The L.A.-via-Gainesville electro-indie group Hundred Waters will perform at the High Dive on June 27 at 9 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for $10 online, at Hear Again Music and Movies or the High Dive box office and are $12 at the door. Hundred Waters’ tour comes off the tails of the release of “The Moon Rang Like a Bell,” which dropped on May 27 under Skrillex’s record label, OWSLA. The Alligator caught up with electronics/guitarist and former UF architecture major Paul Giese for a brief Q&A.
You guys are returning to Gainesville this month. Will you be revisiting any places where you used to hang out?
We’ll probably grab some La Tienda immediately when we enter the city limits, and then after the show, we’ll probably grab a cup of coffee from Volta.
Speaking of Gainesville, I read in the feature SPIN did on you this week about something called Bro Island, a warehouse space you used to practice and perform in—
Oh my gosh (laughs). That’s so embarrassing.
So can you tell me more about Bro Island?
Basically it’s a little house that’s right behind El Indio, that taco place, and we came in at a time when the subsidized housing that used to be surrounding that area was all being demolished.
It used to be a grocery store and then a dojo and all these things — and it’s still there — I think it’s kind of fratty now. But it was great. It had a giant yard that was fenced in, so we could throw shows there. There were giant rooms and concrete floors, so we could be loud and experiment. We recorded the first album; we threw a lot of shows there. We had a lot of great formative times there. It became a great little piece of the Gainesville music scene at that time.
In what ways has Hundred Waters’ sound changed since those early days and now with “The Moon Rang Like a Bell?”
It’s hard to quantify those subconscious things that make you do something a certain way. With art and music, it’s hard to set a goal and then just have it be achieved and check a box. Ideologies change, so it’s a tough question — the listener might be able to answer best.
Reviewers throw around so many different words to describe Hundred Waters, and it’s not like the other acts on Skrillex’s label. How would you personally describe your sound?
There’s all sorts of fun things people use to describe us, and it’s always interesting for us to read them — things like folktronica, or like, synth-pop.
It’s hard to describe, from our point of view. We just make it with our ways of making it, and it just ends up being what it is. It’s always a tough thing; like when we’re at a gas station on tour and a car pulls up next to us and they’re like, “You’re in a band! What type of music do you make?”
We’ve been having that question posed to us for two years, and everytime it gets asked we all just lock up and chuckle because we don’t know what to say. We usually just say something silly, like Christian dubstep or something.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 6/19/2014 under the headline "‘Bro Island’ and Christian dubstep: Q&A with Hundred Waters"]
