Words by McGregor
Photos by Maria Porcaro

Meeting Kyle and Orhan of Blind Man’s Colour at Cake Shop on Ludlow Street in the LES felt like meeting your roommate’s teenage Floridian cousins at a speakeasy and trying to sneak them in the back door so you could crush a happy hour before their parents picked them up to go to the airport. We couldn’t really chat in Cake Shop and we couldn’t go to any other LES watering hole, so, like good teenagers do, we headed to the closest pizza joint, Rosario’s. Of course, it was too loud in their too, so Kyle and Orhan, who just released their debut LP Season Dreaming on Kanine Records, took a seat on the curb to chat about college life, Fantasia, marine biology and the magical musical story the band has been secretly working on for a few years.

You guys are apart of a little scene going in the St Pete area. Ironically, I came across Blind Man’s Colour through Chromatic Flights and Sandbar.
Kyle: (laughs) That’s so weird. Usually people are like, “I like your Chromatic Flights stuff” its almost always after being familiar with Blind Man’s Colour.

So there is Blind Man’s Colour, Sandbar, Suntime, and Chromatic Flights. How is it all arranged?
Kyle: Suntime is me and my brother Evan. We’ve been playing together since we’ve been little. We’ve gone through a ton of different projects. Some electro stuff. More folky stuff. We’ve done a few things as Suntime already. Some tape recordings and stuff.

I’ve heard “My City’s Dead” from Suntime, which is a lot folkier than a lot of the BMC stuff.
Kyle: Yeah, that’s the one song we’ve put out. I don’t think we’re going to really do stuff like that anymore. It’s going to be more keyboard-based songs. My brother does solo stuff as Sandbar and he’s only put out one song too, and that’s very similar to what the Suntime stuff will sound like in the future.

So how’d you guys get together?
Orhan: I came down from the suburbs of DC/Baltimore in 7th grade and we went to the same school. We started making music almost right away.

You were already playing music when you got to Florida.
Orhan: I had just started to play guitar and he had just started playing drums. And we were the only ones who were our age who were playing.

So you were almost forced to start a band because there was no one else to play with.
Orhan: Right, right. We were into the same shit.
Kyle: Most of the kids were just into, ya know, pop music. Orhan and I were listening to more classic rock; Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. We started to write our own songs- really simple, modern rock songs. It was basically a classic garage band.
Orhan: We wrote our own songs from the beginning.

Really? You’ve never played covers?
Orhan: We’ve covered two songs. “Wish You Were Here “ and “Stairway to Heaven” just like any thirteen year old in a band would do.
Kyle: Yeah, we’d just record straight through the microphone to Sound Recorder in like Windows 98 or something.
Orhan: We probably still have those recordings somewhere.
Kyle: Then in High School that band played our big Halloween show in the gym at school. We did that again our sophomore year in High School. Then Junior Year, Sheridan Willard moved down from Pennsylvania and things totally changed. He was using the same electronic sequencing software that we were using to make electro songs.

What program?
Kyle: Reason. But he was using it in a completely different way than I was using it.

It’s funny how know one really goes by the book, or takes a class, or anything technical. People play with the software and make it work for them, not necessarily using it the way it’s supposed to work.
Orhan: Sometimes you need the tutorials. (laughs)
Kyle: Yeah, but in general it was just months straight of coming home from school and tweaking things, trying out new arrangements and production techniques, playing around with the sequencing. Just getting it used to that. I was using it in a way more experimental way than Sheridan was. I probably wasn’t using it correctly at all, but he knew all the proper techniques and knew how to use Reason the way it was supposed to be meant, which I think taught me a lot about sequencing and production. We produced a few things that never got out anymore, or were never finished. But then the start of senior year we started–

(Cab driver pulls over in front of us, gets out of car and begins screaming at seemingly random pedestrian. Screaming escalates and peaks with a massive bear hug. We all watch on in utter confusion. Love New York.)

Kyle: So the start of Senior Year, we would just go to each other’s houses a lot. We started recording a little bit more seriously and slowly, whether consciously or sub-consciously, our sound started to change. It became more floaty, and experimental. Before than it was a bit like Flaming Lips, acoustic guitars and big drums with weirdo sounds. After that things really started to gel and the album started to come to fruition. Some of the recordings on the album are from that time too, late 2007. Basically that whole year, we were just meeting after school and recording and that’s how the album came together. It was all done by Summer 2008. Then we went off to college, not thinking about anything, and all of the sudden, the Kanye West thing, and all that, and Kanine came calling and decided to put out that record.

Seems like it was totally organic, the flow of the recording process through the eventual release of the album.
Kyle: Yeah, it all just sort of happened.

So tonight is your third show ever.
Orhan: Yeah.

So much of what you guys do is really synthetic and built in the studio. How have you rearranged your band for the live setting? How has your idea of performing your music changed in preparing the songs for a live setting?
Kyle: We look at it wayyy differently than how we record. When we were recording, we didn’t even think about things like live arrangements, or how we’d pull it off live.

Were there elements that you were like “fuck, we need to figure out how to play this because I have no idea how we recorded it.”
Orhan: When we were recording we could get away with a lot of shit. Like not using bass. Ever. I don’t know how, but you can. The drums, the guitars, its all so different live than how we’d been using them prior.
Kyle: Well, I mean, I think a lot of those were conscious decisions. I didn’t really want bass. I didn’t really think bass was necessary for our sound.
Orhan: I’ve always wanted bass.
Kyle: You never mentioned recording a bass guitar.
Orhan: Of course I did, are you kidding me?
Kyle: There was always a bass guitar right there.
Orhan: That was a shitty bass guitar. No strings, shitty pickups. We didn’t have a bassist, so I wasn’t really trying to lay down bass lines.
Kyle: I actually think you did try to lay a few down.
Orhan: Either way, we had to adapt the bass for the live performance. It’s just essential for the live sound.
Kyle: Only two of the songs were recorded the entire way through. All of it was done so gradually over time, tons of overdubs, tons of tweaking, so a lot of that had to be stripped away in order for us to play live. It’s a simpler, more rock and rolly, I guess.

Are you using samplers?
Kyle: No samplers. We want everything to be in real time. The keys, the drums, etc.
Orhan: We’ve got a couple of pre-recorded drum tracks that we use though. Programmed in Reason and play them through the laptop. We’d like to make our live shows more original eventually. Right now we just have the standard equipment and only like one pedal. But I think we’re getting good experience. We just don’t have that much to build on yet, though over the next year we hope to get some of that figured out.

When do you guys go back to school?
Orhan: A week from now.
Kyle: the day we get back actually. We’re going back to school. We go to different schools, so it’s not like well be able to play all that often or really record together on a regular basis.

How far away are the schools?
Kyle: Only like an hour or so.

So you don’t really plan to record?
Kyle: It’s just weird because you’re in that sort of school mode, where you’re not thinking of too many things out side the bubble of university life. Classes and all that. Just such a different mental state. We’ve also got tons of new, different things to worry about. New lyrics, new arrangements, so we can’t really worry about playing live and what not. I guess we won’t be focusing completely on either.

So you finished Season Dreaming a long time ago.

Orhan: Last summer.

You’ve released a bunch of free EP’s and digital downloads on your blog. Where’s it go from here?
Orhan: Now that we’ve started playing live more, I think we’re going to think about writing new material that sounds better live, which we never thought about at all before. We’ll probably be a lot more conscious of it when we’re laying down the sixth or seventh synth part on a song without bass and guitar.

How does the recording process work when your at school? Do you guys send each other demos and recorded ideas? Like MediaFire it to one another and have them fuck around with it.
Kyle: Eh. I think we really want to take a more analog approach. We want to get a like an eight-track analog recorder so shooting ideas off through the Internet might not be the most productive thing for us. We’re sort of moving in a more analog way, at least in terms of recording. Really want to buy some nice analog synths and what not.

You know the guys in Holiday Shores?
Orhan: Yeah.
Kyle: Yeah, they came to my school. 


They’re cool guys. They’ll be up here soon. Nathan is the same way about all the analog equipment. They’ve done a really good job of fleshing that one out live.
Kyle: Yeah, even though he played like all of the instruments on that album, it’s still a very live record. I mean, he played physical drums on it, and guitar and bass and so on. Our record is so different, in that it’s just really synthetic. We’ve got so many layers.
Orhan: I think our next one will be a lot less synthetic. We’ll still try to be experimental and innovative but I don’t think we’ll need hundreds of layers of sound in order to produce that, which playing live has definitely taught me.

You want to remain true to your sound but make it a little less pre-programmed and reliant on digital effects.
Kyle: Yeah, we really want to buy some equipment. We want to keep it lo-fi, but we don’t want to just have some cool sounds and base songs around them. Instead, we really want to write some crazy songs and work little effects and found sounds and what not into them, instead of using them as the jumping off point.

What you guys listening to lately?
Orhan: I’ve been listening to–
Kyle: Animal Collective!

(laughs)

Who’s Animal Collective?

(laughs)

Kyle: I really like Ducktails and Mt. Eerie but I also listen to Lil’ Wayne and Beach House.
Orhan: Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Grizzly Bear, a lot of Black Moth Super Rainbow. Old stuff like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Grateful Dead. I try to keep a good balance of listening to old and new shit.

You guys ever listen to the Smile era Beach Boys shit?
Kyle: Huh?

When you were just talking about song structure, the first thing that came to mind was Brian Wilson. Such a master of execution and experimentation. Especially during that psychotic period. Or Van Dyke Parks, who helped arrange the Smile shit.
Kyle: I listen to a lot of Paul Simon, sort of reminds me of Brian Wilson. Got such an original knack for melody and nostalgia, but always keeping things fresh, never getting stagnant in his own right.

Did you guys use a lot of field recordings and found sound stuff on the record?
Kyle: Eh, a little, not too much.
Orhan: Occasionally.
Kyle: The first song is supposed to be all underwater, then coming up for air, so we recorded some waves and seagulls and the like.

Did sequencing play a lot into finishing the record?
Kyle: Sort of. The first song was started in 2007 and finished in 2008, “Warm Currents Pull.” At that time it just stopped. We weren’t thinking about it for an album or anything. Once we had a batch of songs, we started to think about order, and how things would flow into and out of each other and different sequential pairings and stuff. Some songs we meshed the beginning and ending of two songs. We never had that idea before really.
Orhan: It really helped the way the songs transitioned. If you hear “Dinosaur Ride”, the whole intro to that song is a recording of a town square; just people going by, you hear their voices. Then we put that in reverse, maybe added a little delay. But the way “Heavy Cloud Hustle” ends is like a swoop up and then it comes down into “Dinosaur Ride.”
Kyle: We sort of think of it like with “Warm Currents Pull” it starts off and your underwater. Then that ends and your coming up for air with “Heavy Cloud Hustle” and then back down with “Dinosaur Ride,” where you hear all the people.

So it was sort of an intentional trip.
Orhan: Yeah (laughs)
Kyle: It’s a weird fantasy ride.

Was there any inspiration besides general summer–
Kyle: Marijuana.
(laughs)
Orhan: Getting high.

Sometimes there is a little bit more than that, ya know? I don’t even mean drugs, ya know, just general inspiration, whether it’s Dr. Seuss or a ride at MGM Studios or whatever. Like when you’re a kid and you read Puff the Magic Dragon and shit.
Kyle: I think the old Disney stuff is a big influence on us. Fantasia. Jungle Book. That stuff was may more interesting and creative and really opened kids minds than a lot of the stuff that has come out in recent years.

True. Although, I did see Coraline 3-D recently that was the trippiest thing I’ve seen in a really long time. Birds flying directly at your dome. Trapped doors to bizarre worlds where everything is just slightly different. Really dark and psychedelic.
Kyle: we definitely loved childhood literature, something that we were doing simultaneously with this album was we tried to record a story.

Like a musical story?
Kyle: Yeah. We read the whole story out, recorded it onto four-track, and then wanted to score the whole thing.

Oh man, you guys got to get the Beach Boys Holland. Brian Wilson does this ridiculous narrative piece called “Mount Vernon and Fairway (A Fairy Tale).” They were already rich as shit, and they had Warner Bros. build them a custom JBL studio in California and then ship it to Holland, because they wanted to record in Amsterdam. So the middle of the record is this musical narrative about a fairy who takes over the signal inside an AM radio at night.
Kyle: Our story has a lot of metaphors and symbolism and it was really visual.

What was it about?
Kyle: The world had filled up with water. These giant buckets poured over an entire town. By the end people were coming to the top of the water. The sun was shining through. We never really recorded it, or were that happy with it.

How long is it?
Kyle: probably like fifteen- twenty minutes. I sort of noticed that Orhan is really into fictional writing. He’s always writing stories.
Ohran: Oh hell yeah.

What are you guys majoring in?
Orhan: Well, last year I was studying Live Music, but this year I think I’m going to move more toward marine biology. I mean, my schools right on the coast so…
Kyle: I’m an environmental studies major, so it’s more of a philosophical study of the science, while he goes out and does the research and then I analyze the research. So we’re sort of thinking, like we’ll go out to the beach during the day and he’ll do the work, then we’ll play live music at night. If it just worked out that way–

Scientist-slash-musicians.
Kyle: That is the life.
Orhan: Yeah, that is the dream life. Just go diving, be at the beach all day and play music all night.