Afro/soul/jazz combo Mifune have been compared to Stereolab and Brazilian Girls, but I’ve been having a hard time seeing the resemblance (or understanding their liberal use of the word “electronique”); Mifune seems more like a neo-soul/smooth-jazz hybrid, a kind of Afrobeat-lounge for the middle-aged set. In any case, their keyboardist/cofounder Cutty was a great interviewee — he talked all about his various influences, which included the Godfather of Funk, Fela Kuti, Squarepusher, spaghetti westerns, and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
Popcorn Youth: The name of your record is “Afro Electronique.” How would you define that to me? Is the term of your own conception?
Cutty: We really wanted to create our own genre as opposed to cram our music into predefined genres. Actually, Corbett, our bass player, came up with that name, and we decided it kind of represented a lot of what we did. The “afro” covers the Afrobeat influence, but not straight pure Afrobeat, but definitely influenced. And the “Electronique” is more ambiguous… We do use electronic elements, like Stereolab influences or whatever that connotes.
Popcorn Youth: Are you originally from Cleveland?
Cutty: Me personally, no. But I’ve been here for 10 years now.
Popcorn Youth: What is the dynamic like, being Mifune and being based in Cleveland, the “home of rock’n'roll”?
Cutty: The reception is actually quite positive because of the fact that it’s not something you hear everyday; you don’t hear a lot of bands go this direction at all in Cleveland, or even from other places traveling through Cleveland. It’s been cool watching the response, it’s definitely original people that respond to it, more niche-y people or music aficionados. But after the initial splash of friends and family coming to the first few shows or whatever, there’s been a big contingent of just middle-aged people, just based off the fact that it’s good music or whatever.
Popcorn Youth: Middle-aged people? Is that a large part of your demographic?
Cutty: It’s really quite interesting, actually. Our demographic stretches from, like, high school kids to middle-aged [people] our parents’ age.
Popcorn Youth: How old are you?
Cutty: I am 29. The range of our band is anywhere from around ambiguous early 30s (laughs) to around 24.
Popcorn Youth: And that roster is always changing?
Cutty: No, actually we’ve been really lucky. We haven’t changed, it started with me, Jake Fader, and Christine Fader, and then we kind of built it up and wrote a lot of songs and concepts and added the drummer, Jeremy [Miller] and the bass player Corbett [Hein], and that was our core five players. And then we were going to hire these horn players out, they were definitely a separate entity at first. We didn’t know any horn players as intimately as we knew each other, but Betty jeane [Wischmeier], the saxophone player, has been with us the whole time. She was somebody that we hired for our first demos that we cut, and then our debut show, and then we found the trumpet player through an ad… but once we’ve gotten our members, they’ve stayed in there.
Popcorn Youth: Christine and Jake are siblings or married?
Cutty: They’re married.
Popcorn Youth: So you’re in Cleveland now. Do you envision a move to NYC or LA?
Cutty: We have been on the road a little bit, but the way that we figure is that if we want to be successful at what we want to do with our career, we’re going to be pretty transient as it is. And as a home base right now, especially with our family contingent that we have — we have a child in the band and a couple of marriages and whatnot — and plus Cleveland is a lot cheaper. If you’re only going to be in a place one week for every eight weeks, it’s way easier to try to maintain that as your crash pad or mortgage than NYC, and then you travel to NYC or LA if that’s where you need to be. I personally feel that that’s a mistake that a lot of people make, is that move, and adding themselves to the masses of artists that pick up and move and go do their thing. You lose a lot of your individuality, whereas eyebrows raise when people say, “Oh, you’re from Cleveland?” That already gives you kind of a little bit of intrigue, especially when people say, “Oh, you sound like you’re from NYC” or whatever, and that’s kind of like a compliment. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Is Jeremy a trained jazz drummer?
Cutty: No, I think his college training was in painting. His dad was a musician and [Jeremy] always described it, is as early as he could remember, he would go downstairs and there would be all these instruments set up in the basement, guitars and drums and he always picked the drums and just started playing them. He’s always played instruments, he started playing in groups with people way older than him in his early teenage years; his [training] is basically his life experience. He’s learned a lot.
Popcorn Youth: On your MySpace page, one of the tags you use to describe your music is drum’n'bass. Do you use computerized drum beats at all, or is it just the speed that inspires Mifune?
Cutty: No, but Jeremy has an electronic drum set that he has mixed in throughout his acoustic drums.
Popcorn Youth: Is he influenced by that kind of speed?
Cutty: Definitely as a drummer, he’s your modern drummer’s drummer. He definitely has a bevy of those beats. I think that Squarepusher and stuff like that, he does listen to, but by the same token he also likes straight metal or just straight art breaky jazz. Just as long as it has good drumming, he can just get really into it.
Popcorn Youth: So this idea of “Composer’s Collective” that you use is interesting because people understand composers in the context of working alone, not collaborating. So what did you mean by that, what is the songwriting process like?
Cutty: The true essence of the whole group started not even out of a performance-based goal, but just try to figure out how to emulate Spaghetti Western soundtracks and then Akira Kurosawa films, like the soundtrack music. And it kind of morphed into “why don’t we do this and listen to different music.” But we did decide to move into a band setting, and we wanted to maintain the openness of it, where anybody can bring anything to the table, and where it’s a three-headed monster at the head of the operation instead of just one person. And that’s good because we just naturally have a good checks and balance in place so it doesn’t get out of hand. The same thing goes with composition, we encourage anyone to do anything. But it’s never like, “Ok, this is my piece, and it’s going to go like this,” and things like that. Granted the composer will have the final veto or say, but it’s still very open. Or sometimes you’ll bring a riff to [someone else’s composition] and it will truly become a Mifune thing. We just feel that this will keep us fresher longer if we have that many more voices and share leadership throughout the group without having one specific person writing all the songs.
Popcorn Youth: 2004 is the official year Mifune formed. Why did you wait until 2006 to release your first record?
Cutty: Well, we didn’t even have our live debut until 2005. June 2005, technically, I guess you can start the clock.
Popcorn Youth: And the record is self-released?
Cutty: Yeah. And the wait on that was simply just getting it together as an early ensemble. We started recording a few months after our live debut, we recorded it ourselves and did it in our own studio, so it just took a while to get it right. We’ve been just really patient with it.
Popcorn Youth: One of your catch phrases is “Music that moves from the soul to the mind.” Can you elaborate on that? Is there a component that appeals to the soul, and what part appeals to the mind?
Cutty: Well, what we’re striving for is a balance. We don’t want to have music that is just really celebral, complex songs, like a musician’s music, where you’re really thinking about it, crazy time signatures and all that. We wanted to make it really organic. But by the same token, you’ve internalized [it] and you can feel the love and the good messages in it. It does have something more to it, like “Wow, I never really heard that layer.” It’s not right in your face like, “Hey, look at what we’re doing, look at what we’re doing” very advanced, complex music. So we like to root it where it counts and then after you’ve internalized it, it does satiate that too, it’s more intellectual or you notice some of the other things.
Popcorn Youth: Do your live performances deviate very much from the recordings? Do you try to incorporate more improvisation or spontaneity?
Cutty: That naturally happens, as far as, like, the songs open up. Almost unanimously people who have heard the album and then see us live say that the two are different entities – like, you’re way better live, the energy is way different live. I think the performance energy, where you have a lot more charisma live, it’s a challenge, especially with our first recording, to capture a lot of the live stuff in the recorded form.
Popcorn Youth: Have you ever been to Ithaca?
Cutty: No we have not.
Popcorn Youth: So I heard you’re somewhat vocal about your political views. Are you planning to incorporate some sort of political stance during your show here?
Cutty: I mean, we have a song dedicated to Bush, but if we don’t tell people that it is, I would be pretty impressed if people figured that out just from the lyrics. Our politics happen to be what we think, but I don’t think we’re a politically overt band. If you ask any one of us, we’ll be happy to sit down and talk about it, but we really want the band to be about the music and not the politcs. Because that kind of stuff really doesn’t have relevancy, because two years from now, when that guy is gone, there’s gonna be another guy in his place. The political stuff is not going to change that much, so we don’t want to be defined as a political band.
Popcorn Youth: James Brown passed away last month — how he or funk shaped or influenced Mifune’s sound?
Cutty: Humongously. Because James Brown is a great influence on Fela Kuti, when he was founding his group and music, and he definitely drew his sound from listening to James Brown. I personally find his influence just all over the place, especially now when everyone is drawing all these parallels. But I really buy into them all, I believe them all, the influence he’s had on hip-hop and funk and even bands like Stereolab, which is one of our big influences. But they are also very similar to Fela Kuti or James Brown, even if it doesn’t seem like it, but through the discipline of the group, and their willingness to have the parts make up the whole, which James Brown illustrated awesomely. He had one of the tightest groups that played together ever recorded, but if you break down its not like they’re just virtuoso performances, a lot of the time the rhythm players are playing a quote unquote “simple line.” They fit in the tapestry of things and create this big machine, and I think he was really integral in taking that concept to popular music.
Popcorn Youth: What does Mifune have planned for 2007? What else are you looking forward to in the new year?
Cutty: Well as far as our stuff goes, we have a few producers that working on a remix album of “Afro-Electronique.” Jake engineered and produced the first one, so we’re going to get a little analog on this next effort which is actually starting in the next couple weeks, so our second record will come out probably this time next year. And the remix album will sneak in the gap in between there. As far as projects coming out in 2007, I know that as soon as I hang up the phone I’ll remember this and that, but… there’s a few groups that I’ve gotten hip to that I want to see this year, like Afrodesia from the west coast and some live shows that I’ve interested in. The recording stuff, I’ve kind of gotten out of the loop with some of that stuff, because I think a lot of the stuff that I listen to now, I don’t have as many mainstream groups [that I like] that are putting out albums right now.