Bankai is a awesomely creative glitch/nerdcore electro producer from Melbourne, Australia. His first release, an EP titled “Quarter Circle Punch”, was very successful & popular among the music blogs, private torrent trackers and independent music sites. Just half a year later, Bankai is out with his second energy-loaded album “Teen Slut Pimp Strut”. Also just a half a year after releasing his first recording, Bankai is hitting the road soon.
His fans are organizing and funding a ‘crowd sourced’ tour in Canada slated for February 2010 – an excellent idea, may I add!
Bankai – PARTY HARDER by Bankai
One of the things I completely and absolutely love about Bankai is the fact that he is entirely open sourced – meaning – he releases all his music (stems, mp3s & wavs) and his artwork under Creative Commons letting people enjoy and build up on his work. Just the fact that he lets people legally take a stab at his music created a load of excellent remixed – all of course available for download on his website.
Here’s an excerpt from our interview we did with Will a while ago:
What is your music background?
I played violin as a kid, I was raised on balkan / macedonian folk music and stuff. I taught myself guitar in my teens, got vocal lessons later on – I played in a punk band for about a decade. I only started doing electro about 9 months ago, so I still tend to scream and rant a lot on stage. It feels weird twiddling knobs and sliders.
Who are your musical and non-musical influences?
Devin Townsend was a big deal to me and my friends growing up. Big fat epic production, manic songwriting. Of course there’s Oizo and SebastiAn and whatnot, but a guy called Joe Forrester I used to play with – astoundingly talented dude – has probably been an even bigger inspiration over the years.
I wrote a big chunk of QSP in a wee little town called ‘Savonlinna’, in Finland. Really inspiring place. It’s like someone reached into reality and turned down the hue, all black and white and dark green, with 5 hours of sunlight a day and -30 temp and stuff. I spent a lot of time in this bar called ‘Happytime’. Hah!
Do you compose your own songs from scratch?
Most of it starts on the piano or guitar, or I go “laa laa” into my phone when I’m not at home. I tend to start things too late at night and mix them together the next day at the cafe down the road, or the pub. I tend to finish remixes the day I start them, but originals take a lot of obsessive tweaking. I have trouble keeping things simple, the last step tends to be pulling out all the unnecessary extra synths and samples so it’s listenable again.
Now, what’s next for Bankai? He’s says, “I’m in the process of modding some Wii bits and fixing up a pedal thingy I made from a broken usb keyboard, ’tis fun… but way cooler is this group of people over in Vancouver (from the ‘Electro Freaks’ group from T61) who are trying to do a sort of crowd-sourcedBankai minitour, where they share the costs and effort over a bunch of people, making merch and buying plane tickets and all. If it actually works out it’ll be quite the feat…” If anything, his EP is already quite the feat.
If you are a fan of noise loaded electronic music – make sure to download this one and if you love it, support your artists – get some awesomely designed gear.
Related Links:
Bankai on FM
Bankai on Facebook
Bankai on Myspace
Bankai on Last FM
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and is available as a free album download (.torrent or .zip) from Bankai’s website.