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CHEETAH - CRAZY WISDOMWORDS BY JOE PRICE
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Connecticut is bashfully unapologetic, it’s like blush and lipstick on an angry face, we wanted to replicate that in sound
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aking music that’s incredibly smart, delightfully smutty, and occasionally outrageously high-concept is a day to day thing for James Kristofik. Describing the world of his main project, Body Cheetah, as “kind of like an alternate reality, where everything is the same but everyone is different”, his world plays under a different set of rules to ours. He tags his music as ‘psycho-swagger’, and with three Body Cheetah albums under his belt – including the incredibly titled Sluts Talk About Heaven – his music possesses an insatiable lust for the unheard. Treading a thin Lynchian line between hip-hop, psychedelica, and even a touch of anti-folk, no one sounds quite like Body Cheetah.
Producing music as a means to survive mentally, his creativity is continually evolving. “As I got older I started to develop a serious panic disorder. I was hardly able to function. I went through psychosis for six months and I literally thought I had accidentally become aware of Mother Nature, and she was pissed off that I found her.”
He struggled with anxiety and panic attacks for years, before he was given treatment in the form of every drug imaginable. He went on to explain how severe it got: “I started walking laps around my house because I was afraid to stand still.”
The pains of his life are rarely touched upon explicitly in his music, despite how openly he discussed where his passion for music stemmed from. “As I was walking these laps my mother stopped me in the kitchen and just said to me ‘you might have to live the rest of your life like this, so find something that works.’ So, I started singing it.”
His need for creation only makes his efforts all the more impressive, considering it’s what he uses as a suppression of his demons. He went on to say, “It became the thing I did instead of thinking about it. And I’ve been panic free, off drugs and healthy for almost 6 years now.”
“As long as I make a song a day, or try to at least, I’m good.” And ever since he began creating music, he’s been remarkably prolific, even going as far to start his own Internet label, Woozy Tribe. That his means to create music resulted in something so passionate, and so exciting, is a gift. He’s gone on to release music under the name James Miller – which he decided to torture himself over and master in one day. “I have insane amounts of unreleased material, but all of those tracks were from a certain era in my recent life with this quasi-medieval concept I was playing with”, he said of the album Sunny On My Throne. There’s a clear definition between all of his projects, even if his distinctive voice is heard throughout each one. But perhaps his most exciting and unique project is Cemetery Family Band. t’s a high-concept group formed between all of his best friends, in which all of them play characters of a creepy Connecticut-based family of sorts.
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I literally thoug become aware o she was pissed
“The song ‘Sister’s Song’ was the starting point for Cemetery Family Band. From this one song we created backstories for all of the members of CFB. Basically we became the roles of four people living in the house of a hoarder in central Connecticut, and we quietly kill people and hide them under the hoarded material.” He claims the darkness stemmed from long, aimless drives with his friends: “My friends and I like to drive around aimlessly a lot. We call it ‘perusing’. Actually, the world calls it perusing, it’s in the dictionary.” This interesting technique acts as a lot of the inspiration behind the project; he elaborated “central Connecticut is a creepy ass place, it’s just mountain towns with populations under 500. And although it’s creepy, it is also stunningly beautiful” – which is also a perfect descriptor of their music. “There are a lot of failed townships from the 1700s in Connecticut because people came here to farm, but when they got here the soil was full of large rocks. So people starved, and drank, and froze. Connecticut is bashfully unapologetic. It’s like blush and lipstick on an angry face. We wanted to replicate that in sound.” And that they did, almost unabashedly; they’re creating one of the most interesting sounds in the more morose underground of Bandcamp. That they’ve done this all without a label, and continue to do so, is incredibly surprising. “Cemetery Family Band is the collective efforts of Father, Sister, Mother, and Brother.”
ght I had accidentally of Mother Nature, and d off that I found her
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“Father is played by Lucas Smith, Mother is played by Matt Lindahl, Brother is played by Spencer Fox, and Sister is played by me. Those are my three best friends.” It always retains his sly wit and dry, dark sense of humour: “I have this song written for Sister about police searching for a missing person, and they finally find the person’s truck submerged in the bottom of a pond. When the cops pull the truck from the pond, they open the bed of the truck and find a massive alligator that eats them all. It got pretty dark.” Speaking of his future projects, he wasn’t shy about his ambition: “I really want someone to give me enough money so I can make this book I wrote, San Antonio Honeymoon, into a film.” He doesn’t seem interested in keeping his unique persona simply tied to music. “I’m really excited about the future. I also want to start touring, but I want to do some really personal and intricate shows. Like - wait. Wait, no... I can’t reveal this. All I can say is that I would need my own 18 wheeler.” He’s planning on touring in 2015, perhaps even holding a small showcase at SXSW, and considering his talents, his ambition doesn’t seem that farfetched at all. He’s been making a confident whisper for years, but now it’s about time for his existential howl. World, meet Body Cheetah. [You can download Body Cheetah’s material completely for free at his Bandcamp. His upcoming album The Dead That Dance is due late 2014/early 2015.] This feature was originally designed and written for Audio Addict’s ‘Magazine in a Day’.