An interview with Todd Millenacker of Avenpitch on 1/14/09
By: David Rachac
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HowWasTheShow: When did you first start playing music? Who were your early influences?
Todd Millenacker: I remember when I was 8 or 9, sitting in my parents’ living room and making a robotic hand out of Legos that strummed my mom’s classical guitar. I’d pound on Lego boxes while singing into a tape recorder. I don’t remember too many of the tracks, but I clearly remember that my masterpiece was called “Greta in the Garbage Can”. If you can imagine what a robotic Lego hand strumming an open guitar, random pounding on Lego boxes and a third grader chanting, “Her name was Greta, Greta, Greta -- Greta in the garbage can…” over and over, you have a pretty good idea of one of my first musical creations!
I started playing guitar back in fifth grade because of Motley Crue and Guns N Roses. I remember watching MTV and seeing the video for “Sweet Child O’ Mine” where Slash plugged his guitar in at the beginning and thinking it was the coolest thing ever! As for early influences, I think it’s pretty safe to say that if they’re a part of a VH1 Reality Show now, I probably liked them then -- Motley Crue, Poison, Guns N Roses, Skid Row, etc. Like practically everyone, I got into the whole 90’s alternative thing, like Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, and my interests just sort of went on from there to The Cure, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, New Order, etc.
I basically go through phases where I become super-obsessed with one particular band or artist and listen to everything they’ve every done, read every book written about them, and absorb everything I possibly can. My recent obsessions have been Leonard Cohen and U2, but before that it was the Kinks, Neil Young, the Flaming Lips, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The The, etc. -- the list just goes on and on. For better or worse, I basically only read rock biographies, which makes me a pretty good source for Rock’n’Roll trivia, but fairly worthless in any sort of real life application!
HWTS: What kinds of bands did you play in when you first started performing?
TM: My very first band experience was as the guitarist in the 7th grade jazz band. We played classics such as “Endless Love”, “Bill Bailey” and “Fame”. I remember having an 8 bar solo in “Fame” that, as I’m sure you could imagine, was basically the culmination of any young guitarist’s career. It wasn’t quite as cool as the start of the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” video, but it was still pretty big stuff at the time.
As for high school bands, I had quite a few that ran the gamut from “typical,” meaning we could play “Plush” and a few Pearl Jam songs to “industrial,” with drum machines, MIDI sequencing and dressing up like Marilyn Manson. Really, the most notable aspect about any of my early band experiences is that we usually played original songs and I almost always wrote them. I’m not saying they were good or even the most original, but I’m still pretty proud of the fact that I made the effort.
HWTS: How did the members of Avenpitch come together?
TM: I met Darren in 2001 when he started playing guitar for my band The Fleshpeddlers. We were looking for an additional guitarist and we put neon pink fliers up all over the U of M saying “Electronic Rock Band Seeks Guitarist”. Darren answered the ad and was super-hyped to join the band, way more hyped than anyone should be given our status. The Fleshpeddlers eventually dissolved, but when I started Avenpitch, Darren was naturally the guy to call.
I met Paul through a post I made on the local site Musicscene.org. I posted the song “Hacienda” and mentioned that I was looking for a drummer. He called me, saying he liked the song and the idea of playing along with loops/sequencers. We met up and hit it off right away.
Finally, I knew our original keyboard player David from his band Fadladder. He was with us for couple years, but left to do some different things with his life. When we were brainstorming for a replacement, I remembered a girl dancing away throughout our set at a warehouse party. This turned out to be Darren’s friend, Sarah. We got her on board, sent her to Keyboard 101 - she was a quick study - and within a couple weeks, we were out playing shows again.
Thinking about it now, it’s an odd set of circumstances that brought us all together, but it just seems to work.
HWTS: What do you like about making music living in Minneapolis?
TM: Honestly, I never really think of “Minneapolis Music Scene” or realize how lucky we are to be surrounded by all these great clubs or bands until I’m trying to book shows or a tour out of state. So much of it, we just sort of take for granted and don‘t give much thought to. Thankfully, there’s a lot of talent here and we’ve been lucky enough to be associated with some of it through the Twin Cities Electropunk compilation series that we organize (www.tcelectropunk.com).
HWTS: How receptive has the local music scene been to your self-described brand of "electropunk"?
TM: It feels like when people see us live, they are rather impressed and are fairly receptive to our sound and hyperactive stage presence. I think that we’re a lot quirkier than most bands, so sometimes, it may take some convincing to win an audience over, but we usually pull it off. I like to remind the guys that if people aren’t blown away by what we do, we need to find a better way to connect and get our message across, as opposed to sitting on our high horse thinking that our “art” is too advanced for the audiences’ taste.
Obviously, the local scene isn’t exactly fawning over us, but for the most part, I think it’s actually benefited us much more than it has hurt us. For starters, we’ve made the effort to tour a bit where we’ve been met with both crazy praise and complete disinterest. There’s something really exciting about showing up at a random club and needing to win people over in order to sell enough CDs to make gas money to get to our next show. Some of our best shows have come from that experience -- some of our worst too!
It’s also forced me to actively seek out alternate promotions, such as getting our music placed in video games. So far the most noteworthy placement we’ve received is in a video game called “Rock Tour Tycoon”. It’s basically like the Oregon Trail, if you remember that game, but instead of heading out West, you’re a rock band touring America. When you’ve acquired 20,000 fans, your band is Avenpitch and little cartoon versions of us come out and perform for you. We’ve got 5 MP3s on there and it’s sold at Best Buy, Software Etc - you know all those places we’d normally never get into. I get MySpaced from kids all over saying they found out about us through “Rock Tour Tycoon,” which is pretty awesome!
HWTS: How did you get into the whole video game placement thing?
TM: I just started emailing video game companies. It’s kind of funny to think that behind every email address is just a regular person going about their day doing their thing. Obviously, I’ve been met with a lot of indifference, but every once in awhile, you make a contact and it turns into something cool. That happened with “Rock Tour Tycoon” and it’s happened with a couple other video game companies as well.
Oddly enough, one contact at a video game company just happened to have a husband who was in the process of developing an MP3 phone over in England. He was looking to have these devices preloaded with music and now thanks to that random contact, Avenpitch’s last record “Butterfly Radio” came pre-loaded on 12,000 MP3 phones.
I view promotion as a big game and it’s really fun to see where no promotional money, an email address and a little bit of creative thinking will get you.
HWTS: Tell me about your songwriting and recording process -- how does a song go from idea to finished form?
TM: The songs that seem to work are ones that I’ve actually sat down and written before I bring them to the band. We’ve tried the jamming thing, but then we usually end up getting locked into a cool groove that never leads us anywhere. Normally, the process is that I come up with a few ideas and bring them to the band; we’ll jam on the basic arrangement to get a couple more ideas flowing and then I’ll go back to work on the song by myself. Then it goes back to the band and this process goes back and forth for quite awhile. Finally, I decide on lyrics and we have something close to the finished song. Then I usually spend another five or six months trying to find the “perfect” overdub that inevitably gets mixed way in the background where only the most astute listener will ever notice it.
Our songs are heavily layered and based around sounds just as much as parts, but I still think it’s really important to actually have a “song” in there behind all those bells and whistles. Like Tom Petty said, “If you don’t have a verse as good as your chorus, you don’t have a verse”.
To vary up the songwriting approach this time out, I did try a couple different things. For instance, on “Maybe I Was Wrong,” I recorded a five or six minute synthesizer loop and ran in through every type of filter effect imaginable. Then I actually set out to write a song on top of this crazy sounding loop. Surprisingly, it came together really well and it is probably one of my favorite tracks on the disc. Another fun one was “Shadows of Giants,” where I wrote the entire piece on the piano as a “Bruce Springsteen-ish” rock ballad. Then after the fact, I managed to ruin any sense of normalcy by mixing in a bunch of circuit bent keyboards, walls of shoegazy guitar and samples from Charlie Brown’s “Christmas Time is Here”.
HWTS: Cast Off will be the third full-length release by Avenpitch. How has your sound changed over the years?
TM: I think we’ve gotten much better at incorporating the “live” aspects of our sound along with the “electronic” ones. For me, the flow feels a little more natural and the juxtaposition isn’t quite as awkward.
As for the songwriting, I’ve been making a conscious effort to incorporate a bit more expressiveness into our music. I think we do the hyper/energetic thing really well, but I don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner, so we’re consciously trying to open things up and take a few more chances.
HWTS: Which song on Cast Off do you think is the best example of what Avenpitch is all about?
TM: Hopefully, each song on “Cast Off” represents a different facet of the band, but if I just needed a good “catch all” from this album I’d say “Pregnant Pause,” just because it’s a good rocker; it’s catchy and I really like the lyrics. Plus, I love that crazy filtered synth bass sound and the fact that we managed to incorporate samples of a real marching band into the song without it sounding too out of place.
HWTS: The CD release party for Cast Off will be at Club Underground on Saturday, January 17th. What all are we going to see there?
TM: We’ll be sporting our new look and hopefully some cool little stage gimmicks and lights -- we‘ll see how close our plans come to actually happening. Eventually, I’d love to design a stage show that’s something like the Faint meets the Flaming Lips; however, we tend to work at our own mysterious pace, so that might be more of a long-term goal. We’ll also be playing with our buddies Thosquanta, Skittish and Military Special. All really good bands -- should be a great evening!
HWTS: Any other final comments before we go?
TM: Thanks to everyone who’s ever taken the time to come to a show, download a track or buy a CD. We really do appreciate you listening and supporting us. Oh, and keep listening - hopefully, we’ll only get better!
Artist Info: Avenpitch
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