Do you know who Black Moth Super Rainbow is? Shrouded in mystery and even going so far as to embrace their anonymity by way of masks and monikers like The Seven Fields of Aphelion and Father Hummingbird, the members of Black Moth Super Rainbow aren’t doing much to improve their Facebook cred. But as BMSR frontman and mastermind Tobacco is quick to point out, “If you care about me, the person, the same way you care about the music, I’m going to severely let you down.”
Interview by Bruce Scott
Let’s get one thing straight: Black Moth Super Rainbow is Tobacco, or Tobacco is Black Moth Super Rainbow. Having derived his name from the Troma horror flick Redneck Zombies, Tobacco is the central force behind Black Moth Super Rainbow. In control of everything from chief songwriting credits to album art down to directing the band’s music videos, Tobacco even has his own DJing gig when he’s not touring and recording with BMSR. Tobacco and co. originally operated under the name Allegheny White Fish, which is slang in Pittsburgh for a condom because “fishermen would pull condoms out of the Allegheny River.” After a brief stint as satanstompingcaterpillars (“I don’t really like that one anymore”), the band became Black Moth Super Rainbow, and Tobacco has confirmed that this “is probably the one we’re sticking with.”
BMSR’s latest album, Eating Us, is a curious mix of loungy electronica imbued with an abstract sense of horror bubbling under the surface. The band leaves it up to the listener to decide what is swirling in their well-textured pastiche of sound, but one thing’s for sure, something is not quite right. It’s a wonderfully disconcerting effect, one that certainly sets Eating Us apart from the one album it seems to get compared to the most, Air’s 1998 breakthrough, Moon Safari.
“I think with a band like Air... they make almost like a space age bachelor music, and I don’t know, I think what I’m going for is a little freakier than that, a little grosser than that,” Tobacco says.
When I ask him why he thinks the comparison exists in the first place, he gets much more vocal. “I think the Moon Safari thing is funny because up until this album, we had to be compared to Boards of Canada...and I think when it became apparent with this one there was no way they could compare us to Boards of Canada they were like, “oh no, what do we do?” So somewhere along the lines they chose Moon Safari, and it kind of stuck. I don’t hear it.”
One thing that certainly sets Eating Us apart from the prior works of Tobacco’s various incarnations is the inclusion of an outside producer in the form of Dave Fridmann. Former member and long-running producer of Mercury Rev, Fridmann has also worked with The Flaming Lips, Weezer, and Tapes and Tapes, not to mention recently producing MGMT’s smash success Oracular Spectacular.
“He was my only choice,” says Tabacco of Fridmann. “I wanted to take it as far away [as possible] from what I normally do. I didn’t want it to be a big, glossy mess, like too glossy, but I wanted it to have maybe a little bit of that.” On Eating Us, Fridmann’s production succeeds in retaining Tobacco’s aesthetic while still flirting with a pop sensibility. “The whole time I was telling him ‘forget about upsetting the fifty fans we have, let’s just make something completely on its own.’”
Another defining feature of the band is the manipulated vocals. Impossible to detect without knowing, the vocals are actually Tobacco singing through a vocoder. Some have described the vocals on Black Moth Super Rainbow albums as having a robot-like quality to them, but Tobacco takes it one step further. “I’ve sort of been working towards making it more human sounding because people just naturally want to associate vocoders with robot music. I don’t look at it like trying to make a robot real, I look at it like adding all these layers to my voice. I think it’s kind of androgynous almost.”
In fact, that androgynous quality further enhances BMSR’s aim for anonymity while lending to the sense of mystery or other worldliness their music evokes. But incorporating the vocoder into their sound wasn’t a calculated move in the beginning, it was just a way to take the spotlight off of Tabacco onstage. “I didn’t want to sing anymore,” he says. “I was too uncomfortable with it, I don’t like my real voice and I don’t like performing in front of people. I’m even self-conscious performing with the vocoder in front of people. It started off almost like a crutch, but I think that it became a little more than that, I now can’t imagine not using it.”
Black Moth Super Rainbow wants to keep the focus on the music. This isn’t a band parading itself online via gossip columns and media blogs. This is a band that has chosen to not even disclose their real names. “I never wanted it to be about us, I just wanted it to be what it is, and let people decide what it is and don’t worry about what I do outside of this.” Perhaps another reason is that the members, particularly Tobacco, don’t want their own identities to interfere with the public’s perception of the band. “I think in real life, I’m not like this music, you know? I think I’m pretty normal, I guess… I like jogging, I like my BMX bike, I like golf. I’m not a hippie.” And that is how he intends to keep it.
