Hiya Jonathan and Brandon (aka, The Hogstad Brothers), thanks for joining us in the virtual RGM lounge today. Grab a brew and take a seat.
What made you decide that music is a thing for you?
For Jonathan, music was such a healer in an awkward and isolated stage when he was young. He felt like he could hear something special in certain music, and he felt a connection to others that could hear what he was hearing. In college, when he started to write music, it was exhilarating, like he was trespassing on sacred ground.
For Brandon, it all started when he was a little kid singing along with movie soundtracks for Aladdin, Lion King, and David Bowie’s Cool World. He loved envisioning soundtracks to imaginary movies and for daily life, which planted the future seed that grew into him becoming a DJ, musician, and songwriter.
Introduce us to you all and your musical history.
We’re actual brothers, the name isn’t clever. We’ve been playing together in one way or another as long as Brandon’s been alive. This song, Spinning Round, has a lot of imagery from our childhood growing up in the desert in northeast Los Angeles County. When we moved to New York City in 2008, we started making music together.
We had a short run as Bitter Cacao (an indie-pop Samba band) before forming Flyer Learning (a five-piece electro-funk-soul band) in 2013. There was a real hustle-and-grind to performing in NYC venues for six years. We became a confident and sharp live band and we loved the self-titled EP we released in 2018.
In that same era, we also had started DJ’ing and, after seeing a Flying Lotus show, we became fascinated with integrating live-mixed projected visuals into our parties. We had this vision of an immersive dance floor where the dancers were part of the surrounding visuals. We ended up hacking an XBox Kinect camera to point at the dance floor to get these really trippy live dancer visuals in the projections.
The best part was when someone would realize it was them in the projections and then really start to go hard on the dance floor. We had some great parties, including six annual Prince-themed Purple Rain New Years Eve parties, a couple of which got onto some top recommendations for New Years Eve parties in NYC.
In 2019, when our fourth Flyer Learning drummer moved and our lead singer left the city after her apartment was infested with bed bugs, we decided to take a break from coordinating a full band and start recording music as The Hogstad Brothers. In 2021, we released a six-song project with Shola Adisa-Farrar, a super-talented singer that Jonathan met in Paris when visiting a friend and ended up reconnecting with in Brooklyn after she coincidentally moved a few blocks away. That project was called “A World of Love & Hate”, which felt right for an album of three love songs and three political songs. It felt right in that era to grapple with navigating a world of extremes.
In this latest phase, we’ve experimented with what it means to be our own voice in the music we write, instead of just instrumentalists and behind-the-scenes producers and songwriters.
What’s the live music scene like in New York City right now? Anyone we should be looking out for (bar you, of course)?
It seems like most artists we know love-hate New York. The rent makes everyone miserable. The venues as a whole lean exploitive-to-artists and they do little to foster a scene. But artists are here and making art despite all that and we’re really grateful for the community we have. We’ve found ourselves around a lot of musicians and experimental theatermakers. You should definitely look out for a couple of artists that were in Flyer Learning with us. Bass Trombonist Alix Tucou has an incredible project called Technology & Bones. It’s ambient music that’s as trippy as it is musical. And Chandanie’s stuff is super soulful and fun.
I’ve seen a lot of people struggling for support recently online. What’s your view on the industry?
Social media seems more and more widely revealed as a twisted dystopia. A friend of ours who’s an amazing playwright, Beto O’Byrne, put it well when he told us, “I posted something talking about this play that I’ve been working on for three years that’s getting produced and I got like five likes. I posted a picture of me holding a f*ckin’ chicken: 150 likes!” Art is happening, but I don’t think it’s because of the industry or social media landscape.
Where do you feel you currently sit within the music industry?
We’re making music that moves us and not worrying about the pressure of making a living off of it. We’ve made some money along the way, particularly from our DJ/VJ work, but that’s not the point.
Tell us two truths and a lie about you.
We have a glockenspiel named Gunther.
One time, we were driving home from a family vacation and forgot Brandon (8 years old at the time) at a rest stop 2 hours away from our house and we didn’t notice until we got home.
We love getting requests from anyone and everyone when we DJ.
Do you ever worry about people taking things the wrong way or cancel culture? Discuss….
We’re pretty thoughtful about our lyrics and keeping things rooted in the politics of liberation and unity that inspire us, so we’re not too worried about getting cancelled by those that are like-minded. But cancel culture is a complex term. Neither of us really believe cancelling anyone in our personal interactions is ever helpful. We’re much more the type to try to call people in and talk to them if there’s a problem to figure out rather than call them out and cancel them. But not all cancellations should be seen as the same.
We have more sympathy for calling out and cancelling the voices that are carrying the water for the powerful at the expense of the weak, than we do of the powerful cancelling voices that are being critical. For example, protesting a white nationalist speaker, who is ultimately being supported by the rich to race-bait and divide the working class, is a perfectly valid thing to do. But from our perspective, it’s often the opposite–cancelling critical voices of those with power.
Do you sign up to any conspiracy theories? If not, why not?
Who needs conspiracy theories when we see what happens in plain sight in front of us?
What was your best experience on stage?
The times we can go outside of the box are artistically exhilarating. We did a dance party that was themed around David Bowie’s web of musical influence and worked with an immersive dance company called Minute Zero (choreographed by Kristin Yancy).
We were able to put it up at this beautiful avant garde music venue called National Sawdust and again at Brooklyn Museum’s Artists Gala. Kristin and the dancers were so enthusiastic to figure out how to bring the music and interactive visuals and engage the crowd in new ways. We looked absurd dressed up as Ground Control and Major Tom but the whole thing was so much fun and the crowd drank the kool aid and went along for the ride.
What was your worst experience on stage?
There was a time Jonathan got strep throat and gave it to our lead singer right before a show. She drank tea and did her best, but two thirds into the show, her voice completely gave out. We just kept on playing while she regrouped and we were all looking at each other trying to figure out what to do. Then the emcee that was part of the band at the time decided to start singing her parts. But while he was a great emcee (and friend), he couldn’t hit a note for the life of him. It was a train wreck.
Tell us something about you / each member that you think people would be surprised about.
It seems like a lot of people that see our name (with its Nordic provenance) don’t know that our mother is Filipino and how important those roots are to us. She immigrated to California in the ‘70s and a lot of our family is still in the Philippines. We cook Filipino food. We laugh loud like Filipinos and love karaoke. We even laugh at our own jokes before anyone else gets the opportunity to, which is a very Filipino thing to do.
What are the next steps you plan to take as a band to reach the next level?
We just beefed up the computer code we use to translate the Xbox Kinect camera that we point at the dance floor that creates visuals based on a 3D point-cloud mesh. We’re getting some uniquely trippy results (in a great way). We’re going to be making videos for some of the music we have coming out in 2025. We like the idea of not just being a music act, but an art project in whatever direction it takes us.
I hear you have new music. What can you tell us about it?
Lots of life has been happening since we last released music in 2021. Spinning Round is the lead single off of our upcoming album Creatures in the Dirt. A story arc for the album naturally emerged from eight songs we had written organically and sequenced. The story was about a journey to come into relationship with the darkest parts of ourselves, to bring healing to old wounds.
Spinning Round was the only song we wrote specifically to fill a gap in that arc. We wanted to grapple with the imperfections of that journey that happen despite our best efforts. Through mind-expanding medicine, the protagonist in this song has gained a glimpse of the pure loving energy that exists when fear fully subsides. But as that moment recedes, the shadows return and he works to accept the winding nature of his journey and grows heartened that the fears aren’t as overwhelming as they were before his divine moment (“the night is not as frightening in the glow of the new moon rising high”).
While the lyrical message of compassion for ourselves and others has a deep emotional resonance for us, we’re also happy if folks get that healing energy subconsciously while they groove to a nasty bass line, funk guitars, and Brazilian percussion.
What was the recording process like?
There was a lot of experimentation on this record, particularly with the drums. We’ve had a fascination with Brazilian music since years ago when someone gave us a folder titled “The 100 Greatest Albums from Brazil” and sent us down the rabbit hole of mind-blowing music we had never been exposed to. A couple years ago, Jonathan took up Pandeiro, which is the national instrument of Brazil.
For those that aren’t familiar, it’s like a tambourine with a drum skin across it and you can play it with a technique that gets a similar range of sounds as you could with a full drum set, even though it’s this little 10”-wide, 2”-tall thing. But you don’t have the mic options that you do on a full drum set.
On this song in particular, we were determined to create a unique rhythmic texture that focused on the pandeiro, but we wanted it to sonically carry its weight too. After a lot of trial and error, we ended up putting a close mic on the pandeiro with an AKG D-112 kick drum mic and micing the room with a condenser mic so it both hits your chest and has a sense of space. Then in the mixing process, we put a ton of saturation and heavy eq to bring out the full spectrum of harmonics and used a transient designer to bring back the dynamics and get it grooving again.
It’s not like anyone is going to say, “hey, is that a pandeiro?” after all that work, but we think it gives the song a sub-consciously unique flavor. It’s hard to make music that’s both different and good.
What was the biggest learning curve in writing the new tunes?
During Flyer Learning, our lead singer Chandinie wrote the top-lines and lyrics and we stayed more on the production and arrangement side of things. When we made our last EP, A World of Love & Hate, we wrote a lot of the top-lines and lyrics, but Shola Adisa-Farrar was the incredible vocalist to be the voice of it all.
This time around, we wanted to push ourselves even further out of our producer-instrumentalist comfort zones by writing things from a more personal perspective and becoming our own voice for the music we’re making. But for Jonathan, who took most of the lead vocals on this project, that was a daunting task. He’s primarily a bassist and has been more than happy to back frontwomen on other projects instead of taking on the incredibly vulnerable role of singer.
There were countless takes experimenting with singing in different ways and a deeply uncomfortable process around hearing his own voice played back. But art has to be uncomfortable. As soon as you’re comfortable, you’re just a technician. We were happy with where we got.
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
No. Mixing the songs was a wild ride of being happy with how it’s sounding, then realizing it sounds terrible and not understanding how you could’ve ever thought that it sounded good, then fixing it until we’re happy again, and repeating. But the mixes thankfully got better and better, and we feel like we were able to preserve what we loved about the songs from the beginning all the way through to the end.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
I think we’re just grateful for the opportunity to make music and share it with others. Keep your eyes out for more music and other art coming this year. We hope folks enjoy and connect with any of it.
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