years. What we’re all about is,
I’ve been through a lot of rock ’n’ roll shows in my
day, so many that I can’t differentiate between them. It’s
just a bunch of guys with guitars, looking at their shoes, trying to
be studs or whatever. We try to work for the audience, amuse them, put
on a spectacle. For us it’s as much about the show as it is about
the music, and that’s what we think is special about us. M: What
are the songs about? I’ve got “Techno Lust,” Techno Nuts”
and “Frauline” listedhere— AC: We try
to talk about a sort of campy little vision of the future, which has
to do with computers, robots and Germany, stuff like that. But it’s
always very overtly sexual. If you listen to my lyrics, it’s not
hard to tell. M: Tell
me a bit about the costumes. AC: We make them all ourselves. When we started out, we’d wear all black, turtlenecks and stuff. Then I kinda wanted to represent what we talked about in our songs. I’m the frontman, so I wear the fewest clothes, but I do like to do a few costume changes. James, who handles most of the keyboards and electronics—he’s pretty clever, he actually built himself a vocoder from this vocoder-building kit—has this black motorcycle helmet with a black visor, and he makes these glowing red eyes appear, like some sorta robot. The costume I’m most proud of, and I’ll wear it at the show, is this orange sorta armour made out of wood that I can walk around in. It doesn’t work very well, but it makes me look like some kinda big, whadayacallit, Transformer. Oh, also, everywhere we play, we have this robot guy with this computer head that one of dancers gets in and walks around in. A cup, until
it is struck M: I noticed
that, between the hammer and the cigarettes, your jockstrap takes a
lot of abuse. AC: Yeah,
I don’t know why. I just love the fact that there’s a cup
in there, so you can really do what you want. I think people in the
audience know it’s there, but still, I like to see ’em grimace.
I always have a girl from the audience come up and hammer on me, but
there was this one girl one time, she just wailed on me. It really hurt.
So now I have plants in the audience. M: Give
me an example of a show you guys did that made you think, that’s
what all our shows should be like. AC: A few Halloweens ago, we did this show, and I was a little nervous because I figured that everyone would be dressed up and we wouldn’t seem so special. But we went up with some new songs and new gimmicks. Wherever we play, we try to bring our stuff out piece by piece. We started with just the music and had some dancers dancing around, getting people into it. Then Shawn came out and sang a song, then James came out and plugged his vocoder in, and everyone was into the new technology. Then I came out and did a song in one costume. Then Shawn sang another song while I changed costumes. Then we pulled out the shadow puppets. That was the first time we introduced that—I mean, everybody loves shadow puppetry. We managed to whip out something new every five minutes. I felt like we hadn’t given people a chance to get bored. : With the Sick
Lipstick at Casa del Popolo on Saturday, Jan. 12, 9pm, $5
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Here’s
three and half reasons to go see New Jersey’s 3.5 Megabytes this
Saturday: budgetronic sex jams beamed in from the future, reckless use
of shadow puppets and freedom dancers in robot costumes. The .5 goes
to the robot thing, because robots are a reason and a half to check
anything out. Going on nothing more than four minutes of ludicrous video
footage and a completely misleading bio, the Mirror established a comlink
with 3.5 Mb front-freak Alec Coiro to get a better picture of what he
and his cohorts Shawn Ring and James Pham intend to subject us to this
weekend.