While the names, The Perfects and Tim Hollowboy Phillips may not mean anything to you right off the bat, just think of the Mindless Self Indulgence remix Hollowboy Extended Pleasure Mix and you will know Phillips work. Besides his work with MSI, Phillips has released a five song The Perfects EP. Phillips along with collaborator, Ric Peters has made The Perfects into a throwback to The Cure end of New Wave. Their stuff is dark, crazy and fun.
Check out the official website for The Perfects
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Tim Hollowboy Phillips: Well weve got some new tracks to mix so Im just tweaking around, adding some stuff in, just trying to brush up some ideas.
DRE: Is this at your home studio?
Tim: Yeah, Ive got my home studio set up. For the most part everythings pretty much in the computer. Ive got a few instruments like a bass and a guitar around the house but I mostly just program.
DRE: Is it work for yourself or other people?
Tim: Right now Im working on The Perfects stuff were mixing up there. But I always have ideas that Im always messing around with. Im not very linear so I got to jump from idea to idea. I might have an idea thats like, Oh this might be for something else, I dont know. I just throw it to the side and I collect them and sometimes I surprise myself and I play something for the other guys in the band. They like it and they make it into a perfect song or something like that.
DRE: So you create music and sometimes you dont know what its going to go on?
Tim: Yeah, pretty much. There are times I sat down and I specifically had some ideas in my head and said, Okay, I have an idea and I think this will work. This is something along the lines of what weve been doing with The Perfects. I put a lot of ideas down and then I finally present them to the others and say, Hey, what do you guys think of this and do you think its usable or not? So I have a lot that just never make it past the initial idea stage but sometimes those things can pile up and work for other ideas. Actually an idea that I had in my head ended up working with the Mindless Self Indulgence remix that I did. I pulled a baseline that I had written as an idea a long time ago that never really worked for anything and it worked.
DRE: How did the Mindless Self Indulgence remix come to you?
Tim: We were contacted through our MySpace account by MSIs manager. He dug our stuff and was really interested in what we were doing and what The Perfects had been up to. We were just chatting back and forth and then he popped the question Would you guys be interested in working on a remix with MSI? So at that point Im like, Sure, send me some stuff and let me get working on it. So thats what happened. I spent some time tweaking around a little bit. I did about three or four different versions and the earliest of remixes didnt pan out for me personally. They mostly ended up sounding more like the song itself and I wanted to get away from it and I wanted to do something more in The Perfects style.
DRE: Has working with MSI brought you a whole new fan base?
Tim: It has certainly opened up a new audience that we probably wouldnt have captured before. I was a bit hesitant at first about doing a remix for them because I knew they had such a rabid fan base which can be finicky, for all the right reasons as any fan base can be. I think that trying to redo a song of any band, whether youre doing a cover and performing it live or youre doing a remix you expect some backlash and expect people to say, This is horrible, this is nothing like MSI. But, I guess thats the point. You want to give them a different spin on their sound and I wanted to put my own influences into it.
DRE: Was it difficult to infuse your own sensibilities with their song?
Tim: As I said before there was one baseline idea I had. I decided to listen to that old idea again after I did a couple attempts with the remix. As I was going through some old ideas, I heard something and said, Hang on, I think this might work, but let me rewrite it. It certainly wasnt in the right key or anything. I just went with the idea that I had for the choruses and I think that really worked. Once I put it in it I had to go back and redo the entire remix based around that.
DRE: Usually when someone has a cool nickname they dont look the way you do. But I guess DJs can be a bit nerdy.
Tim: [laughs] I think they may have darker, ominous looking pictures that may be more fitting to the Hollowboy name.
DRE: Were you always a techie guy?
Tim: When I was going through high school, I definitely was the artsy guy in the class. I had my hair up in a little bit of Robert Smith-esque look and I certainly stood out in my class over the years. I was not so much into the music until right after I started college even though I always had a keyboard around. I met some people and we started hanging out and writing songs together. Ive always been a computer math nerd and I was also artsy, so I had the weird left and right brain thing working [laughs].
DRE: Is The Perfects EP the first album you guys have done?
Tim: Yeah the five song EP is our first release. We actually had a total of six tracks ready to go and we ended up paring it down to five. Were going to rework one of the unreleased tracks. We started building up a buzz through MySpace and other online communities and we decided we need to get some sort of product out there so we can move on and work on new songs. We decided we didnt have enough stuff to do a full length so we wanted to get the EP out there and see what kind of reaction we can get.
DRE: How did you like releasing The EP yourself?
Tim: Well, technology these days certainly allows us to do a lot of things on our own. The do it yourself attitude really works well with all the technology we have around us now, starting with my home studio setup. For the songs that are on EP, as well as some songs that are not released yet we took them up to New York and put everything down, throw it into ProTools and mix and master it. God bless iTunes and things like that which can make our music accessible very quickly. We found some good online tools and resources to market our music. We are selling our CD through MerchDirect with little cost on our end. Its actually very encouraging that we can do that because the thought of sitting on our music waiting for someone else to come along and release it wasnt something we were going to do. We wanted to get it out as fast as possible.
DRE: Is it a coincidence that Nic Hard worked because he produced The Bravery and The Perfects is also a throwback to New Wave?
Tim: We loved the stuff that Nic Hard did with The Bravery, he was New York based and we were looking around for who to work with. Over the years Ric [Peters] and I have worked with some local mixers and engineers around here but Ric said that he really liked the mixing on The Bravery record. So Ric contacted Hard and asked if he would be interested in working with us. We sent Nic some of our demos that we had done here at my house and Nic really loved it so it went from there. Its actually been great to work with Nic and were going back up to work with Nic again at the end of February to do these new tunes.
DRE: How did you get DJ Richard Vission to remix Shipwrecked?
Tim: Richard also had done some remixing for The Bravery and The Killers. It was Rics idea to ring him up. So it was a similar thing. We sent the material over to him and he really enjoyed our stuff. We went ahead and worked up a couple of remixes but none have been released yet. Theres some back and forth going on about how were going to release the remixes but its been great working with Richard and getting someone elses take on it. Hopefully it is the first of many remixes well do with Richard.
DRE: You put together a live band for the tour, which is unusual for a DJ.
Tim: It was definitely tough. Both Ric and I were in a band together prior to The Perfects called Imbue. We worked together for years. But the one thing that we missed was performing live. On top of that I think its a necessity to perform this music live otherwise our audience will be limited by what we can do online. So we need to do is get in front of people. We went online and we talked to friends we had from the old band and said, Hey do you want to work with us on this new project? So now we have a live drummer, a live bass player and a live guitarist. We have about nine songs that were in rotation right now, five from the EP and four unreleased tracks.
DRE: How did you and Ric hook up?
Tim: Ric and I met through some mutual friends about ten years ago. At the time he was working on a project and I had my own band going on. But the two of us were looking for something different. I think we both just wanted to work on something new so mutual friends set it up. We both gave up our old projects that we were in at the time.
DRE: How did you come up with Hollowboy?
Tim: Ive had the name Hollowboy for a long time. It was my online name for many years. An old band of mine was called Hollow which is the band that I left when I met Ric. I think that the explanation of Hollowboy isnt as dark or as mysterious as people would hope. At the time it stemmed from my love for the movie Cabin Boy.
DRE: I totally understand. Im a monstrous Chris Elliott fan.
Tim: Me too [laughs].
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official website for The Perfects
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Tim Hollowboy Phillips: Well weve got some new tracks to mix so Im just tweaking around, adding some stuff in, just trying to brush up some ideas.
DRE: Is this at your home studio?
Tim: Yeah, Ive got my home studio set up. For the most part everythings pretty much in the computer. Ive got a few instruments like a bass and a guitar around the house but I mostly just program.
DRE: Is it work for yourself or other people?
Tim: Right now Im working on The Perfects stuff were mixing up there. But I always have ideas that Im always messing around with. Im not very linear so I got to jump from idea to idea. I might have an idea thats like, Oh this might be for something else, I dont know. I just throw it to the side and I collect them and sometimes I surprise myself and I play something for the other guys in the band. They like it and they make it into a perfect song or something like that.
DRE: So you create music and sometimes you dont know what its going to go on?
Tim: Yeah, pretty much. There are times I sat down and I specifically had some ideas in my head and said, Okay, I have an idea and I think this will work. This is something along the lines of what weve been doing with The Perfects. I put a lot of ideas down and then I finally present them to the others and say, Hey, what do you guys think of this and do you think its usable or not? So I have a lot that just never make it past the initial idea stage but sometimes those things can pile up and work for other ideas. Actually an idea that I had in my head ended up working with the Mindless Self Indulgence remix that I did. I pulled a baseline that I had written as an idea a long time ago that never really worked for anything and it worked.
DRE: How did the Mindless Self Indulgence remix come to you?
Tim: We were contacted through our MySpace account by MSIs manager. He dug our stuff and was really interested in what we were doing and what The Perfects had been up to. We were just chatting back and forth and then he popped the question Would you guys be interested in working on a remix with MSI? So at that point Im like, Sure, send me some stuff and let me get working on it. So thats what happened. I spent some time tweaking around a little bit. I did about three or four different versions and the earliest of remixes didnt pan out for me personally. They mostly ended up sounding more like the song itself and I wanted to get away from it and I wanted to do something more in The Perfects style.
DRE: Has working with MSI brought you a whole new fan base?
Tim: It has certainly opened up a new audience that we probably wouldnt have captured before. I was a bit hesitant at first about doing a remix for them because I knew they had such a rabid fan base which can be finicky, for all the right reasons as any fan base can be. I think that trying to redo a song of any band, whether youre doing a cover and performing it live or youre doing a remix you expect some backlash and expect people to say, This is horrible, this is nothing like MSI. But, I guess thats the point. You want to give them a different spin on their sound and I wanted to put my own influences into it.
DRE: Was it difficult to infuse your own sensibilities with their song?
Tim: As I said before there was one baseline idea I had. I decided to listen to that old idea again after I did a couple attempts with the remix. As I was going through some old ideas, I heard something and said, Hang on, I think this might work, but let me rewrite it. It certainly wasnt in the right key or anything. I just went with the idea that I had for the choruses and I think that really worked. Once I put it in it I had to go back and redo the entire remix based around that.
DRE: Usually when someone has a cool nickname they dont look the way you do. But I guess DJs can be a bit nerdy.
Tim: [laughs] I think they may have darker, ominous looking pictures that may be more fitting to the Hollowboy name.
DRE: Were you always a techie guy?
Tim: When I was going through high school, I definitely was the artsy guy in the class. I had my hair up in a little bit of Robert Smith-esque look and I certainly stood out in my class over the years. I was not so much into the music until right after I started college even though I always had a keyboard around. I met some people and we started hanging out and writing songs together. Ive always been a computer math nerd and I was also artsy, so I had the weird left and right brain thing working [laughs].
DRE: Is The Perfects EP the first album you guys have done?
Tim: Yeah the five song EP is our first release. We actually had a total of six tracks ready to go and we ended up paring it down to five. Were going to rework one of the unreleased tracks. We started building up a buzz through MySpace and other online communities and we decided we need to get some sort of product out there so we can move on and work on new songs. We decided we didnt have enough stuff to do a full length so we wanted to get the EP out there and see what kind of reaction we can get.
DRE: How did you like releasing The EP yourself?
Tim: Well, technology these days certainly allows us to do a lot of things on our own. The do it yourself attitude really works well with all the technology we have around us now, starting with my home studio setup. For the songs that are on EP, as well as some songs that are not released yet we took them up to New York and put everything down, throw it into ProTools and mix and master it. God bless iTunes and things like that which can make our music accessible very quickly. We found some good online tools and resources to market our music. We are selling our CD through MerchDirect with little cost on our end. Its actually very encouraging that we can do that because the thought of sitting on our music waiting for someone else to come along and release it wasnt something we were going to do. We wanted to get it out as fast as possible.
DRE: Is it a coincidence that Nic Hard worked because he produced The Bravery and The Perfects is also a throwback to New Wave?
Tim: We loved the stuff that Nic Hard did with The Bravery, he was New York based and we were looking around for who to work with. Over the years Ric [Peters] and I have worked with some local mixers and engineers around here but Ric said that he really liked the mixing on The Bravery record. So Ric contacted Hard and asked if he would be interested in working with us. We sent Nic some of our demos that we had done here at my house and Nic really loved it so it went from there. Its actually been great to work with Nic and were going back up to work with Nic again at the end of February to do these new tunes.
DRE: How did you get DJ Richard Vission to remix Shipwrecked?
Tim: Richard also had done some remixing for The Bravery and The Killers. It was Rics idea to ring him up. So it was a similar thing. We sent the material over to him and he really enjoyed our stuff. We went ahead and worked up a couple of remixes but none have been released yet. Theres some back and forth going on about how were going to release the remixes but its been great working with Richard and getting someone elses take on it. Hopefully it is the first of many remixes well do with Richard.
DRE: You put together a live band for the tour, which is unusual for a DJ.
Tim: It was definitely tough. Both Ric and I were in a band together prior to The Perfects called Imbue. We worked together for years. But the one thing that we missed was performing live. On top of that I think its a necessity to perform this music live otherwise our audience will be limited by what we can do online. So we need to do is get in front of people. We went online and we talked to friends we had from the old band and said, Hey do you want to work with us on this new project? So now we have a live drummer, a live bass player and a live guitarist. We have about nine songs that were in rotation right now, five from the EP and four unreleased tracks.
DRE: How did you and Ric hook up?
Tim: Ric and I met through some mutual friends about ten years ago. At the time he was working on a project and I had my own band going on. But the two of us were looking for something different. I think we both just wanted to work on something new so mutual friends set it up. We both gave up our old projects that we were in at the time.
DRE: How did you come up with Hollowboy?
Tim: Ive had the name Hollowboy for a long time. It was my online name for many years. An old band of mine was called Hollow which is the band that I left when I met Ric. I think that the explanation of Hollowboy isnt as dark or as mysterious as people would hope. At the time it stemmed from my love for the movie Cabin Boy.
DRE: I totally understand. Im a monstrous Chris Elliott fan.
Tim: Me too [laughs].
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
While the names, The Perfects and Tim Hollowboy Phillips may not mean anything to you right off the bat, just think of the Mindless Self Indulgence remix Hollowboy Extended Pleasure Mix and you will know Phillips work. Besides...