Beautiful Machines

Beautiful Machines is a great band name, how did you come up with it?

Thank you! Remember the movie, The Abyss? Those bioluminescent creatures below the crevasse emerged like biological machines, beautiful in their design. The more deep we peer, there seems to be an organization to things, calculated and arbitrary, like a symphony of organisms, both macro and micro. When looking at DNA for instance and all the nano and microscopic interactions happening, there are these little machines carrying out the nature of life. Being struck with the awe of that recognition supplied the inspiration for the name. A name which has been around awhile with Conrad, and carried over from a previous band with an album of the same name.

Your new record, Bridges is part of a trilogy, can you tell us more about that and what each album will represent?

Bridges is the middle album, figuratively bridging two paradigms of existence, and marks a divergence from our previous sound, as we naturally develop. It represents transformation into something new, and what that something new is, will be resolved in the third and longest chapter of the saga, Singularity, which has to do with man merging with machine to overcome our biological limitations. Disconnect: :Reconnect was our first album where we were discovering our sound, experimenting with what we like and what we don’t, always learning and growing. The idea being, one must disconnect (predominantly from technology or a way of being) in order to reconnect with what is important and significant. 

What other artists would you like to collaborate with?

Conrad: Jean-Michel Jarre, Danny Elfman, Trent Reznor, Martin Gore, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Hans Zimmer, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads

Veli: Slayer

Stef: Simon Posford of Shpongle, Deadmau5, and Erez Eisen of Infected Mushroom, Björk, Alison Goldfrapp and Thom Yorke

What sparked your aural addiction?

Conrad: Now that I think of it, I would say it was the movies. The emotional draw that certain, now nostalgia-laden, movies really struck a nerve with me. Films like The NeverEnding Story, Blade Runner, The Abyss (aforementioned), Alien, and Weird Science stand out. When I was 6 or so, I heard Michael Jackson’s Thriller and was captivated by the candy-pop hooks, I loved the guitar riffage of Van Halen in “Beat It” and just thought, this is cool. It became more complicated as time went on, with explorations into classical music, getting weird guitar sounds, and synth sounds. While guitar is my instrument I play live, I spend probably more time in crafting sounds behind the scenes; so for me, I really like finding interesting sounds to generate, curate, and instantiate into the music.

Stef: I remember hearing something by either Rachmaninoff, Chopin, or Brahms at a young age and thinking to myself, finally this is a language that is competent of expressing the potency of my emotions. All these things I was not allowed to speak of, all these feelings that were taboo to express, all these feelings of such complexity that I myself don't even understand, all expressed by a passage of notes that pours forth from the piano like a string of pearls set free to bounce on and tickle my soul. Aural addiction was re-ignited when I learned how to sample and process sounds to make electronic music. That was akin to breaking through to another level of reality, all of a sudden all these possibilities came into being.

Veli: 80s metal album covers. They lured me to pick up albums, put on headphones, and let the sound bang my earholes until I realized it would be super fun to make this noise myself.

Which song do you wish you wrote?

Conrad: “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen…and “Rainbow Connection” by Kermit The Frog

Stef: “Uprising” by Muse, “One” by U2

Veli: “Chicken On the Rocks” - Jean-Jacques Perrey

Tell us a fun fact about each band member that not many people know.

How discreet must we be here :)? Veli says really funny random computer error message type things, so we’ve decided to make a quote book of his isms. Conrad is really an outdoorsman, loves adventure travel.

Veli: Veli wasn't one of the leading 19th-century French impressionist artists because he can't paint and he was born 100 years too late.

Stef: I want to explore every ancient civilization ever existed around the globe and visit and learn from intentional communities of all kinds all around the world. I think reptiles are super cute and want to have a pet Komodo Dragon who will let me ride on its back as transportation.

Conrad: I DON’T like socks or any garment which restricts you (under-roos). Same goes with bed sheets - if you have a duvee, you’re set, what’s with the extra flat sheet, it gets all mashed up and then you wake up in a pool of your own sweat, tangled up, panting, wondering how on earth did I get here. I DO like outdoor adventures and cuddling with animals.

What is next for Beautiful Machines?

We are currently planning on a US tour with a new booking agent, aiming for some dates in the fall of 2016, with even more college dates focused in the spring of 2017. We are likely producing another music video for “Million Miles”, which we would plan to release around Halloween.  Then in October, Zoolabs invited us to their music accelerator residency, which should be really interesting. During all this time we will be writing the next album, Singularity, the resolve of the trilogy, dealing with overcoming our biological limitations and merging closer and closer with machines. Encompassing a large body of work and taking us on a major sonic exploration, we ambitiously hope to release by Summer 2017. In the winter of 2015, we went to write in Berlin for Bridges, part of the idea was to scout touring in Europe, that could be a potential summer of 2017 as well, but nothing yet on the books. More and more we are finding that planning has less to do with our next destination as being in the flow and realizing where we arrive once we’re there. Perhaps it’s a bit of now-ism that projects us into our future state.