Tiny Masters Of Today
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Websites:
Bio: Tiny Masters Of Today might be named after a fictional rock band, but they’re real enough, even if they do sound too good to be ... (more)
true. A brother and sister, Ivan and Ada, respectively 15 and 13, from Brooklyn, NY, who have been performing and recording together for almost four years, it would be easy to praise them purely on account of their youth, but the music they make is extraordinary for any age, and by any measure. And they have done what all superlative rock acts, young and old, want to do on their latest album and that is to evince a considerable advance, musical and lyrical, from their earlier work – in this case, two EPs, three singles and a debut album, 2007’s Bang Bang Boom Cake - to demonstrate progress and an expansion of ideas, influences and possibilities.
You can hear whole new areas of opportunity opening up and whole new types of music being assimilated on that new album, Skeletons. More experimental than Bang Bang Boom Cake, Skeletons is a frighteningly accomplished record that sees Ivan and Ada incorporating elements of, and feeding off the energy from, not just punk and grunge, garage and indie, but also electronica and hip hop, dub and disco. The success of their self-produced EPs attracted a large degree of attention and, as a result, Bang Bang Boom Cake saw all manner of underground, alternative, pop and rock guest musicians drawn into Tiny Masters Of Today’s world, from Karen O and Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Kimya Dawson of Moldy Peaches to Russell Simins of Blues Explosion, Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers and Fred Schneider of B-52s, Skeletons finds our heroes increasingly confident and working mainly alone in the studio, handling all the singing, playing most of the instruments and operating much of the equipment, with only an engineer and a new 18-year-old drummer called Jackson Pollis between them and total creative independence.
The result is an experimental but accessible collection of beats, guitars, bass, keyboards and vocals, artfully assembled into stylishly messy, ingeniously condensed one, two and three-minute noise-pop-rap songs; 11 triumphs of compression and adolescent expression. In a way, it sounds like the Sonic Youth of Teenage Riot jamming with Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad.
Drop The Bomb is a brutally effective opener, the synapse-singeing beats, treated vocals and backwards FX serving as the perfect statement of intent. Two Dead Soldiers, based on a 19th century schoolyard chant, kicks off with a rockabilly guitar lick over an incongruous hip hop beat, before morphing into a supremely infectious, international party shout-out jam: "Can you hear me in Brooklyn? Can you hear me in Brixton? Can you hear me in Berlin?"
The title track brings to mind a fuzztone Cheap Trick circa He’s A Whore produced by Phil Spector if his Wall Of Sound was daubed with graffiti. Pop Chart sounds like Mink De Ville’s new wave classic Spanish Stroll being tweaked into the modern age by The Strokes, only with an exquisitely bored pre-teen girl on vocals, which sort of makes sense when you think about it. And so the album goes on, with one bubblepunk blast and DIY garage-rap burst after another. There’s weird stuff going on here, but never at the expense of the hooks and melodies.
“It’s a lot more experimental and artsy than our last album,” insists Ivan, the Tiny Master responsible for most of the music. “There are weird time signatures and weird instrumental breaks. Just more weird things, really. It’s more sophisticated, maybe because we were listening to more experimental music as inspiration this time. I was 11/12 when we made that first record and my influences were a lot different back then. I still love the Velvets and the Stooges, but I’m also listening to new hip hop artists like Lupe Fiasco and bands like Animal Collective.”
Ivan describes the music on Skeletons as “catchy with an edge”, a neat way of encapsulating hummable explosions of melody and teen noise terror like Drop The Bomb, Two Dead Soldiers and the shockingly infectious title track, which sounds like a hit single in an alternate universe where Ramones were as big as The Beatles. He worked up rough drafts of the songs – a guitar riff here and a drum beat there - at home using GarageBand before entering Seaside Lounge studios in Brooklyn last September, just ahead of the new school term. With engineer Patrick McCarthy at the controls, Ivan and Ada would spend between 11am and 6pm in the studio, developing the riffs, beats and fragments into songs and finding ways to use the various makeshift instruments they picked up on the way to the studio. “We’d find these weird keyboards and toy instruments on the street, fix them up and do weird things with them,” explains Ivan. “We’d use them to play melodies. Sometimes they would sound funny or bizarre, but they helped us experiment in our own way.”
A progression between Bang Bang Boom Cake and Skeletons has also been achieved with regard to the lyrics. The process of arriving at a fully-formed Tiny Masters Of Today song involves Ivan playing his sonic doodles to his younger sister, and her coming up with words to match them. Occasionally, Ada – “the brains behind the lyrics” according to Ivan - will come home with a complete lyric or she will propose a melodic idea, at which point the heated debates begin.
“I’m pretty terrible at writing lyrics, so I let her do her thing. We don’t sit in a room together like Lennon and McCartney. We work separately, then collaborate later. The lyrics change after I hear them sometimes - we are definitely allowed to change stuff. I sometimes say they’re stupid, and she’ll get mad at me and beat me up. But usually we work it out. Mum and dad tend to let us fight it out if there’s a disagreement. This time, Ada would propose her ideas beforehand, so they were all written with my consent. But that’s okay - she’s the lyrical genius.”
Ada admits that she finds it hard to answer the question about where she gets her ideas from. “I don’t really think about it too much,” she says, modest about her lyrical stance, one that is always wryly funny, and generally anti-establishment, anti-corporate and anti-consumerist. In Pop Chart, Ghost Star and Abercrombie Zombie, celebrity culture, the media’s obsession with stardom and peer-group pressure are coolly dissected, while Big Stick annihilates, ever so cutely, pretty much everyone in her way: “Losers and the users and the bullies and the choosers/Gangsters and the wanksters and the gossips and the pranksters/Snobs and the slobs and the critics and their blogs/Politicians, bad magicians/I'll knock out the competition."
“Abercrombie Zombie was about the time we [she and Ivan] went to the mall in Queens, and I got the dirtiest looks ever,” she explains. “All the girls looked exactly the same and they looked at me like they wanted to kill me. Why? Probably because we’re different. But I’m not a total tomboy, I never have been. My bedroom is pink, and I won’t deny that. Appearances don’t count for everything. A lot of girls at school look like Valley Girls with their blonde hair and skirts, but once you get to know them they’re not like that at all.” “Besides,” she adds, “just because someone is different to you doesn’t mean they’re not nice people. There are a lot of people I’m friends with that you couldn’t imagine.”
Ada is especially proud of the lyric to the title track, which she wrote three years ago, originally in the form of a poem. “I just came across it recently, but I’m still not sure what I was trying to write about,” she says of the line in the song about “skeletons in my closet”. “I was just thinking about the saying, and what that could mean to someone.” She says she doesn’t use metaphors – “not consciously. I mean, maybe Skeletons is a metaphor, but generally I don’t think like that. It just happens that way.”
Pop Chart, she explains, was based upon a melody they developed in the van on tour. “We sang it for the whole tour and then Ivan wrote the music on guitar and some of it [the lyric] actually fit and it was pretty cool.” Ada admits that, against her better judgment, she sometimes finds herself singing songs from the Top 40, but hasn’t heard too many people singing her songs, apart from the chorus to Big Stick (“Gotta big stick, gonna hit you with it, hit you with it”), which “a lot of my friends sing as a joke.” Does she get ideas for songs at school? “Well, I try to pay attention in school, but sometimes a song will come into my brain.”
Ada doesn’t really have a role model, although she thinks Karen O is “really cool”. She has a sneaking regard for some of Katy Perry’s songs, says she must listen to Sonic Youth “because everyone compares us to them”, and has been reading up about riot grrrl on the internet. Mainly, she’s just pleased to have completed a second album of which she can be proud, as is her older brother.
“I’m really happy with it,” he says. “Sometimes it’s hard being in a band while we’re still at school but it’s not that big a deal. We just wanted to do an experimental punk rock record and that’s what we did.”
The album Skeletons is released on 15 June 2009.
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