The Magic of Oh Fortuna
Bonus Points for Dancing
originally published March 12, 2008
Mike White
Oh Fortuna
Sometimes the most danceable electronic music ends up being a bore to watch onstage. Take Hot Chip, for example. DJs can spin "Over and Over" and the dance floor is packed, but put Hot Chip on a stage and it's just five dudes hiding behind laptops. Snooze. You can see the same "show" at Hot Corner any night of the week.
While perhaps musically similar to Hot Chip, the electronic dance collective that is Oh Fortuna shares more in common with The Flaming Lips or Polyphonic Spree when it comes to stage presence. This seven-piece ensemble fills the stage with eclectic costumes, wide smiles and contagious enthusiasm.
"It’s all about performance and humor," says synth controller Nick Lamberth. "If people aren’t having a good time watching you onstage, then they won’t want to listen to your music, and laughter is an easy way to connect with somebody at first, before you try to tug at the heartstrings a little bit."
From matching Harry Potter glasses to tacky Christmas sweaters, the band seems to get behind anything kooky that adds to the spirit of the show.
"We usually just bounce stupid ideas off of each other [like, 'Martin Luther Sting Day'] until one of them makes us laugh hard enough that we have to do it. It’s actually, probably, the hardest part of being in the band - coming up with and making costumes."
While the silliness may make you smile, it's the tunes that keep you watching. Frontman JT Bringardner reaches out to the crowd like a preacher, his golden Robert Plant locks glowing under the lights as he sings the praises of love, family and friends. Around him, a veritable orchestra of performers plays an array of instruments from saxophone to banjo. The one constant string tying each track together is a steady electronic beat and the gentle swirl of synth. It's hard to tell exactly what all that knob-twiddling and button pushing is all about, but Lamberth isn't interested in divulging any secrets.
"We don’t use electronics," he insists, "we use sorcery."
If magic is at work here, it's definitely not the dark kind. It's more like a fairy landed in Gainesville, FL, waved her magic wand, and Oh Fortuna manifested itself in a cloud of glitter. These kids just seem so genuinely excited to be playing live, like every show is their collective birthday party, and they just want to invite the audience to celebrate with them. How do they stay so darn optimistic? "We all eat a bucket of marshmallows and watch Charlotte’s Web every day to keep the whole illusion up," Lamberth explains. It's hard to tell if he's joking. "Oh Fortuna’s origin story is a deeply guarded secret," Lamberth continues, "but I can say it involved wizards and the best game of Balderdash ever played." (Of course, even Athens' own mega-band Dark Meat will tell you that touring with this size band is a logistical nightmare. Although the group is still young, Oh Fortuna has already come to grips with this struggle and, not surprisingly, has been able to see the lighter side of the situation.
"Seven of us all usually tour, so transportation is a mess," Lamberth admits, "but it’s always a fun trip. It's kind of like an arty, dysfunctional family road-trip comedy - Little Miss Sunshine starring The Goonies, if you will."
In the past year, Oh Fortuna has just begun stepping out on the road and testing the waters. So far, the reception has been very warm. The band was pleased especially by the response in Athens, and was equally impressed by our local talent.
"We all have a band-crush on Ice Cream Socialists," Lamberth says. "The set they played with us was one of the best I’ve seen at a local concert."
In the midst of touring, Oh Fortuna has been busy recording material for its debut release. The first singles are posted on MySpace now, and will hopefully be released sometime later in March or April on an EP tentatively titled Oh Fortuna’s Bad as I Want to Be, by Oh Fortuna. In the meantime, the band can confirm the release of a split 7" with fellow Gainesville band Oh Sanders coming out in April. Oh Fortuna also plans on following the recent trend in music sales: giving it all away for free.
"We did make the decision that until we professionally record, all of our songs will be up for free to download because we don’t want to be lame about distributing music that we love to make. That is, until we sign to a label and sell out. Then it’s 25 bucks a CD. Count on it."
Despite tales of wizards and marshmallow consumption, this is actually the one line from Lamberth that really seems unbelievable. An ensemble so set on having fun and making others feel good doesn't seem like the type to be easily swayed by dollar signs. In fact, having commercial appeal or success is hardly the group's priority.
Lamberth explains that in the process of writing and recording material, the band "eventually settled on a kind of mission statement for writing the music: Every song should be either physically or emotionally moving. If someone’s not feeling something or dancing, then we’ve failed as a band. Bonus points if they feel it and dance."
WHO: Oh Fortuna, Gemini Cricket
WHERE: Flicker Theatre & Bar
WHEN: Friday, March 14
HOW MUCH: $5
The Metamorphosis of Ra Ra Riot
Despite a Tragic Loss, The Band is Reborn
originally published March 12, 2008
Ra Ra Riot
There are three things you might as well know right off about Milo Bonacci. First, he’s the bespectacled guitarist for Syracuse, NY-based band Ra Ra Riot, where he lends a rougher, serrated quality to the sextet’s grainy chamber pop. He also seems like a pretty nice guy. And finally, he makes quite a passable caterpillar. At least, that’s what one could gather from the video for “Dying Is Fine,” a mixture of live action and animation in which Bonacci and bassist Mathieu Santos start out as happy rock-and-roll caterpillars, before being imprisoned in a bug collector’s jar. This might sound like some heavy psychedelics, but the circle-of-life song and video seem closer to tasteful children's programming than to Iron Butterfly.
The song, from the band’s melodious yet melancholy self-titled 2007 EP, was one of the first written by the group. Inspired in part by a poet forever popular on college campuses, e.e. cummings, it features the sprightly chorus, “You know that dying is fine, but maybe / I wouldn’t like death if death were good / Not even if death were good.” The track proved bizarrely prescient, when the band’s 23-year-old drummer, John Pike, died suddenly early last June.
When Pike's family formed the John Ryan Pike Memorial Foundation to provide musical resources to underprivileged kids, Ra Ra Riot put on a benefit concert in Boston called “Friends of John,” which also featured Tokyo Police Club and Vampire Weekend. “[The foundation] was started because that’s the kind of person John was,” says Bonacci. “If he was interested in something, he was going to really learn about it, and know and explore and discover. He taught himself guitar, piano and drums.” Because Pike was integral to the band’s writing, Ra Ra Riot had to learn how to compensate for his absence when the group began recording its new album at the end of last year, convening for a few weeks in Seattle with producer Ryan Hadlock (Blonde Redhead, The Gossip, Stephen Malkmus).
“John contributed in a lot of ways to melodic and structural ideas, and that sort of stuff,” says Bonacci, “but also, he wrote a lot of the lyrics. So, this time around, it was all [Wesley Miles], our singer, who wrote the lyrics; before, he would always work with John on lyrics, so it was always a collaborative process. More or less, our overall process of writing hasn’t changed, it’s just the people contributing to the process has changed.”
Those people currently include Bonacci and Santos, as well as vocalist and keyboardist Miles, drummer Cameron Wisch, and the string section of Alexandra Lawn (cello) and Rebecca Zeller (violin). The group originally formed in January 2006 at Syracuse University, where its members were majoring in everything from painting to astrophysics, architecture to the music industry.
“We started playing a lot of house parties and campus events,” says Bonacci, “something to do on the weekends. There wasn’t a whole lot going on, so I think our intention was to make something go on.” They didn’t even bother recording until they wanted to play outside Syracuse and needed music to send to prospective venues. And by the fall of '06, the then-graduated members of Ra Ra Riot found themselves in a situation quite removed from their original casual jams.
“We were no longer a college band,” Bonacci says. “We started to think of ourselves as a real band in the world. Ever since then, we’re just trying to live up to that.”
Part of how the members are living up to it is through their live show. Onstage, the band is a constant flurry of activity, as the musicians pick up secondary instruments mid-song, contributing a bit of tambourine here, some keyboard there and backing vocals throughout. With Wisch on drums, the tempos are always pushing ahead, rather than lying back in the pocket, as if to further goad the band - and the crowd - to fresh exuberance. And if the lovely string section steals a bit of the spotlight from Miles, it doesn’t faze him; it seems that for Ra Ra Riot, having a singer, rather than an egomaniacal frontman, too, is fine.
Currently, the band is wrapping up the new full-length album and finding a U.S. label to release it. But the guys have already had some pretty real-world experiences as a band, including touring the United Kingdom a couple of times, opening for The Editors and headlining some dates as well. Bonacci recalls a special gig in Reykjavík, Iceland, where “a larger percentage of people… were singing along than I’ve ever seen at any of our shows. I have no idea how they knew our songs, but they did, and it was completely unexpected.”
Moments of triumph in distant lands aside, Bonacci, at least, projects a humble and weirdly matter-of-fact attitude. “None of us are expecting that we’re going to be doing this forever, or anything,” he says. “We all have other potential careers to get back to."
This article was published in the Pittsburgh City Paper in January 2008.
WHO: The Cribs, Ra Ra Riot, Jeffrey Lewis & the Jitters
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Monday, March 17, 9 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $10 advance
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