Interview: Alt Rock Artist Iddie Mo Talks About His Debut Single/Video "It's Chronic"
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“...at our very first meeting I told Nol K that if he felt something didn’t work he shouldn’t hold back and tell me, also that if there was anything that he wanted to try out, experiment with, this is the opportunity and vice versa.”
Congratulations on the completion and release of your debut single "It's Chronic"; tell us about your creative process for its development and what it was like working with its producer Nol K?
Thank you. I actually intended to write a happy song at first, but even before I started writing the lyrics, I had already been going through a state of depression for about 3 months.
It was an attempt to force myself to get out of the slump but eventually the pretense bothered me too much because my words felt disingenuous, so I scrapped most of it halfway and leaned into my feelings at the time.
This bittersweet track about hanging onto hope and getting over adversity called “Seize the day” turned into “It’s Chronic” a song pretty much about being aware of your depression and going through the motions while you wait for the darkness to pass.
Sounds cliché but “keeping it real” is important to me.
The demo I came up with had a more mellow vibe and bringing it to Nol K transformed the piece giving it more power whilst still maintaining a lot of my original demos’ integrity.
When it comes to the more technical process of making this song, I like to start with establishing the melody first, then it’s a back and forth against the lyrics. Once I feel like the main melody is decent, I lay down layers of different instruments, almost always starting with a basic piano track to get the right chords. Then I either play around with making patterns on my DAW or have the track on a loop while I vocalize accompaniments and try to translate them into instruments by ear. Sometimes occasionally looking at various tutorials online; to help polish my Frankenstein track.
See I had this long running fear that not knowing how to properly read notes and having limited music theory knowledge meant that I couldn’t be a songwriter; not that I didn’t try to learn in the past, but life kept getting in the way somehow.
At some point I decided to just jump into it and remind myself that there are a lot of successful artists out there who couldn’t either; not to compare myself to the Beatles, but even John Lennon admitted that none of them in the band could read music.
I was introduced to Nol K by Professor Alex Fischer of the Mahakarya Institute of Arts Asia (a.k.a. MIAA). Professor Alex Fischer was looking for an artist to collaborate with for one of his modules, to give his students the experience of working with a client to work on a music video.
He had shown Nol K (producer and front man of the indie band Hurricane Honey) my demo and he apparently loved it. Funny story, in return the professor showed me Hurricane Honey’s song “Through your mind” and I thought “Wow, these guys sound just like “I Mean The Snakes”” a band I was a fan of in high school, who I thought had disbanded and stopped making music- I was wrong. After I connected the dots that they were one and the same I became a blubbering idiot.
Now, whenever I work with someone, I have it in principal that they must enjoy what they’re doing. So at our very first meeting I told Nol K that if he felt something didn’t work he shouldn’t hold back and tell me, also that if there was anything that he wanted to try out, experiment with, this is the opportunity and vice versa.
We went back and forth experimenting with different sound fonts and effects I’ve heard used in other songs, adding harmonies on the spot. We’d add and take away things, for example an electronic glitch effect which I ultimately felt was too distracting; he even encouraged me to try doing some metal vocals that I didn’t think I could do until I just went for it in the recording studio.
Working with Nol K is heaven, like I literally did not realize I could get so happy before, I’m not even exaggerating I cannot for the life of me remember a time I was that happy. People who say “you should never meet your heroes” have some pretty terrible heroes, ‘cause honestly, it’s like the more I got to know him the more I’m like “Yeah, this guy is Bruneian Keanu Reeves” and it’s not just me, it seems everyone who’s ever met him at least once only has good things to say about him.
Sorry for getting off on a tangent and gushing about Nol K, but seriously, meeting him in person only made me a bigger fan. Aaaand I know he’ll probably see this interview, but I’m pretty sure I’ve embarrassed myself enough getting all red and blubbering gibberish every time he complimented my singing.
You've also just released a very intense music video for "It's Chronic", directed by Minori Ramzi. What's your favorite memory of filming the clip and would you say that your treatment was fully visualized in the final product?
I’d say that it was almost completely different from my initial idea, though I did come into the project with an open mind and wanted to give Ramzi (along with the other students) the opportunity to express her own creativity.
My initial treatment had the music video be more like a twisted version of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” but Ramzi pitched something more inspired by late 90’s goth and early 2000’s emo (citing Marilyn Manson and Panic at the disco to name a few). She appeared very enthusiastic about the idea and I just couldn’t say no.
Nothing major really comes to mind, but one of the dancers did get locked up in the toilets for a while (the door got jammed) and we had to pull them up from out of the cubicle, oh and my hair did get singed a bit during the scene where I was laying down surrounded by candles- thankfully no one got hurt 👍🏽
How would you describe the alt rock scene in Brunei Darussalam, and would you say that there is a huge audience for the genre?
I’d say that the scene is steadily rising in recognition. I hear about alt rock bands in our mainstream more now than I did, say 16 years ago, although you’d still have to seek them out yourself. Classic rock, rap and pop still dominate the airwaves.
Who have been some of your influences that inspired you artistically, especially early on when you began making music?
Being a lover of different types of music means that I have way too many influences and that makes it a little difficult to know where to begin.
I did have my start making background music for games, so it’d be safe to say that most of my early influences came from the soundtracks of some of my favorite games; music from composers like Nobuo Uematsu and Yoko Shimomura.
I had also been a fan of Indonesian singer Anggun Cipta Sasmi (Often referred to as just Anggun in the west) since a very early age- I don’t even remember how old I was when I first heard her music, I may have been a toddler. She used to be an absolute rocker at the start of her career but in 1997 came out with ‘Rose in the wind’ which was a fusion of several genres, pop, rock, traditional Indonesian folk, funk, etc. It could have been the catalyst for my love of fusion music.
There really are just too many influences, I’d like to honorably mention Philippe Jaroussky, Natalie Dessay, Jojo (Joanna Levesque), Kings of Convenience, Cannibal Corpse, Ella Fitzgerald, Mariah Carey, Bjork, to name a few. I should stop here or else this interview is never going to end if I don’t.
With 2023 winding down, what are some of your goals musically in 2024?
I am eager to release more music, I’m working on a couple of demos right now and plan on working with Nol K once again, hopefully for a whole EP. However I’d like to believe that my music taste is vast and I would really love to make music in a plethora of genres to reflect that.
Stream and Share “It’s Chronic” on: Spotify | Apple Music