NUMBERS

Selected Discography

Exclusive Interview

Justin St. Vincent from Xtreme Music interviewed Indra Dunis, Eric Landmark and Dave Broekema of Numbers on June 5, 2004 Oakland (CA), Ptomaine Temple.

Xtreme Music: I’m here with Indra, Dave and Eric from Numbers, here in Oakland. I’d like to start the interview by asking, how exactly would you describe your music?

Indra Dunis: It’s punk and dancy and it’s noisy!..

Dave Broekema: And it’s fun!..

Eric Landmark: And it’s a little arty and weird!..

Xtreme Music: I’d also like to ask you, who are your main influences and how have they shaped your musical direction?

Dave Broekema: Black Sabbath, not just my musical direction but my whole way of life, pretty much.

Indra Dunis: Yeah, I was thinking Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, Madness, Duran Duran..

Eric Landmark:
For Numbers, probably like Kraftwerk for the keyboard kinda stuff.

Indra Dunis: I would say also.. the usual people you could probably guess pretty easily.

Xtreme Music: What innovative production techniques do you incorporate into your music?

Dave Broekema: Production techniques? As far as recording for studio albums, we record ourselves. So far everything we’ve done we’ve recorded ourselves, it’s very basic. We have pretty low technology stuff.. that’s cheap.. there’s really no crazy tricks involved.

Indra Dunis: We have nice microphones, and it’s all analogue..

Dave Broekema: Well they’re cheap though, they work good, but they’re not really nice..like expensive or anything.

Eric Landmark: I bought a thing.. a little twelve dollar speaker from Radio Shack and played keyboard through that for some songs.

Indra Dunis: Yeah, our last record we did a lot of experimenting with different kinds of cheap and more expensive microphones to get different sounds. Then when we got a rough recording, we went to this guy Alex Newport and he helped mix it, like put it all on Pro-Tools and kinda beef it up a little bit.

Xtreme Music: One of the things I love about Numbers is your indie-punk-rock sound and you have very tight tracks on your albums. Where do you find your inspiration lyrically and musically?

Indra Dunis: Lyrically.. a lot of it is pretty mundane you-know..

Dave Broekema: Everyday shit..

Indra Dunis: Stuff that just comes in our heads in our daily lives.. it started out being more that way because all three of us were working trying to find jobs and didn’t have too much going on except for small music projects. We started writing about what we were doing in our lives. We’ve gotten maybe a little bit away from writing songs about our internal experiences more than our external.. but nothing too emo (laughter)..

Dave Broekema: (laughs).. We’re totally emo now.. we’re so emo(!).

Xtreme Music: What has been the best experience in Numbers’ music career?

Dave Broekema: The best experience? So many amazing experiences. It’s just amazing to get the chance to tour and go to Europe and just make records. It’s just really fun and I feel lucky that we get to do it.

Indra Dunis: Yeah, I think it’s all the people that I’ve met being on the road, and all the great bands that I love that I’ve been able to play with. Also, just touring all the time.. changes my perspective of my life in the world. I feel like my life extends out from just this little community in San Francisco. I have friends all over the country, and now it’s like all over Europe. It’s a cool feeling!

Xtreme Music: You mentioned your live tour in Europe. How has the live tour been going and what has the crowd reaction been like?

Dave Broekema: Well, the crowd reaction is almost always positive. It ranges from everyone being happy to people totally freaking
out and dancing.. I mean I can’t remember a bad crowd reaction..

Indra Dunis: We’ve never really been heckelled or anything like that.

Dave Broekema: Although there were a couple of shows where people were like pretty confused. Like Faenza, Italy is pretty strange, this wealthy suburban city or something, people there seemed fairly isolated..

Indra Dunis: I think sometimes people don’t have any context to put it in.. they’re totally isolated from any kind of perspective you-know, they’re just like “What is this? This just sounds like noise!” You know what I mean. The first time my mother heard my record it was like that.. she’s like “I respect what your doing but I have no idea what is going on!” (laughs).. I think that happens occassionally but most of the time if you have a well booked show then people are there to see you because they like it.

Xtreme Music: Could you tell us a little bit about your latest album?

Dave Broekema: Well we did talk a little bit about how we recorded it. We recorded ourselves but the departure for us this time we had a professional helps us put it together, so that’s a new thing for us and the sound is pretty different from most records I think.. it still has dirty sounds on it but it’s a lot more three-dimensional…

Indra Dunis: We tried to have a little bit more dynamics and more division between the bass and the trebles.. make it a little bit more clearer.

Xtreme Music: What’s it like being on the Tigerbeat6 label owned by Kid606?

Indra Dunis: I would say the beginning experiences of him were really good. Very enthusiastic and a fun label to be on. I think now maybe we’ve outgrown it.

Dave Broekema: We need more than they can really provide, because it’s really Miguel’s poppy label, that’s really what it is. It’s not really set up to be a label for bands that tour a lot.

Indra Dunis: Most stuff on their is electronic.

Dave Broekema: And hardly any of those people tour a lot, other than Miguel who’s constantly touring.

Indra Dunis: So we kinda need a lot of support right now for touring and recording expenses and stuff like that. So we’ve been looking around, so we’re gonna do our next record with Kill Rock Stars.

Dave Broekema: Yeah we’re pretty happy about that.

Xtreme Music: Could you tell us a little more about your work in the near future?

Dave Broekema: Well our record came out at the end of January and then we immediately started touring, and we’ve pretty much been touring since then. So we have no new songs right now. We have nothing.. so we’re back now, this is our last show for a while. We’re taking a little break, and then we’re gonna start working on new stuff.

Eric Landmark: Musically I’d like to get away from disco-punk stuff which I just hear all the time. I like it but you-know I like doing something that’s unique.

Xtreme Music: What direction would you like to take Numbers in?

Eric Landmark: Yeah, just away from that sound I guess. I don’t know what..

Indra Dunis: I think we still want to keep it, or at least for me as the drummer I still wanna keep it dancy but not in the disco way. Because it seems like so many bands are jumping on that right now, and playing disco beats. It’s gotten kind of old.. it’s just not really that exciting anymore.

Dave Broekema: It’s tough coz I feel the same way but at the same time I also feel like this is what we’ve been doing and just because other people are doing it now, we can’t just give it up and like move into something else. I do want to change it somehow but it’s tough to know what exactly to do.

Indra Dunis: I don’t wanna play the same beat on every song anyway.. so it’s gonna evolve.. we just haven’t written the songs yet (laughs).

Xtreme Music: Fantastic! Well it’s been great meeting you and I’m looking forward to the live performance tonight. I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best with Numbers in the near future.