Interview: Greek Band The Velvoids Discuss Their New Visual For "Rake Your Mind"
/
“‘Rake Your Mind’ is drums, guitar, and the vocal track done live, lights down and all that. Production wise, we usually move into our friend’s recording studio for an undesignated number of days and pretty much live there for a while...”
Congratulations on the release of your new video "Rake Your Mind", which appears on the "MOTHER" album. Of all the album's songs, why did you decide to create a visual for it and how did you connect with its director, Elly Economides?
Thanks! We almost did ‘Rake’ last year when we were looking to shoot a video for the new album but ended up going for something heavier; we always liked that track, though, so we knew we’d come back to it.
We threw the initial idea to Elly because we like her and her work as a photographer; she’s also familiar with our band so it just came down to finding a general theme and that was it, we wanted her to feel free and approach it any way she saw fit and that’s what she did. She seemed keen on wanting to know the conceptual meaning and lyrics of the song; you can kind of see how she incorporated all that into the visual which is always very cool. Melina who performs in it is great too, she owns the dance space it was filmed in, called Horos.1.
We're huge fans of the "Rake Your Mind" song; tell us about your creative process for its development, in terms of production and songwriting.
For us, it usually starts with an idea on the guitar or piano and maybe a gibberish vocal melody, then that’s usually how we’ll bring it into the studio. We always finalize the songs as we’re recording them, it’s just genuinely more interesting to us to zone out and be spontaneous like that then to rehearse material and go in prepared. We track the drums and main guitar live and build from there, if we have lyrics ready we’ll do some vocals live too.
‘Rake Your Mind’ is drums, guitar, and the vocal track done live, lights down and all that. Production wise, we usually move into our friend’s recording studio for an undesignated number of days and pretty much live there for a while, we’ve been doing it this way for the past 10 years, Dorah was pregnant with our daughter during those sessions which was also pretty inspiring.
For the drums we’ll set up using the Glyn Johns technique; on this song, Dorah muffed her snare and toms with towels and just substituted the hi-hat for a tambourine ring. We set up the guitar nearby because we want to be in the same room when we track, and Vice is playing a Jaguar through a Vox AC15. Lastly, we use a few room mics for ambiance. Once that’s done, we’ll go back and do the overdubs.
How did you two initially meet and decide to form "The Velvoids"? Also, where did the name originate?
We didn’t actually form The Velvoids together; Vice formed the band in early 2003 with another friend, Max. We met during the band’s hiatus around 2006 and just stuck together since.
The name doesn’t really mean anything, it just sounded good at the time.
Describe the scene for experimental music in Athens; is there a vibrant club scene where artists can perform live (pre-COVID)?
Athens always had a pretty healthy scene, a concoction of lot of different things happening at once, it’s like anywhere. Maybe everything kind of branched out after the internet boom of the late 2000’s and in the long run, may not be quite as magical anymore, but it’s definitely vibrant.
There are always a handful of good things that’ll stand out among the chaos wherever you go, whether they’re above radar or below, and a strong art scene that’s centered on architecture, crafts, and visual design. For now, everyone’s just sort of waiting around for this whole thing to blow over and go back to normal, until then it’s as good a time as any to experiment.
With the "Rake Your Mind" music video now released, what are some of your goals musically for this spring/summer?
We initially wanted to repress the LP because we always do short runs and there aren’t too many copies left but, times being what they are, we decided we preferred to move on and just do something new.
We recorded a new album at home last summer on our 24-track Tascam, and did the whole thing with an SM57 and an AT2020, eventually turning up a batch of new songs. We’re planning on finishing them in the studio and have it out later in the year maybe. Generally though, we’d just like to keep going.