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Interview – SC Mira

By on May 9, 2018

Photo Credit: Travis Ross

We sat down with Winnipeg based band, SC Mira, who are in town playing a show at the Horseshoe Tavern on May 9th for Canadian Music Week. Find more info about the show HERE. Often described as “pioneers in an age of sameness, when everyone is claiming to be different,” we learned about their eclectic music taste, their parallel EP’s, and how they’ve grown together as a band.

Can you introduce yourselves to our readers?

S: Hi I’m Sadye, I’m in SC Mira. I’m a singer and I play the rhythm guitar. I’m one of the founding members of the band.

C: I’m Caro, I play keyboard and sing backup vocals with the band.

So, I like that you describe yourselves as “five painfully unique, flawed individuals” and you seem to describe yourself by your differences. Do you mind talking about what makes you all different and how you bring that together to become something entirely unique as a band?

S: I think when the band first started it was a lot more folky. As Caro joined in 2015, we sort of moved more in a synthy direction. As individuals, my roots are in folk writing and then our drummer for instance has been in a lot of punk bands. Our bassist loves hip hop and rap, so we all kind of have different musical tastes.

C: Very different.

S: It kind of does creep out in our music, which is interesting. That’s kind of what makes it a little hard to pinpoint.

C: We’re all bringing different things to the table for sure and I think we all had music in our lives in different ways. Some of our parents put us in lessons, and other people are self taught, which is really cool. I think that also influences the way we approach music. When we’re trying to figure out a chord or something it’s not necessarily what would make sense in the theoretical sense, it’s what would sound good even if it’s weird. We go by gut feelings a lot when we write.

On that topic, I’ve noticed that a lot of your music and a lot of your songs have very different sounds, but are still really consistent, so I’m just wondering where you get your influences from and how that grows over time.

S: As different as all of our tastes are, there are some core bands that we all enjoy as a group that we play on repeat in the tour van. Unknown Mortal Orchestra is a big one. Grimes is kind of a big one. As of recent, Charlie XCX has been on repeat in the tour band. I think getting excited about the same kind of bands at the same time kind of influences what we’re writing in that time and that creeps out in the music. Not to say that we sound like any of those bands, but you hear bits and pieces of those influences, and I think that kind of shapes the sound. A new album comes out by one of those bands and we all get excited about it together, we study it together like “what do we like about it,” “that’s a cool tone.”

C: Tones are so important. We will spend a lot of time going through the lexicon of tones on all the keyboards – the various keyboards we have in this band – figuring out what the perfect tone is. I feel like a lot of it is about sounds and noises, too. We’re very detail oriented.

S: Sometimes if things are coming out too nice, it’s like okay let’s take a minute.

C: Dirty it up! How can we dirty this up!

S: Yeah so we lean toward the same things even though we have eclectic tastes.

Tell us a little about Keep Crawling / Drug Warm Coma.

C: The last single of Drug Warm Coma just came out, “Your Hair.” That’s exciting because it’s one of our more edgier songs and it’s kind of hinting toward the direction we’re moving as a band.

S: It’s definitely the heaviest of the songs we put out.

C: We’ve also been putting out little animation videos with each one. That’s progressed through the two EP’s, working with a local artist called Matea Radic and her partner, Bill Acheson. That has been very cool. With each song that we’ve been putting out, the three from Keep Crawling and the three from Drug Warm Coma, we’re very into the songs having an identity – individually, but also as a body of work. They’ve been split into the light EP and then the dark EP, which was a conceptual decision on our part.

I’m glad you touched on why you chose to split the EP’s. I was curious about that.

S: That kind of goes back to what I was saying about how we write in waves, too. The light songs were written in the same chunk of time, and the heavier ones we flushed out together, so when it came down to putting them together in some way to release them it was an obvious split between the six songs instead of mixing them up. Because we were going to release them as singles it made sense to release them as the light and the dark.

For sure. What’s the most exciting part about being in Canadian Music Week?

S: I think it’s just fun to be out here when you know so many bands are out here for the same reason. You know you’ll run into people you know and meet new people.

My last question is a fun one that I like to ask everyone I interview. If you had to get a tattoo that was influenced by your music or your sound, what it be?

C: Oh my god! You’re on the same wavelength as our band.

S: We may be doing that this week.

C: Literally. We were like “we should get a band tattoo,” because this tour has been so monumental for us I think.

S: Okay, but we can’t decide. That’s why we haven’t gotten one yet.

C: Well each single has like single art, and we’re wondering which one would look really cool. They’re all really cool.

S: Actually, the single art for “Breaking My Skin” is actually a tattoo that I have, so we’re kind of like oh, should we get a different one then? But yeah, we can’t really decide. We have a logo, so maybe, but then we have to get it somewhere that you can’t really see it because it’s sort of like self-advertising all the time. We’re gonna sleep on it.

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