Club Kitsch and Electro Pot: The Cataracs are Serious about Being Silly

Even when they're being over the top, Bay area electro duo the Cataracs seem to be taking themselves seriously. Under the monikers Campa and Cyrano, the group's members leverage an astoundingly eclectic mix of hip-hop, electronics, elecrto-acoustic elements, and a tad bit of everything else.

In the wake of last June's Universal Republic release of Songs We Sung In Showers, the band has recently taken the nets (not to mention the floor) by storm with "Club Love." Even more recently, Campa and Cyrano released a remix of the song with hip-hop legend E40. MOG's Sam Houser caught up with the crew in transit to talk diminutive bridges, club love, and the pleasures of smoking pot. He also listened as they narrowly avoided an accident.

Sam Houser: How long have you guys been making music together?

Cyrano: We've been making music together since we were like sophomores in high school. So, yeah. I guess we were about 15 years old... I guess if I did the math, it was 6 years ago.

SH: You guys from the Bay area?

Cyrano: Right we're from the Bay area, and we try to bring that out in our music although it is poppy we try to include a bit of irony, a little bit of humor, a little bit of parody in our stuff.

SH: Yeah it's pretty funny stuff.

Cyrano: Thanks man, I'm going to do the Facebook and poke ya.

SH: (laughs) Yeah there you go. Awesome, I'll consider myself poked...

Cyrano: S**t! What you say man, sorry. We almost got in a car accident.

SH: That's ok.... Be careful. So you're on your way to Las Vegas now are you doing a show there?

Cyrano: We are actually just celebrating. Yeah man doing normal people stuff.

SH: I was listening to your last album; I think it's funny but I was wondering why you covered a Ben Harper track, ["Burn One Down"]?

Cyrano: Oh why did we cover the Ben Harper track? Um, we, we yeah we smoke pot so we thought it was like a cool metaphor... And so when we were on tour actually, with The Pack, the first time we ever went on tour, we were all crammed into this mini van, it's like old passenger van, going to all these different cities doing shows, and I had my guitar with me, we would just play songs like Kumbaya style. Then yeah, one night when everyone was asleep, in the middle of the night, I wrote, I just took that line and I just made a song out of it. It's about smoking pot in this park by my house.

SH: When did you guys start getting out as the Cataracs?

Campa: I don't want to be… I feel like we've always just been constantly…

Cyrano: I mean honestly it's just been… Ever since we made music like everyday. You know even if it was a little bit of getting out, I feel like our music has slowly been rising in popularity as we've been constantly making more music. And it just like everyday it seems to grow a little bigger what we're doing.

Cyrano: There was no… To me there really was no one day.

Sam: What do you use to make your music?

Cyrano: To make our music we use Acid to sequence everything, to record everything, and I… I'm about to go under a tunnel so bear down one second. Can you hear me actually?

SH: Yeah.

Cyrano: Well I guess it's all good. It's a modest tunnel.

SH: It wants to be like bigger tunnels.

Cyrano: So yeah what do.. I use Reason. I use Reason to make beats and I use Acid to sequence everything and do the vocals. And Acid I think really has a lot to do with our sound because everything is on a grid and you can really take vocals and take any sound really and completely f*** with it limitlessly pretty much, and so that comes down to music, like, I don't know if you ever heard the song we have, "This Is All I Do". It's basically me taking David's voice and like pitching it in crazy ways and just sequencing it, just like really chopping it up and really going nuts with it. And then "Club Love" also you hear like, you know, "girls in the house get low, oh oh oh" and all that "dah dah dah", and all, all that little bs you that you could do in Acid.

Sam: Alright, um... I think that's, I think this is pretty good. Is there anything you want to say?

Cyrano: Is there anything that I want to say?

SH: Yeah.

Cyrano: Well, you know... If you got a girl treat her nice. Yeah, she's, you treat her nice. (laughs) and you let her know that you care. And um. And yeah... I just had a big girl discussion with David actually. So, that's what I resolved. I came to that resolution.

SH: That's good.

Cyrano: Yeah, we have a lot of, you know, men sometimes have a lot of power and they're also tolerate with females and it's on us to really do the right thing.