Catching Up With... Noot d' Noot

After a busy summer with the International Hits release of their first album/mixtape Goofer Dust, followed by a short stint up the east coast in September, the crazy collective of Noot d' Noot is back to playing shows and writing new music in Atlanta. Paste:Local recently sat down with four of the eight-to-ten band members, the interchangably named Bimbi Garraux, Dream Sanitation, Dr. Kinje and Circuit Diva (or was that Electro Siren?). And while we're still a little confused about who's called what and why, we now understand a little better how the band morped from a simple side project to one of the best live acts in town.

Bimbi: It’s a way to get away from trying to make a certain type of music. If you’re a different person-- if you have a different identity-- then it’s easier to let yourself go.
Dr. Kinje: It’s much easier for me to shake my ass on stage as Dr. Kinje, the Fire King. Especially now with the dashiki, too.

Paste: And you two [vocalists Circuit Diva and Electro Siren] switch names?
Circuit Diva: Those names were actually bestowed by Dr. Kinje. They’re hot names. It’s "Circuit Diva and Electro Siren"; occasionally we feel like both, so instead of having the one name, we just switch. Sometimes I’m both of them at the same time.
Dr. Kinje: Originally, they were Efectiv [the name of their vocal group] A and B, and they didn’t like that, so we had to christen each.

Paste: I want to know about how much you guys have been playing recently. What have been the forces behind that?
Bimbi: People just keep asking us to play, so we’re like, “Well, I guess if we can do it, we’ll do it.”
Dream Sanitation: It always seems to be for a different set of people, too. I think after this batch of shows, we’re going to have to take some time off before we can make the Atlanta world tour again.

Paste: Do you think there’s such a thing as playing too often? Do people keep coming out?
Circuit Diva: I think there’s such a thing as playing too often in the same place, because you do want to expose yourself to different audiences, especially with live music. You just want to branch out.

Paste: Can you guys do a quick band history for me? How did this all get started?
Bimbi: Well it started with me and Dream Sanitation picking up Crab Louie’s MPC. And we were in Good Friday Experiment. We actually played with Dr. Kinje fairly often as that band. We’d always been into just playing for hours and hours. It seems like once you’ve been playing it for two or three hours straight, just improvising, all of a sudden all of this really cool music starts to happen that you never would have come across if you were just writing a song. You go to someplace deep in your mind, and you find some weird stuff. We just always liked to record those things, and once we started learning how to sample and stuff, we would tape it. We would sample the music we’d recorded and loop it, and just kind of go back over that. We had been learning to sample and whatnot, and we went into The Living Room studio [in Atlanta] and tried to start assembling a lot of the things that we had. Then we called in Dr. Kinje and Skins Malone to kind of overdub on stuff, and then we thought it sounded really cool and we were like, “Hey, maybe we should make a band out of this.”

Paste: Before it was a band, it was supposed to be just some recordings you were trying to do?
Dream Sanitation: Yeah, it was a project. Something to do on Fridays, keep us out of trouble. We basically got together to hang out; we just played music instead of video games.

Paste: So at that point, what brought on the transformation from project to full-fledged band?
Bimbi: We assembled all this stuff and we put out this mixtape, the Goofer Dust mixtape. And honestly, we thought about trying to sell the beats to anybody-- commercials, video games, singers, whatever. And then we started handing it out to everybody, and we were like, “This is really cool. Maybe we should just play a show, and see how it goes.”
Dream Sanitation: We had people record; overdubbing is how we brought the band together. We were like, “We want musicians on this besides just what we sampled. We wanted to take it a step further." We sampled ourselves, but we can’t do everything. We can’t sing as well as Efectiv can.
Bimbi: A lot of people have only gotten to know each other after we started playing out.
Dream Sanitation: But now it’s been a long enough time that we’re all friends.
Dr. Kinje: I didn’t know Skins Malone’s real name for a while.
Dream Sanitation: It was weird, we were together so infrequently, too, that we didn’t talk, we just played. Trying to get eight people together, we’d just play and then leave. A show would come, and we’d play and then we’d go home, and eventually it was like, “Ok, we've got to start talking to each other.”
Bimbi: It’s just hard with that many people. It usually only coalesces when we’re on stage. And honestly there’s very rarely a practice where everybody’s there that is going to play the next show. A lot of time you’ll have five or six people, and the next practice you’ll have five or six people, but it’s not the same five people.

Paste: Do you think that that’s a hindrance at all, or does the type of music you make kind of deal with that?
Circuit Diva: I think it can be good. There’s a large group of people who came together to make music, but they all have individual projects.
Dream Sanitation: It definitely keeps the stage show kind of live.
Dr. Kinje: Not “sloppy,” but “live.”
Bimbi: Because you don’t have that full energy until you hit the stage.
Dr. Kinje: We are sort of writing more now. If we get a lot of people at one practice session, we start writing stuff, and originally we were all having to learn stuff off of the recording.
Dream Sanitation: So the next album is taking shape without even trying.
Bimbi: Yeah, we’re ready to get on to the next thing, because we put out that mixtape with International Hits, and then went back and re-worked it to try and make it more like an album, but it’s still been finished for over a year, and in the year, the band has become a real band. It’s sort of like a relic of the band getting started. It’s not where the band’s at now.

Paste: Tell me about sharing bills with people like Judi Chicago and other bands that on the surface, don’t have a lot to do with the type of sound you guys make.
Dream Sanitation: I don’t think they sound like us, but I think they have a similar attitude.
Circuit Diva: A similar energy.
Dream Sanitation: They want their crowd to dance. I think they help with that. It makes sense for us to play with kind of electronic-sounding bands.
Dr. Kinje: I think all of us play music that you can either go to a show and have fun and dance to, or stand back and listen to and it still has content to it. I hear new lyrics in Judi Chicago’s music every time I see them.
Bimbi: We’ve done a lot of DJing and stuff, too. We’ll bend the name to mean a lot of different things.

Paste: Why do you think so many people want you to play in all these different kinds of environments?
Circuit Diva: I couldn’t say for sure why, but it’s definitely a good thing.

Noot d' Noot's next show is at The Earl Nov. 21 with All The Saints and The Coathangers for Stomp and Stammer's anniversary celebration.

Related links:
Paste:Local Atlanta: Live Review: Judi Chicago, Noot d' Noot @ Lenny's 7/26/08
Paste:Local Atlanta: Feature: Catching Up With... It's Elephants
Feature: Catching Up With... Butch Walker