“To me, Katrine is about chasing after someone, no matter the cost. Knowing what you know will guide you to them and change their mind. ” – @MindOverTimeNYC

Listen to the Interview-
Episode #270 : A.V.A Live Radio Behind The Music with Jacqueline Jax
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avaliveradio/2015/10/29/episode-270-ava-live-radio-behind-the-music-with-jacqueline-jax

 

GETTING TO KNOW MIND OVER TIME
by Jacqueline Jax host of A.V.A Live Radio
Person interviewing: Wes Estrella

Music business…
I feel strange about it, its in a very weird place right now. There isn’t a definitive system in place at the current moment and everything feels like its free falling. It’s sort of like an every man for themselves type of situation. There isn’t a lot of support unless your Beyonce or Taylor Swift or signed to a label that’s pushing you all the time. Some systems have worked for some acts and it’s great to see them succeed. For independent and upcoming artist, it’s very DIY, and that becomes a balancing act when you have to pay rent and bills but, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

What pros and cons have you experienced…
The successes feel like great victories and the bad moments can feel like your world is coming to an end but, you have to keep marching on and have a short memory to live another day.

How are you over coming the hurdles and pitfalls…
By staying together as a band and working hard towards our goal. If we stay focused and look forward then we won’t be shaken by what’s below us.

Social media…
I love that everyone is involved and can communicate with each other. It’s fun to read peoples comments. Scheduling has been our number one challenge. Its hard to try to get five full time working adults in a room multiple times a week at the same time. Balancing every day life is also hard to do when you are looking to make your dreams come true.

Singles vs an album…
I’m whole heartily into releasing albums because I love sitting down and really delving into the songs on a record and trying to get an idea of where the musicians were in their head space at the time. A lot of my favorite records where always concept albums. They are like time stamps of where the musicians were at the time and always bring you back there when you listen to it. When you release just a single, I feel like you loose something, you loose a sort of substance that you find on a record. Everyone likes different things in music and I feel like you can find that variety more on a record than just releasing a single. There’s something much more artistic and romantic about putting together an album and I find that much more interesting.

We haven’t released just singles and we feel that we can do a lot more with our limited time by releasing records instead. It gives us content to work with when its comes to releasing videos and so forth. We are currently working on this for this record. It may take more time but, in the end it will definitely be worth it.

I feel like there is definitely too much of an emphasis on being current and trendy…
and not enough on just being yourself and doing what you want to do. A lot of people, I feel are just hearing music but not really listening to it. There’s a lot of music that’s not very good out there because the artist are not taking their time to fully develop their songs and instead or just writing and releasing things to keep themselves current or in the light. We are taking our time to develop our songs and put them out there how we want them to sound. I believe quality is much better than quantity.

My definition of success is…
setting a task for yourself and going out of your way no matter the obstacle to complete it. A few years ago, Abslan and I started this band together and set out to write and record some songs and put it on a full length and through our hard work, blood, sweat and tears did just that. We released our full length and it was a great success for us personally because we achieved something that we were working very hard at doing for a couple of years. When we went out to play our first show, we didn’t know what to expect and we came on staged to a sold out show. There were so many people there in support that some were standing around my bass cabinet and right next to my pedal board and some were standing on the staircase of the entrance. It was a fun night and another great success.

My overall goal for my life & career is…
to do everything that I want to do on my own terms and not let anyone else dictate my life and career. I’m a hard working, driven person that completes what they set out to accomplish and hope that this will help me get to wherever I choose to go in life. I know this sounds pretty serious but, I love to have a lot of laughs along the way as well. Laughter is a great part of life.

3 Ways that I challenge myself and how each one moves me forward towards my goal.

1) Find a passion in everything that I do

2) Work more efficiently to get things done

3) Try to find humor in everything and enjoy the ride

According to my mother…
I was always emotionally affected by any music that was being played when I was growing up. I just gravitated towards it. As soon as I had the opportunity to play an instrument, I took it. She bought me, my first guitar and the rest was history.

Katrine…
To me, Katrine is about chasing after someone, no matter the cost. Knowing what you know will guide you to them and change their mind. To Abslan, its more about the character that is singing rather than Katrine herself, He’s become obsessed over her. It’s one of those “if I can’t have you, no one will” type of stories. That’s the great thing about music though, it can have many different meanings.

Initially the demo for the song was written and recorded by our singer Abslan, while he house sat at my apartment. We shelved it and then revised it months later by added parts and lyrics and the song ended up on our current album “Ghosts”

Some of us in the band are massive Battlestar Galactica fans and have always had running inside jokes about show and its characters. The name Katrine and story came from one of its secondary characters. Louanne Katraine was a most unsavory Viper Pilot, who uses a false identity to serve in the fleet. she comes across an old business partner who threatens to expose her. Abslan decided to exaggerate the story a bit in his dramatization.

A tragic thing did happen in the process of developing this song. We had a massive computer crash after it was recorded that erased all of our session files. We didn’t know how the original sounded so we reconstructed it as a band and added extra parts and verses. The version you hear on the record is what we did as a full band. The original was a much dancier tune. The way he tells it, the chorus was written first. The music was set and he needed a story to tell in order to write the rest of the track. He just had finished watching that specific episode so he went with it and told the story from his perspective. The back story to Katrine is in the rest of the album. According to Abslan, There’s an order to songs in Ghosts that tell a story.

What’s great and special about it and how it was meant to be heard and understood.

The Album…
Our music is very layered and full of ambiance, when listened to on headphones you can catch all of the nuances in the instruments and synths. There’s a lot hidden things in our music, it can rewards those who listen closely. We like to intertwine our songs and their themes, it is very possible for things to re occur in different songs on different instruments kind of a motif, if you will. We wrote “Ghosts” as a complete idea. All of the songs come together as one to tell a complete story from start to finish.

To us “Ghosts” is a very important record because it was the first time that We came together and wrote all of the songs in a room as a band. All of the songs on this EP were done by us jamming together in a room for a 3 month period. The first record was written primarily by Abslan and I, in my bedroom and then spruced up by the band but, this time it was different. When We wrote everything, there was a certain magic in the air. It was a very special time. The outcome was a record that we are really proud of and displays a great growth within the band. We are planing to keep marketing it by performing live, getting radio play and filming a few music videos for the record while we go to work on our next effort in November for the spring.

New York City…
We come from all different parts of New York City, The scene is very all over the place. If there is something that you are into, you can definitely find it here.

This is a hard one, usually everyone is in Pianos, Mercury Lounge, Arlene’s Grocery, Terminal 5, Webster Hall, and Bowery Ballroom.

As a band, we have the habit of going to play pool and grab drinks after rehearsals. We like to joke around and have a lot of fun together.

I would love to have 5 minutes alone with…
actually two people. David Bowie and Trent Reznor – They are both very driven people with fantastic careers to show for it. I would love to pick their brains and get ideas of how to go about doing things. I’ve admired both of them for so long so it would be great to have that opportunity. I would love to talk to Trent about the use of technology in music and Bowie for his ability to adapt to any given situation artistically. Those are very important things to me in art and music.

I am most afraid of…
failing because we didn’t try hard enough.

Bio –
Mind Over Time is an American Atmospheric/Space Indie rock band from New York City. The bands sound can be defined by soaring guitar delays, haunting ambient synths, groovy melodic bass lines, a tight snare heavy drum mix and passionate lead vocals.