A brief interview conducted with
DNA Girl from Astro Al on the winding road…
Count Robot: What would you
say is your biggest influence on Astro Al?
DNA Girl:Monty Python, 60’s avent garde movement,
Robyn Hitchcock and the Three Stooges. We’ve been compared to the Bonzo Dog
Band.
Count Robot: What is your
view of playing live verses playing a song in the recording studio?
DNA Girl: More nervous live, more relaxed in the
studio. Love the audience reactions but playing in the studio we can experiment
more.
Count Robot: What’s your
favorite live gig we’ve ever done?
DNA Girl: The Landing Pad in Philadelphia. We had a
ball there and people seemed to get us there.
Count Robot: What was your favorite recording
experience?
DNA Girl: The thing that stands out the most to me are
the videos we made. Some of the most interesting things is when we are
recording against other peoples music like when Joe Davis (from Harts Horn) or
Brian Fowler (from Spaceseed) contributed music.
Count Robot: Which video is
your favorite?
DNA Girl: Hands down, You’re Dead, So Shut Up, had a
ball doing that one. Rio Santos was a hoot too. It was fun not having to play
the straight character. It’s been fun having our friends in these videos. It’s
turned into an extension of our old theater group.
Count Robot: Where do you
get your inspiration?
DNA Girl: A lot of is from crazy dreams, like the song
Cocoa Clouds Hides the Chocolate Dimension. I just woke up one day with that
phrase in my head and Rodney the Rodent Roadster was based on a dream.
Many of the best horror stories
leave it to the reader to fill in the gaps and use the darkest parts of their
own imaginations to fully develop the terror of the tale they are reading. The
HP Lovecraft story, The Music of Erich Zann is an excellent example of this
type of fiction. If you like a good creepy story and haven’t read the Music of
Erich Zann than seek it out.
With our track Ghost Story we took
that approach.
The idea of suggesting enough
things to send the listener down many shadow filled paths.
What happened between Jack and his
wife? Did he really love her and she him? Was the ghost trying to please Jack
or did she want something else?
The video was shot in an
impressionistic style to attempt to emphasize the gothic mood.
Some of the houses in the video are
no longer standing.
The cats in the video just happened
to be there while we were filming. It was an interesting coincidence to say the
least.
So here it is, from Pet Noizes, our
horror fiction, Ghost Story.
I’ve always thought that dolls are
an odd and weird totem for our society. We project onto them the things we want
to be and the things we fear to be and do. They are portals to our imagination.
And sometimes our imagination is a
very frightening place.
From Pet Noizes here is The
Dollhouse of the Damned.
We have long been friends with Joe
Davis who records under the alias Harts Horn. Harts Horn rocks and it is a cool
privilege to have played and recorded with Joe.
Some years back we decided to
record a split cd with Harts Horn. Since we both treasure the 60’s music scene
we figured why not nod to a classic 60’s musical trove of history and mystery,
Pet Sounds. Thus we dubbed our split cd Pet Noizes.
Although we had recorded three
Astro Al cds before working on Pet Noizes, in many ways I really consider this
to be the one where we found our identity. From the outset of Pet Noizes we
aimed to make the majority of our tracks horror/sci-fi themed. We had always
talked about being a B movie horror/sci-fi band but up until that album we
weren’t one.
Check out this track Evil Organs
that was built around samples from the movie the Bloody Pit of Horror.
Funny thing about Pet Noizes is we
turned every track we did on it into a video with the exception of A Night at
the Beach. We would make that one into a video too if we had a million dollars
for a budget.
But the point is here that all
these other tracks heavily lent themselves to the visual world.
Thanks Joe for suggesting we do
this split cd. If we hadn’t gone down this road I’m not sure we would have
found our true identity.
Cult of
Frankenstein and Mansion of Dracula were a famous double bill. They ran for
three weeks straight at the Starlight drive in theater. Neither of them had any
big name stars but they were A flicks despite their B movie budgets. The cult
thing really freaked viewers out and played on their fear of conformity and
paranoia. The Dracula flick was flat out spooky, the hero was a ghost like
figure in the movie and the lighting was just plain eerie with deep reds and
thick shadows. The mansion itself was huge and felt like it was alive. It was a
real mansion too although there are disagreements about where it is located,
it’s either in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or the UK depending on who you
ask.
Viewers
didn’t know what to make of Attack of the Prehistoric Beast. Some said it was
the straight up funniest comedy they had ever seen. Others thought it was dark.
Some other people just thought it was stupid and that it looked like some 50’s
giant monster scientist type landed in a movie with a 70’s porn actress.
Satan’s
Sister had a minor hit song called Into the Sky the love theme from Satan’s
Sister. The tune was more popular than the movie. The movie was held over a
week and put on a double bill with the Burning Witch only because of the song.
The
Burning Witch is a whole other ballgame. No big names in it or anything like
that. Maybe it was true about the real live woman being burned at the stake and
the distributors destroyed all the copies to cover it up. Funny thing is not
many people seem to remember the movie at all.
Then
there was Undead Kiss. That was one demented flick. What were the monsters in
that movie? Vampires, ghosts, zombies, aliens, who knows? There was almost no
dialogue and it was a little on the arty side with all sorts of psychedelic colors
and sounds. There didn’t seem to be much a plot but it was pretty, gothic, and
spaced out.
Yeah
some people say the Starlight was haunted. Maybe it was haunted not just by
ghosts but also by the strange films they showed.
Mark Colby- Long time fan of the
Starlight Drive in Theater.
He wrote some incredible science
fiction stories. One that always stuck with me is Chains of Air, Web of
Aethyr.
We put together a track
based around it, which we called Aether Chains of Air
The story concerns a man who is afraid to make contact with
a woman with a debilitating disease on a distant planet. It speaks to the fears
we all hold about illness.
We urge you to go buy this album and do some good. The album
contains 44 songs all by different artists. Go forth and download for good!
