Bringing a Little Madness - and Lots of Teamwork - into the Mix
An Interview with Koko Dozo
By Mark Kirby

Musical groups made up of great performers - those used to working alone or being the star - can sometimes be less than the sum of their parts, as egos clash and the group becomes like a bad basketball team, where everyone wants to score. Koko Dozo, however, is a dream team. Each member - Polarity/1, Rubio and Amy Douglas - is an equal contributor, with the entire group utilizing each member's skills and talents. Here, there are no egos clashing. On the group's debut 'Illegal Space Aliens', Koko Dozo shows that individual and group expression can meld into one.

[Mark Kirby] What incident ignited your passion to get into music?

[Polarity /1] When I was in high school I discovered Brazilian music, Appalachian folk, Eric Dolphy, 16th century Japanese court music, Bob Dylan and Mahavishnu Orchestra. My thing with Dylan got me to buy a guitar so I could express my rage over the inconveniences of life on earth.

[Amy Douglas] If I had to narrow it down, I'd say playing Stevie Wonder's "Songs in the Key of Life," seeing Chaka Khan on Soul Train, seeing Bowie everywhere on TV, hearing all the Beatles' albums, and most important, hearing Led Zeppelin.

[Mark Kirby] Describe your musical backgrounds.

[Polarity /1] I spent a semester at Berklee School of Music in Boston, which was a weird move, being that I couldn't functionally read music and my brain isn't wired for formal learning. But I could write notation a little bit and tried to prove that I was Berklee-worthy by hot-dogging the homework projects - like scoring an arrangement of Monk's "Epistrophy in 7/4,” which nobody could play.

[Mark Kirby] How did the three of you meet and get together?

[Amy Douglas] I had a show called "Red Hot Mama," which was a rock vaudeville show, and I had hired Rubio as the keyboardist. When the show folded, he introduced me to Polar, the two of them having done a project called Audioplasm. We got together on a super hot summer day in 2007 and realized we had a great capacity to make incredible music based on our collective musical passions and influences, so we really had quite a stewpot brewin' by the time we started to write songs.

[Mark Kirby] How did you arrive at the name Koko Dozo?

[Amy Douglas] My ex-boyfriend had mentioned wanting to do an avant-garde project and he threw out Koko Dozo as a trial name. He did so little for me while we were together, [so] at least he gave the band a great name.

[Mark Kirby] What is the musical concept of the band?

[Amy Douglas] It's a really huge one. First and foremost it's to virtually force people to have to really listen to what we do, and to help audiences that have been pandered to and been reduced to some sort of lowest common denominator grow some brain cells back. We have some deep issues we're struggling with and we do address them in our songs, ranging from our distrust of our government, to the polarization of culture in our home of New York City and a whole bunch of other things. Our musical concept is to shrink the globe as well; the internet has made the world a smaller place and we wanted to find a way to fuse cultures, languages, styles and influences together in a way that reeks of New York City life, but will appeal to an audience that is truly global.

[Polarity /1] Conventional wisdom dictates that our way of working will guarantee that we'll never find an audience. But we know that's bullshit. We're reaching young electro heads, world-beaters, dance-clubbers, boomers, electronica geeks, and po-po-pomo gonzoid hairy-backed noiz gimps living in the basement of the basement on diets of sticky buns and ***** butter and toe jam sandwiches. The parents and the kiddies like us too. And we write in different languages and have this whole bargain-basement-space vibe that makes things really fun.

[Mark Kirby] What is the story behind the "Sun Ra-esque dress” and alien mythology?

[Polarity /1] Here's the story: we came from outer space and landed on Earth to exploit its resources - and for other reasons that we'd rather not discuss. We're from the low-rent part of the universe where you wear whatever is lying around in the alley on garbage pickup day. That, coincidentally, is the same galaxy where Sun Ra came from.

[Amy Douglas] {Laughter} Well...the word "alien" permeates much of what we do and we like to riff on the term. Alien, as we mean it internally, is the feeling of not being comfortable in one's skin, feeling out of synch with the world around you, feeling like the constant outsider. And we decided to really play with the word, and we decided that a space age "alien" theme would suit us wackos pretty well!

[Rubio] We really wanted to put the fun and craziness back in music. Too many projects take themselves too seriously these days, which is BEYOND ironic.

[Polarity /1] Our shows are fun for us, and I suppose audiences love to watch grown people making funny noises up there and bouncing around like homeless space mutants. Amy's wigs and Rubio's Viking helmet are worth the price of admission. And gazing at my psychedelic death-ray yarmulke is a life-affirming way to blow off shabbos.

Read the complete interview at MusicDish Industry e-Journal

WELCOME TO PLANET KOKO DOZO
MySpace.com - KOKO DOZO - NEW YORK, New York - Electronica / Alternative / Funk - www.myspace.com/kokodozo