The description of their band on social media simply says “hip-hop and guitars” which is an immediately intriguing. This brand new group will play their first show this Friday, yet they sound like they’ve been in the game for years. The sound is fresh.
Rock Island: Who are Twenty Dollar Pyramids? How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard of you?
Twenty Dollar Pyramids: The three main, active writing members are Tim Rypien, John Eddy and James Reid. Live, we will have two of our friends – Nathan Cluett and Lennie Earle – helping us bring our sound to life.
We’ve always had a difficult time describing our music to people… in our best description, we play band music soaked with a 90's hip-hop influence, sprinkled with synths.
RI: Your first show is this Friday, June 17th. Your music sounds very refined for a brand new band. Have you been involved in other projects before this?
TDP: Tim, John and James have known each other for around 4 years (though Tim and John have been jamming for 7 years). We met randomly and since then we’ve become good friends who share a passion for music. While we’ve all been involved in various smaller projects/bands throughout the years, this is our first serious project.
RI: Let’s talk instrumentation. What will your set up be for your first live performance?
TDP:
James – Lead vocals, guitar
John – Guitar, backing vocals
Tim – Drums, backing vocals
Nathan – Bass, percussion
Lennie – Backing vocals, synths, keys
RI: The 5 tracks on your sound cloud. Are they just demos? When will we see a debut album from Twenty Dollar Pyramids?
TDP: Those five tracks are demos we’ve composed over the past 10 months or so, via a very interesting/unique process. James has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past 2 years, so we’ve been doing a long-distance type thing.
We have a lot more tracks in the works – also demos – but we hope to put together our first EP in the near future.
Right now, an album is sort of out of sight; mostly due to lack of resources to get it to sound the way we want. Since we are about to play our first show, and we haven’t had much exposure yet, we don’t want to jump the gun – but it goes without saying that it is our dream to put together a professionally mixed and mastered album. Hopefully sooner than later!
As of now, we are focused on writing and refining our live show/sound – due to our unique situation.
RI: This type of Electro-Pop meets Alternative Hip-Hop genre is a pretty new thing. Was there a conscious decision to go down this path or is it something that just happened on its own?
TDP: Since James doesn’t live here, we’ve focused almost the entirety of our energy on writing songs. The resulting sound just sort of happened because of our eclectic taste in music. We’re all huge hip-hop fans, but find our roots in band-oriented music. The electronic side of things comes from Tim and John’s past experimenting with/producing electronic music. It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision, it just sort of happened organically.
