analogues
we cannot be sure what we are listening forDog & Panther ▶ is not music
“Skin Cloud”
More Dog & Panther on Bandcamp
Or at least, Dog & Panther is not just music. Each of the guys just integrates his other creative expertise into the medium of music. After all, even the “instrumentation” of Dog & Panther thrives on taking things out of their context, and the band works best when not seen as a band. So when you hear Dog & Panther, you are hearing something from a graphic designer (Ben Vrazo), a filmmaker (Ian Sigmon) and an engineer (John Katona), all of whom have even more creative pursuits on the side, and you are hearing every frame and brushstroke and intricate system that has become it.
Dog & Panther ▶ turning three guys in a home studio into a seventeen-person staged orchestra
“Homebody”
“On My Friends”
Dog & Panther perform “On My Friends,” video posted by Matthew Tait
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The fact that anyone’s listening to Dog & Panther at all is a true symbol of the Internet age. Dog & Panther exist almost entirely online. They don’t tour. They don’t play any shows–except for one, which was basically The Show to represent the What Happened album. It was the one show to celebrate all the life that led to the album, all the friends it made along the way, and all of What Happened‘s adventures to come.
So you can think of that January show at Pontiac’s Crofoot as a birthday party or a wedding, a sort of culmination presenting the electronica group from Bandcamp before an audience IRL. They gathered everyone they could to recreate the album’s intricate and unique parts as closely as possible, even if it meant playing three drummers at a time. They invited over a dozen relatives, friends and strangers to join them onstage with saxophones and trombones and buckets. It was a mission. It was a risk. It was a celebration.
Dog & Panther share why the live show is important and how they met the people involved:
Dog & Panther ▶ pens, bottles, printers and other sounds of sophisticated symphony
“Love Make”
“Hollywood”
“Skin Cloud”
More Dog & Panther on Bandcamp
We halt the interview. There’s an ominous throbbing noise coming out of the phone. I can’t do anything about it. If I change my volume dials or move my computer, it could ruin everything. So I sit still, waiting for the OK.
It’s not a weird time bomb or anything. There were no explosives planted in John Katona’s room. It’s just that for some reason our call was producing a weird sound from the phone that the band was dying to capture.
I wondered whether this would end up in the next Dog & Panther song (and if I’d make it in the credits). In the “Making ‘Giant Hands’” video they knock on car parts and door frames searching for the right sound to play with.
Even in Ian Sigmon and John’s early days working on other video and art projects together, one of the first videos they worked on was of a man banging on walls and yelling. Ian asked John to cut up the audio from the footage and make beats out of his breathing and beating and screaming.
“Once you become removed from the context of what that sound is, it can kind of become anything that you want,” Ian says. “That’s been an interesting goal: taking things out of the environment and putting them into a different one to see if it works together with a guitar, with a piano, whatever.”
Read about the Kleenex box, water bottle and printer that helped make three Dog & Panther songs
Dog & Panther ▶ is not a band
“Hurry Hurry”
“The Hungry”
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Dog & Panther avoids the word “band.” They give me the overview of their history but slickly skirt around with words like “project” or “group.”
“We just don’t like playing shows, really, and we’re not pursuing labels, and we just don’t want any of that band drama,” Ben Vrazo says. “We have enough other stuff going on in our lives, relationships and things that are important to us.”
The guys tell me they mostly use the music as an excuse to hang out. So even though the whole time I’m staring at the waves of my computer’s recording software and have only a fading concept of my subjects’ faces, being on this phone call seems a little more intimate/invasive (optimism/pessimism) than a lot of my interviews in coffee shops and practice spaces have been. I am emanating from John’s house phone, encroaching on a few friends’ bonding time.
Ian Sigmon and John had been playing guitar together on and off since the ninth grade. When a car accident left John unable to play guitar anymore, he started making more electronic music, and Ian asked John to make some music for films he was working on. They began to collect their film and art projects online on a website called The Dog and the Panther. One of those projects was an early version of the song “The Hungry,” which Ian played for Ben, whom he met at work. Ben loved the music but asked if he could try different lyrics and vocals on it.
“The actual group or project existed for, like, five years before the record ever came out,” Ian says. “But then Ben got involved the last two years of it, so that’s what actually was something.”
“People called it a band, like, three months after the record came out,” John says.
Dog & Panther has never been about the business side for the three, and the extent of their marketing team consists of a self-maintained Facebook page.
“We don’t really talk about it,” Ben says. “I’ve actually had old friends come up and try to tell me about Dog & Panther.”
It has always been just some fun art project, the product of their relationships, but soon enough it became something they just had to share.
“We don’t necessarily want to pick up chicks with it or do shows or that kind of thing, or try to get people to like us,” John Katona adds. “We just like making the music. And then once we had it we were like, ‘Oh, I really want people to hear this. I’m proud of it.’”
read more about the car accident that helped make Dog & Panther an electronic project
Dog & Panther ▶ Introductions
“Giant Hands” (free download)
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I listened to Dog & Panther for the first time one Saturday and e-mailed to request an interview the next day*. They’re the first band I’m featuring on analogues without having a prior relationship with them**, and at the time I wasn’t even sure how much I liked them yet. But the lyrics to “Giant Hands” fit too well with what I was thinking about on Saturday, and when I heard “Hurry Hurry” on Sunday it was as if Dog & Panther had been chiming in on the morning’s conversations.
They asked me at the end of our interview how I’d heard of them in the first place. A simple question, but it hit me again that sharing my own story throughout this writing process isn’t wholly self-indulgent.
“we won’t go and blow it with simple human fears” (“Hurry Hurry”)
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Kithkin ▶ musical versions of ourselves
“Karma and Luck” (free download)
All up to fate now / All up to fate, fate now / Karma and luck now
When I talked to Ian McCutcheon (drums/vocals), he often brought up this idea of “musical entities.” Precisely speaking, he defines this term as “a person who only exists to and from music.”
“When we’re playing, I want to separate us from the rest of our lives and be kind of the musical versions of ourselves,” Ian said, “not just be the people who have lives, but just be all music for that half an hour or whatever.”
He cites his favorite band Man Man as an example, describing their over-the-top live shows. The band wears all-white costume, face paint and the glow of black lights.
“And they never talk to the audience the whole time. They just play music all the way through,” he said. “It’s like you’re not watching people; you’re watching these musical entities. I can’t imagine them existing in real life and going to the grocery store and buying eggs. I can only imagine them playing music.“
So many other artists and audiophiles focus on authenticity, on honest songwriting and heartfelt, raw performance. People love onstage banter and stories because it reminds them that the person onstage who’s pouring his heart out or going crazy is just like us. But Ian has no shame in admitting it’s okay to be a little inauthentic.
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Kithkin ▶ and sometimes, we just don’t know
“Broken Submarines” (free download)
Pressure, pressure building up in the hull / dangerous business stepping outside your home
“I’m a really complex person when it comes to emotions,” Alexander Barr (guitar/vocals/drums) admits. “A lot of people listen, but they don’t know anything about me. Girls I’ve dated have said, ‘I’ve dated you for a year and I care about you and want to be with you, but I don’t know anything about you.’ They know Alex is this and this and this and he’s a fun dude and blah blah blah, but I’ve always been like an enigma to people. I’m not doing it on purpose.”
This, Alexander eventually explains, is part of why he plays music–it’s his journaling, how he confronts his emotions, how he presents who he is to other people.
But I think if you ask any musician to tell you why he loves music and how he fell in love with it, he will not tell you those simple explanations outright. He will first tell you the story of how he met music, and then he will tell you how he really got to know music, and then he will tell you about his and music’s first kiss.
