Camp Counselor Carmel Catches Up with Felix of Future Rock

Future Rock is to Summer Camp as milk is to cereal. This will be this band’s tenth year at the festival, and in the past decade Future Rock has grown right alongside our favorite Memorial Day Weekend destination. There is a special element of passion in what this band does that is practically contagious when you see them live. All pretentious bullshit goes out the window and the energy you put into their music is reciprocated by what they throw back at you. I recently got a chance to catch up with bass player Felix Moreno about all things Future Rock including their relationship with Summer Camp, covering Daft Punk, and their new EP scheduled to come out this summer! [caption id="attachment_21957" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Photo by Ashley Marie Downing/AMD Photography[/caption]   Camp Counselor Carmel: Tell me about Future Rock, who is in the band and how did it all start? Felix Moreno: It’s not unlike Daft Punk’s Giorgo Moroder quote “Why don’t I use the synthesizer? Which is the sound of the future?”. I was in music school at Northwestern and Mickey came over with his brand new Nord Synthesizer. It was glorious. We were obsessed and mystified and giddy with overwhelming possibilities. So we a started a band. Bass guitar, synthesizer, and drums. We wanted to fuse the live with the electronic. We found Darren a couple years later when our old drummer moved to New York. Darren completed us; perfect drummer for Future Rock. Now let’s talk influences… What specific music pushed you guys to develop Future Rock as an live electronic band? We were listening to all the Warp Records stuff during our formative years as a band. Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada. We wanted to sound like that but live. We saw what The New Deal, STS9, and Disco Biscuits were doing and then tried to forge our new path. What other sources of inspiration (not just musical) have helped evolve your sound over the years? Airplanes, Alcohol, Animals, Best Friends, Death, Drugs, Family, Joy, Life, Nature, Octopus, Scarface (the movie), Sex, Science, Spandex, Trees, and Water, to list a few, alphabetically.

  There is an undeniable connection between the band and the audience at a Future Rock concert. What is it like being up on stage and watching your audience go wild to your music? It’s religious. That connection, that energy, that feeling is everything to me. Music as an art form has such a tangible advantage being that many get to experience it simultaneously. The spontaneous collective consciousness that music can provide is unparalleled. Tell me about Daft Rock. How did the idea of covering Daft Punk first come about and what made you guys decide to bring it back at Summer Camp 2015? I instantly fell in love with Daft Punk when I saw the “Around the World” video debut on MTV. Thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Many years later their Lollapalooza performance became an everlasting highlight of my music life…So… it was only natural that we would at least try to play their songs. It started with Da Funk and then we decided to do a whole set of it at Camp Bisco VI. While we covered a few songs here and there since then, this is the first time we’ve done a whole set in a long time. We wanted to do something special to commemorate our 10th year at Summer Camp.   After playing the fest for ten years I am sure the list must be long, but what is your favorite part about Summer Camp? What do you most look forward to that keeps you coming back for more? Our first year at Summer Camp we played to like one person on the Camping Stage (before it was really a stage, more like a small dusty area with a tiny tent). It’s On YouTube. Look it up. It’s hilarious. But the next year’s performance at Summer Camp was probably the one that cemented our future as a band. Together with the Thursday preparty Scampers we morphed that dusty campground “stage” into a living, breathing electro throw-down. When we refused to stop playing, the festival engineers shut off the generator for all stage power. The P.A. went silent. But our drummer Darren just kept drumming, and everyone just kept partying! Nothing but Darren’s acoustic drums bangin’ and a few hundred mad crazy festival goers getting DOWN. I will never forget it. After that we started getting the barn latenight preparty set year after year, and it just kept growing. We grew up with this festival. Our histories are now intertwined. There are many people that I met at this fest who are like family. Besides Summer Camp, what else are you looking forward to this summer? SUPER PUMPED to release our next EP. Putting the finishing touches on it now. Should be out late summer. Can not wait to share it with you all!!!]]>