Altered Zones

(img credit= Joey Miller)

By Marissa A. Ross

My story isn’t original. Back in the Spring, I was catching up on my Google Reader when one of the seventeen music blogs we all subscribe to featured a song called “This Big World”. I was immediately taken by the tune, which exemplified our much-celebrated “chill” without foregoing any of the raucous “rock” that has fueled teenage rebellions & underground music scenes...well, as far as we’re concerned, forever.

Dead Gaze, the project of true Mississippi Man Cole Furlow, is a fuzzy, melodic cloud of beats. It’s garage-y, lo-fi, and at times, a little dingy, but goddamn, it’s chill as hell (heh), while keeping us toe-tapping all the way through. In this broad’s brains, that's quite an achievement.

When the chance to talk to the Jackson native cropped up in my inbox, I snatched it up without hesitation. Quite fittingly for the times, we took to Skype to shoot the shit over glasses of cheap cabernet and PBR.

AZ: Obviously music influenced your music, but what outside of that has affected Dead Gaze?

Cole: I would have to say probably the action of being with friends and having friends who are musically inclined. It gives you this attitude that you can do it, they can do it, and we're all in this together. For me, it was like all my friends were starting to make all these really awesome tunes, and I could do the same thing. Not like a competition so much but just like, "We’re all kinda doing it together, this is pretty rad, and we can do something with this." Friendship was really the motivating factor. I have a lot of great friends making music, and it brought us together. We call ourselves Cats Purring and it's a label we invented, the Cats Purring Collective.

AZ: Yeah, I saw your Twitter!

Cole: [Laughs] We also have a Blogspot! It’s more of a collective of friends (me, Dent May, John Berrett [Bass Drum Of Death]) than an actual label, but it just goes back to the basis that we’re a group of friends who love music, and we support one another.

AZ: That’s awesome. I love the sense of community that runs through our entire “scene”, for lack of a better word. That community, I believe, is a big part of this music/blog milieu we’ve got going.

Cole: Definitely! We played a show at the end of CMJ in New Jersey and I'd never been there before. I really didn't know anything about the place at all. This guy Dan-- not sure if you know Cough Cool-- I've been following that dude for a while now, his music is the shit. I feel like I've known him for a long time but it's actually just "Internet-knowing", like MySpace messages and Twitter whatevers. When I finally met him, it was amazing. He's like my soul brother. We had this great show, everyone already knew about us and it was a wonderful experience. The whole thing happened because of the Internet and because we're all a part of this community.

(img credit= Tom Pavlich)

AZ: Is there a similar support system in Mississippi?

Cole: There's a huge DIY scene here because there are so many kids who are fed up with the way the bar scene works in Mississippi; it's just full of meat-headed blues guys or old people and it's not really a hip spot. Recently, within the last three years, all these spots have started popping off, but before you were just a lone wolf.

We went off on a number of tangents about the community, getting stoned with bloggers, and the Internet in general, which brought us back to me being like, “I’M MAD GRATEFUL 4 THE INTERNET 'CAUSE I HEARD ‘THIS BIG WORLD’ & I DRIVE DOWN PCH BLASTING THAT SHIT”, which isn’t hard to profess when you truly love a jam and you’re boozing it up on Skype. It was only slightly reminiscent of gushing to the popular boys on AIM in junior high, and infinitely more successful: Cole was immediately impassioned.

Cole: "This Big World", that song is just straight-up apathy. I wanted to write a song that was sort of like an anthem. I know that sounds lame but I wanted to write something that was huge and fun and captured everything I was thinking at the time and I wanted everyone to be with me, just collectively on this jammer.

It's all about, "I'm not happy but I'm just feeling a little down." That's just a thesis statement for a lot of things that go on around me. I have a lot of friends, and I'm not saying we're depressed dudes, but we're always feeling down. And we're conscious of it. A lot of it makes us pissed off. We don't want to be down, so we write songs. At the time, I was dating this girl and she had sort of a rough go of it. I just wanted to tell her that it's hard sometimes. Things get tough and sometimes you don't know what it's like to be alone in this big world. I don't know what it's like to be alone in this world, but I can tell you it must be a bad feeling. If you get to the bridge, it's just me telling her that good things are on the way. Like, "I promise you; I swear to God, your time is on the way." I just wanted to convey this optimistic thing because optimism can take you to a place that gets you out of your shit. That sounds silly but that is that song. It's the only song I've ever written where the lyrics are so close to me.

We continued on about lyrics, Los Angeles, and the undeniable vibes of Brooklyn calling. I couldn’t help but wonder…

AZ: Does being a band in Mississippi entail different obstacles than, say, being a band in New York?

Cole: It’s not difficult. I truly believe you can do anything here you can do anywhere else, in any other state. I firmly believe that. People always say there's such a difference between living here and making art and doing it in New York or San Francisco-- or any place where there is "acceptance". Obviously, there is a fuck ton of lameness: too much Dad Rock and people trying to relive the blues. But that's what I kinda grew up on, listening to lots of blues and soul from Jackson that grew from the '70s disco-funk. There's a record label here called Malcove and we grew up on that. As a kid out here, you only go to see music when it's a festival or a neighborhood thing. Music to me at first, growing up in Mississippi, was just like, “This shit is fun! This isn't serious! Everyone's dancing!” It was all for fun. It wasn't until I heard like Elliott Smith that I was like, "Shit’s real." [Laughs] It’s still fun. We’re having a good time, wherever we are, and that’s what counts.

MP3: Dead Gaze: "Take Me Home or I Die Alone"

MP3: Dead Gaze: "This Big World"

End of Days, Why Not You? tape is out now on Mirror Universe, and Take Me Home or I Die Alone 7" is available for pre-order via Fire Talk