Following in the footsteps of other bands with unpronounceable names like Sigur Ros, Aa, !!! and SBTRKT comes San Francisco’s oOoOO, pronounced Oh. The band found a rapid growth in popularity when their tunes were shared and praised by online bloggers and music forums. They’ve just released their second EP which critics have struggled to describe, often citing the difficulty in pigeonholing the band’s sound while throwing up new genre names like drag, witch-house
and chill wave.
The man behind the outfit is Christopher Dexter Greenspan, who’ll be heading to Perth this month for some live shows. Greenspan spoke to OUTinPerth from his home in San Francisco.
How long have you been working on this new EP?
It took me about a year to get it together, there are only five songs on it, but we’ve got a handful of others, we thought it would be good to get this out and then put out another one later. We’re working on a full length for later this year. There are another handful of songs, and more to come.
How has it been performing live?
We performed live for the first time in June last year at the Sonar Festival in Spain… The live experience is really different. My intention was to record it then after the fact come up with a way of doing it live. It’s been a bit of a challenge. There are two different live performances, sometimes we have a live vocalist doing all the vocal trips but in Australia I’ll be doing all solo shows. It’s a bit more like folktronic knob twisting midi controlling experience. Rather than a presentation of songs it’s more like a collage that goes for 45 minutes without any breaks.
You’ve just remixed a track for another band O F F Love, how do you approach remixing?
It’s different every time, sometimes I just hear a song and I want to remix and I’ll just do it, I won’t wait to be asked, it happens very quickly if there’s an idea in my head. Other times I’ll be approached to do a remix and I’ll have absolutely no idea what I want to do, but if they’re paying me I’ll figure something out.
Your fans have found you online giving you a global audience rather than a geographical one does it make it harder to build an audience when your success comes online?
Now you can be a small and not even well known act and have groups of people who like you all around the world. You can turn up to a city though and have a few hundred people come out to see you. I’m definitely better known in Berlin than even San Francisco where I live.
oOoOO’s new EP Our Love is Killing Us is out now, catch them live at The Bakery in Northbridge alongside LA’s Lapalux on Saturday May 19.
Graeme Watson
