HOLY GHOST!
Holy Ghost! is Nicholas Millhiser and Alex Markel. They grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City together and were founding members of DFA catalogue band Automato, after having played together in various bands since their teens. In fact, Automato appeared in ’SUP in 2003 before they’d even settled on a name – back then they were called Elephant (for barely a hot minute). Now firmly nestled in their 20s, Nick and Alex have started Holy Ghost!, a daring disco band still under the helm of DFA.
In the course of the past year, they’ve remixed tracks from MGMT and Cut Copy, and released their own single “Hold On”. Mixing straight-up ’70s disco with a modern, post-Rapture/Interpol/TV On The Radio/Yeah Yeah Yeahs New York feel, “Hold On”, along with the likes of Hercules and Love Affair and the Golden Filter, was instrumental in the well-documented disco revival that swept the city by storm this past year. Did we mention that Holy Ghost! are also a DJ duo with a seemingly endless gig schedule? Not bad for a band who have yet to play their first live performance.
While Nick and Alex made a pit stop in Berlin during a recent European DJ tour, they caught up with ’SUP scribe Nicholas Ricciardi for the scoop on the road thus traveled.
How’d the tour go?
Alex: It was all good for the most part, but last night wasn’t so good.
What was wrong with last night?
Alex: Last night we were in Barcelona. Nothing was wrong. It was just kind of a weird room. The DJ booth was in the middle of the room, and it looked like a bar, so the whole night people came up asking us for drinks.
Nick: And to ask us to fix the cigarette machine.
Alex: No joke, like, fucking every five minutes someone was coming up.
Nick: And literally we would be playing records and some guy would be trying to talk to me, and I’d be like, ‘What?’, and he’d be like, ‘Blah, blah, blah’, and I’d be like, ‘I don’t speak Spanish, in English please!’, and he’d be like ‘Two vodka tonics’ (laughs).
What city did you like the best?
Nick: The craziest night was definitely Russia, which was just –
Alex: Moscow was fucking awesome.
Nick: Yeah, it was really good.
Was it weird?
Nick: It wasn’t, we thought it would be, but we didn’t know what to expect. I just sort of had this preconceived idea of Soviet people liking really hard techno stuff. But the second we showed up at the club, the owner was like, ‘We love disco, everybody who comes here loves disco.’ The second we started playing, it was kinda silly, but I feel like we could have played anything.
Alex: They were up for it.
What was the crowd like?
Alex: Literally, I think there were 60-year-old people there.
It wasn’t, like, the mink women crowd?
Nick: (laughing) Kind of.
Alex: There were some mink women! Definitely some mink women.
Nick: It was a bar owned by this fashion label, Denis Simachev. We were already kinda skeptical and were expecting a very fashion industry crowd. You have your obviously young beautiful people and your sketchy older money guys.
Alex: Yeah, but it was really good.
How long were you in Russia?
Alex: 20 hours. We got to the airport [after the gig] and had no information on our flight. We were so hung-over, no itinerary. We literally went to any one of the attendants with our passports and were just like, ‘Can you find us in the system?’
Nick: We were a mess. We were only a mess because we’re such lightweights. We didn’t do anything that crazy. It was the owner’s birthday, so we drank a lot of vodka. And I really don’t drink liquor, and I just couldn’t see by the end of the night. (laughs)
Berlin has been home base during the whole tour?
Alex: Yeah, Berlin has been home base.
Has the Berlin spell worked on you? Are you wowed by this city?
Nick: No, definitely not.
Alex: Absolutely not. I like Berlin during the day. It was nice, but the parties I went to freaked me out.
We call them ‘techno zombies’. Fucking really scary kids. Fucking faces all gaunt, and smelling, and just like, I don’t know. The night we landed, our agent was like, ‘You wanna go to a party?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah sure’ and he was like, ‘Alright cool.’ It was 11 o’clock and he was like, ‘It’s an after hours spot’ and I was like, ‘It’s early for after hours, I thought Berlin went late?’ and he was like, ‘No, it’s an after hours from Saturday’, and it was Sunday night. I went and there were kids who had been up for 24 hours straight.
I guess you’re happy to get back to New York?
Alex: So psyched. I just can’t wait to get back.
How long have you guys been living in Brooklyn?
Nick: Since we graduated high school we moved out and got an apartment.
Alex: We moved to Cobble Hill.
Nick: Yeah, we moved to Cobble Hill when we were 18, which was a funny place.
Alex: We thought about moving to Williamsburg but we were like, ‘No, there aren’t enough young people there.’ (laughs) So we moved to Cobble Hill, which is basically surrounded by families.
Nick: I moved to Williamsburg. I only made it a year in Cobble Hill.
You two have known each other quite a while?
Alex: Yeah, we’ve been playing music together since we were little kids. We grew up together in New York.
Elementary-school-little?
Alex: Yeah, elementary-school-little. We grew up a block away from each other. Nick was a drummer by trade and I was a keyboardist by trade.
At that age was it piano lessons?
Alex: (laughs) Yeah, by trade. Piano lessons at school and drum lessons at school. Nick played in a bunch of rock bands and I didn’t play in a bunch of rock bands. Then when we were in high school, we started making rap music with a bunch of friends at home and eventually decided to try to play those songs live. And so that was how Automato started when we were about 15-years-old. Nick played drums and I played a keyboards.
When did you start DJing together?
Alex: We just started. Automato stopped after touring and people went their own way. Nick and I just kept making music together, and it turned into Holy Ghost!. The name Holy Ghost! only came the day before the first single came out.
The single being “Hold On”?
Alex: The first and only original single, “Hold On”. Right around the time the single came out, people would say, ‘You wanna come play live?’ and we said, ‘No, we can’t,’ and they said, ‘Can you DJ?’ and we said, ‘Sure’, and that was it.
You guys are coming out with an album?
Alex: That’s the plan. We’re putting out another 12-inch, hopefully an extended song from the album, and hopefully in 2009.
Nick: We’ve been kinda working on songs for almost two years, three years. We were kind of aimlessly working.
Alex: It wasn’t until James [Murphy, of DFA] said ‘Hey, you should put out this song “Hold On”,’ that we started to see it more like an actual project.
Did James produce the single?
Alex: He co-produced the single.
Nick: The way we do most of our recording is that we’ll do most everything by ourselves, and then sort of bring it to James, more for mixing, spit and polish sort of thing. So we recorded the vocals with him, and made slight adjustments to the arrangement.
How did you first get together with DFA?
Alex: We met them when we were around 18 or 19. They produced the Automato record and taught us everything we know in the process and really helped expand our musical interests into electronic.
Nick: The Automato record took six months.
Alex: That was a totally different thing. That was like: big label budget, ordering in buffalo wings and sushi every day for like a year. That was a good year!
Nick: (laughs) That was fun, one of the most fun times of my entire life.
Was DFA putting out records yet?
Alex: Yeah, they were already working on the Rapture record, Echoes.
Where are you recording the Holy Ghost album?
Alex: We have a studio at Nick’s house. He has an extra bedroom with no windows and we converted that. We took a week over the summer with Tim Goldsworthy to do some tracking of the stuff you can’t track at home like drums. But most of it is done at home. And the vocals we do at the studio.
And it’s all analog?
Alex: Yeah. No digital synths, or really any digital processing.
Nick: Besides Protools.
Alex: Yeah, besides Protools.
Are you working on any more remixes?
Alex: We stopped. We did nine last year, and for us, we work really slowly and it’s all analog, and it hits two or three weeks to do a remix.
And you would have no time to do anything else?
Alex: Yeah. That’s a good reason, a good part of why the album isn’t done is ’cause there are nine remixes.
Is the money pretty good for that?
Nick: Yeah?
Alex: Yeah, it can be, we don’t have day jobs anymore, which is good. That’s more the DJing.
Nick: It was hard to stop doing remixes, because it’s something we can do at home. It’s not like DJing where you have to move around. I mean, we do love DJing though.
Alex: We’ve done probably 10 or 11 shows [in a month], which you could never do in a band, you know? Come for 10 shows for a month and you would lose a shitload of money. But because we’re just DJing, we go DJ three days and we come back to Berlin and sit in the house and then do it again
