An Exclusive Interview with The Data Waves

Three of the members of the funky, groovy, local band The Data Waves sat down with Pizza FM the day before their Pygmalion set. We talked about their music at length. Interviewer: First of all, I want to congratulate you on being in the Pygmalion lineup. I’m going to see you tomorrow and I’m excited to see you live again. First thing: In your bio that I found in a few places around the internet, I saw that you guys as a group got your start in 2016 at U of I, but I know that you weren’t always the data waves. Can you tell me a little bit about The Apothecaries and how that progressed to what you are now? Sammy: Yeah. We originally started off as a band called The Apothecaries. We were formed through a class that Allen Hall had called the Rock Band class. The whole thing with that class was that you come in, you sign up for it, and you get put together with other people who are interested in playing music together in a band. It doesn’t have to be rock music specifically. We didn’t really do rock music. We were doing music more along the lines or R&B and Pop and Blues, just experimenting all across the board. That’s where we started and that’s where we were setting up are sound. A lot of it was rooted in groove music realistically, we were all very rhythmic from the start. That was kind of our whole idea: let’s music that sounds good, that makes people dance, and let’s have fun doing it. So, we started off as the Apothecaries and that was freshman year. Me and Diddy are seniors, Shravan’s a junior. At that point, first semester, Diddy was not in the band. We had another bass player at that point. He dropped, and Diddy came into the band second semester. Sophomore year came along and we lost our lead singer. We were no longer a part of the Allen Hall Rock Band class at that point. So, we decided to change our name and from there on out we’ve been The Data Waves. Interviewer: When did the lineup solidify to what it is today? Aditya: It was always changing, really. The only original member left in our current lineup is Sammy right now. Originally, our keyboard player Joey was in our band up until last semester, basically beginning of 2019. Then we just switched from a five-piece to a four-piece. We also switched drummers in 2018. Our original drummer Seth switched schools, so Shravan came along. He was also playing in a band called Open Hall, so he was the obvious drummer. We had always played shows together and they most closely matched what we were doing in terms of style. Interviewer: About that style: In talking about genre, in that same bio that mentions 2016, I’ve seen “instrumental funk” that dabbles elsewhere as your genre descriptor. Is that accurate to describe the music you make, or would you describe it as something else? Aditya: I think the only reason that it would come from other genres is because the way we all learned music is very different. When it comes to playing bass, at least, I come from very much a rock background. I pretty much only played in rock bands. Kevin is a Jazz saxophone player, trained and true. Sammy just has Reggae in his blood. [Pointing at Shravan] I guess you’re also like a rock drummer. Our old drummer Seth was basically just–gospel chops. He learned how to play in church. It was just different backgrounds coming together. We all had different approaches to making music but when we came together, we had to incorporate everyone’s input. It just kind of became a melting pot of background.  Interviewer: Speaking of background, The Data Waves is currently comprised entirely of people of color. Why do you think it’s important that people of color make unique music like you do, not only in the C-U music scene, but overall? Shravan: I just think it’s important in terms of representation, you know? When you look at the charts and a lot of artists who are getting popular these days, they all kinda look the same, to a degree. It’s good to have some different voices within the mix. Funk, Jazz, Blues, and a lot of the formats we’re pulling from are originally from African or Caribbean traditions. It made sense to us to stay authentic to what we come from. Me and Diddy, we’re Indian, so we’re a little bit different, but we also pull from other world music influences. It just helped us be a more well-rounded musical machine, as opposed to just sticking to something that a lot of other people are doing. Aditya: One thing I’ve noticed from the audience is that a lot of people of color will come to our shows, especially Indian people. You don’t see a lot of Indian people playing in conventional rock bands. Just offering a model for other people to base their ideas off of is unique, because most of our role models don’t really look like us, for the most part. So, I mean, creating a model from scratch is almost a challenge within itself. Interviewer: I’ve noticed that you’ve performed in a lot of venues in town. I’ve seen you at Canopy Club, you were at the International Festival in Chicago. In the C-U scene, you’ve performed alongside Zzo and some of your members have worked with CJ Run. What can you say about the music scene here in Champaign-Urbana? There was another interview that you mentioned there was a lot of support for each other within the C-U music scene. What do you think about that now? Sammy: I think the scene changes a lot, and the scene is kind of divided. There are the college students who are really out here for their four years, and they’re pursuing music on the side or full time or whatever it might be. Then you have another music community in Urbana-Champaign that’s more local based. Last year, I did a little side gig with a blues group. We played at a bar on the outskirts of Champaign, where there were a bunch of groups playing that were mainly blues, but older folks that I would never otherwise see. But here, I guess, if we’re thinking about the music scene that really caters to the people in our age group, it changes. It’s really dynamic. There are students coming in every year, students leaving every year. So, at this point, right now, a lot of the bands that we were playing with freshman year or sophomore year don’t exist anymore or do not play in the area anymore. It’s kind of interesting. Realistically, everybody is supportive of each other musically. Whether or not we’re playing the same type of music, whether or not our fans are the same, whether or not we book the same, everyone’s very supportive of each other, because we do this music thing and it’s fun to do. There’s no conflict when it comes to it. Aditya: It’s never really competitive, it’s always just there. Shravan: There’s a really strong sense of community in the music scene here, especially amongst the college students, which is kind of more the scene we’re a part of. You know, students who are here doing their undergrad who are either doing music on the side or are music majors and are pursuing being in a band. When we would first start playing gigs in basements and houses around here, it’s a very organic–it’s like some dude lives in this establishment and he’s allowing us to play in his basement, you know? It’s not like we’re playing at some venue where they have all this equipment and stuff. It’s very DIY, and then because of that, then the community started building. All of these connections and all of these people in these bands starting throwing shows together, booking other bands. Through that, these parties and house shows basically, the scene began to grow more and more. Aditya: It was a challenge to keep a college band at least under the same brand for four years. To be able to have done that, it was a challenge, but we’re grateful that it’s stuck through up until this point. Interviewer: I know that some of you are ending your academic careers soon. Do you think The Data Waves will end by the end of this school year? Aditya: I honestly don’t think so. We’re all established as musicians and none of us really plan to stop playing music. That seems to be a constant in all of our lives, regardless of what happens around it, just keeping that. Because we have this group established, we’re already establishing a sound, we’re working actively. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I think we’re all taking steps to be around each other as much as possible. I mean, Shravan will be here for another year as well. I don’t think any of us will stop playing music. I mean, life happens, and you can’t really control what happens, but our intention is to continue with this group because obviously it has a lot of potential. Interviewer: I know all of you are involved with other things on campus, either musically or in some other capacity. Shravan, I know you’re a part of Open Hall, I’ve seen you’ve been part of Good Grief too, and then you just put out your debut album last month. Aditya, I dug around a little bit, and I found the EP release of The People’s Choir back home, not to mention you’re an ABE major, and that takes some guts. Aditya: Yeah, it takes a lot of time. Interviewer: And Sammy, you were an intern at Blinderman. That’s the only thing I could find out about you on the internet. [We all laugh a bit] You keep your social media tight! Sammy: I’m glad you said that, just because that’s always my intention, I’m not really like a “put my whole life out there” type of guy. Interviewer: I get you. How the hell do you balance all this stuff, being part of The Data Waves and making music? Sammy: That’s a good question. At the end of the day, it just becomes life. You’re living and you have your priorities. You have this certain set of goals and you want to achieve them. The things that mean the most to you are the things that you try and chase after. Trying to put those things together is what makes life. I think we all have our goals and our priorities. We just try our best to make everything work out and, in the process, you see some results. Aditya: If you want to do it, whether or not you’ll have the time, you’ll make the time. Shravan: Definitely. It makes it easier that since we’re all just really good friends, the idea of getting together and rehearsing or playing shows together will never feel like any sort of burden. It’s just another opportunity for us to spend time together and do what we love, which is playing music. It just works out, it’s very–very second nature at this point. If we’re getting together you know we’re going to be playing music at some point. Interviewer: You’re all from the Chicagoland area. How do you think your experiences living there helped you become the musicians you are today, before you came into U of I? Aditya: For me, it was going to a lot of concerts. Seeing people I look up to, being close to a big city, it was nice. I would always be running into the city. I didn’t live in the city, I was from the suburbs, but being able to go to the city on a weekend and seeing a band that I really loved or even I band that I didn’t really know, and I just had the enthusiasm to go see music in the city. I definitely did when I was younger, I definitely idolized those musicians, but since then it’s kind of come down to earth as something that’s realistic. Shravan: How does the city sort of reflect our art? Interviewer: Yeah. Shravan: I mean, Chicago has an amazing music scene, and there’s a lot of locations around the US that get known for having really awesome music scenes. LA always comes up, Nashville comes up a lot, New York a lot of times too for punk and rock music. But Chicago has a really thriving Hip-Hop, Neo Soul, and R&B scene that is really on the rise right now. Just being able to witness that firsthand and see all those newer artists start blowing up and getting put on the map, they influence the music that we make. Me and Aditya are from the same suburb and we grew up listening to a lot of the same rock music– Aditya: True. Shravan: But once we became exposed to the Funk, Jazz, Neo-Soul, and Hip-Hop that’s gotten popular recently, our style of playing kind of changed. That’s how we evolved into playing Funk music together because it’s kind of a melding of the smoother R&B, Jazz, Neo-Soul, but also the rock music danceability and kind of upbeatness. Sammy: Yeah, definitely a good point, Chicago being a really good city for music, you know there’s so many really good artists that have come out of Chicago in the past time and to this day. A lot of our influence as well, that Neo-Soul, Jazz, R&B, Blues, whatever it might be, a lot of that, there’s a very strong influence of that in Chicago. Living around Chicago, there’s no way to avoid that– Shravan: Exactly. Sammy: –hearing that kind of sound. Shravan: It’s such a strong part of the culture that you can’t avoid it, really. Sammy: It makes its way into the mainstream in one way or another, and you’re always going to hear it. Us being the band we are–I guess with me, growing up, I just thought–I grew up in Evanston, which is right outside Chicago and the music scene there. What I do want to say is that everybody in my high school was really into music. I think that’s common among high schoolers across the country, but the influence that music has on you when you’re that age, it’s so strong that it can carry on with you when you go into college. I met these guys through that, I met so many people through music. Interviewer: Speaking of music, you put out two EPs of recorded music and a live one on Bandcamp that I saw, both in 2018 for the recorded ones, and I’m sure diehard fans in Champaign-Urbana that know you and have been to your shows and have been coming out are hungry for more. Are you planning on releasing any new recorded music soon? I saw a Facebook post that you were planning on this summer, but I don’t know if that’s still happening. Aditya: So, we had some live recordings that we were planning on putting out as an official release, but I think the plan for that now is to make that a little more low-key. I think we’re still going to release those live recordings, but we’re gonna do it in a more Bandcamp/SoundCloud kind of way. At the same time, we’ll also be heading into the studio and working on some more polished music, original songs that we actually want to push pretty hard. Interviewer: Can we hear some of those at the show tomorrow? [this was The Data Waves’ set at the Rose Bowl Tavern as part of Pygmalion] Aditya: Yeah. We’ll be playing mostly new, unrecorded music. Sammy: If you catch any of our shows these days or in the future, everything’s going to be pretty different from what we’ve been doing in those EPs or anything that we have recorded online, really. Aditya: Yeah. Those EPs were us as a five-piece and now we’re a four-piece. Sammy: Definitely, a lot of changes have happened since then. Aditya: We try to stay on brand though. Sammy: We try. [chuckles] Interviewer: I have a question for you that I didn’t have written down, but I did want to ask. When I first heard you, and I’m sure a lot of people have the same feeling, I kind of felt that the music you were making was unique in a way that I hadn’t heard before, maybe because I hadn’t been exposed to funk or just because you guys are toying with that idea of genre a little bit. In terms of style of playing, in terms of genre, in terms of what you’re trying to accomplish as The Data Waves, do you think there’s anyone else in the music realm that’s doing what you do? I feel that you guys are kind of unique in that sense. Aditya: I think it’s possible that there’s more out there, but I feel like people with the same type of voice that we’re putting out there every time we play, I feel like that voice is either stifled or being held back. People who have these kinds of ideas might be afraid to put it out there because there’s nothing to model it off of. There’s nothing that they can look at and be like “I wanna do that!”. So, in that way, we’re kind of going into the dark a little bit, which is honestly something that I’ve always wanted to do, try something that hasn’t been done but that has appeal to the average listener. They can be like, “This is a voice that I haven’t heard before, and they’re doing it with these instruments in a way that I haven’t heard before either. That’s always been a passion of mine. I don’t know what you guys say about that. Shravan: Touching on the first point you made about some of the stuff seeming fresh, I know that the U-C underground music scene has been based around rock groups doing either emo music or math rock music, sometimes punk rock music. I think that now there’s a newer wave of fusion bands who are somewhere within Funk, R&B, and Jazz, who are opening up the scene to new sonic territory. A lot of the music that we tend to pull from–we do cover songs every now and then as well–and a lot of the material that we pull when we cover stuff is music from the 70’s, like early 70’s or sometimes the late 60’s old funk music and Blues music, like Curtis Mayfield. We play “Move On Up” almost every show that we do, that’s our closing song a lot of the time. A lot of the younger people maybe haven’t been as exposed to older music like that, at least in a modern context. We’re kind of trying to pull from that but also kind of update it and do it in our own unique way, which I guess might be why it’s a little different. Aditya: Almost like a slept-on period of music, maybe a voice that wasn’t put out there as much at the time. Sammy: Going back to what these guys were saying earlier, I think the fact that we bring together all these different musical genres to the table definitely gives us a sound that I don’t think any of us are ready to hear yet, you know what I mean? We come together, we bring all of our artistic creative differences together, and we just want to make something that sounds good that usually is rhythmic. That’s kind of our formula for the most part. The expectation is not that we’re trying to sound like anybody, it’s that we’re trying to sound like ourselves and trying to sound good. It’s hard to think about whether or not there’s anybody out there that sounds like us because if there is, it’s probably one piece of our band that sounds like that, or a particular instrument. But I think our overall sound is particularly unique and all of our songs are pretty unique. From here on out, when we do write songs, we’re always thinking about how we can do things differently, but also still sound good. It’s kind of our goal. It’s never like, “Oh, let’s listen to these guys and these guys and try to do this,” you know? It’s kind of like “Ok, that sounded cool. Let’s work on some stuff let’s see what we can do.” Shravan: I’m gonna have to run. [At this point, we say goodbye to Shravan and continue the interview with just Aditya and Sammy] Interviewer: As a band, or I guess half the band now: I know that you’ve recorded stuff and put it out but you’re also really active live performance people. What do you enjoy more: doing live performance and being there with the audience or putting music out there for internet people to listen to? Aditya: I think they’re both important. They feed into each other, it’s an ongoing cycle in a way. You play live and people want to hear more, and they go home, and they listen to you, and they find that you put something else out, they listen to that, and they come and see you live. You kind of keep recycling that until enough people listen. Sammy: We definitely live in a time where live music and recorded music are kind of–I guess for a long time, 70’s and 80’s, there was probably more of this excitement when you go to a live show than there is today because of how available and how much accessibility there is to streaming and stuff like that. Ditty was saying that they’re both important. As an individual player in the band, playing live is fun. I love connecting with the audience when I play, I love the inspiration that you get from the audience and that moment when they’re reacting to some things in a specific way and feeding off of that. That kind of stuff is really fun. That’s the whole one-time experience thing that you get when you see any really famous musician, that’s how it goes. Interviewer: That’s really all the big questions I had, but I do have a few other things. Of course, people can catch you at Pygmalion tomorrow, but are there any other shows that you want people to know about? Aditya: We’ll be planning some more house shows in the future, so we can more of the closer circle in, at least in the Champaign area. A lot of times, we play these ticketed shows, and they’re great because a lot of newer people come in, but at the same time, it’s hard for our friends to come and see us, people who might not have $10 or $12 to spend on a concert. We’re going to do some of those in the future. It’s not finalized yet, but we’ll announce those on social media when the time comes. Same thing for our releases, both on Bandcamp and on streaming services. Federico: I did have another question for you. I know you guys are performing at Pygmalion and you were at that festival up in Chicago and other venues, but I feel like the DIY scene here isn’t really something you see in a lot of other places. Do you think that’s benefitted you at all as a band, to be able to go to those DIY shows and interact with those college students on a more personal level? Sammy: Most certainly. What I really like about the DIY scene here is that, like Ditty was saying, it’s very community oriented. It’s very friendly. Once you start coming to the shows and start meeting people, anything can happen from there. The idea that you meet somebody at a party that has similar interests to you that, from there, you guys could go and form some kind of musical group or collaborate on something or do something, it’s just open, endless possibilities at that point. I think what’s really nice about the scene here with all the music and everybody playing in the basement is that there’s–well, I’m from Evanston, right? Northwestern is the university that’s based out there. There’s nothing like this going on there. I think another reason for why the DIY scene exists here is because people get kind of bored of being in the middle of central Illinois sometimes. It’s definitely one of the exciting things to do at the university, at least Urbana people probably agree with me on that one too Catch The Data Waves on streaming services, Bandcamp, and at local shows in the CU-area.