Bumping to drums and bass with Terminal Minded

For the last three years, local drum and bass collective Terminal Minded has been recording music and playing at house parties and clubs throughout Bloomington. Their next local live appearance will be March 1 at Space 101. Here, TM member Matt Weldon talks about the nature of their live show, being mistaken for DJs and the state of the electronic music scene in Bloomington. \nQ: Can you say something about this show coming up at Space 101 on March 1?\nA: The show is called "The Syndicate Strikes Back." It's an electronic music event featuring 23 different DJs and artists in two rooms, with professional live video, plus automated lasers and a massive sound system. Rob F of Renegade Hardware fame will be performing, as well as Wrisk and MC Bubbla (of GAIN recordings), who are flying out from London to make their first-ever U.S. appearance, right here in Bloomington. Anyone in Bloomington who is remotely interested in dance music or electronic music culture needs to be at this show, period.\nQ: What role does the Bloomington Bass Syndicate play locally?\nA: The Bloomington Bass Syndicate is basically the umbrella group that most of the significant local promoters and DJs are using to network and plan shows. Essentially, the idea is that our scene is simply too small for competition between crews, but that there's room for everybody if we help each other out and avoid stepping on each other's toes. It seems to have worked fairly well so far. We have a Yahoo! threaded discussion group online, which is pretty active, and we occasionally all get together to put on these larger events -- events that wouldn't really be possible in Bloomington without a collective effort. \nIn a more subtle way, I think the BBS is attempting to legitimize electronic music as an art form and cultural force in Bloomington. With all the bad press, rhetoric and misinformation going around regarding this subculture these days, people easily lose sight of what 99.999 percent of us are in it for -- the music. It sounds like a cliché, but it's not. Plain and simple, we're all doing this because we feel a connection with how this music and culture affects us emotionally. And we simply want to share that with as many people as possible.\nQ: You said that you started Terminal Minded with an interest in "nurturing a budding local scene." What is the state of the electronic music scene in Bloomington right now?\nA: I suppose that depends on whom you ask. My feeling is that the scene is starting to gel, but it's not necessarily growing per se (a lot of people would disagree with me on that). We are definitely better organized than we were even a few months ago, to the point where we can do shows with internationally known artists as headliners. But, as far as I can tell, it's still restricted to a fairly small but devoted group of people. Most of the audience is still under 21, so you're not seeing much turnout at bars, etc. It's still mostly house parties, with the occasional bigger show.\nQ: What's your live show like? Do you play only your own stuff or is it more like a DJ mix set? Do you do your own visuals?\nA: We play only our own stuff. Period. Some tracks are more "performance-oriented" than others, but it's all ours and it's all being done live.\nWe had a running joke going on for a while; early on, we'd have people come up to us after our set at a house party or something and compliment us on the records we were supposedly playing. Sometimes it was funny, but other times it was kind of obnoxious. I mean, we've got all these crazy blinking boxes with wires hanging out of them, and we're making mistakes that you're not going to hear in a DJ set, and still people can't figure it out. So we went out and printed a bunch of T-shirts with the words "We are not DJs" printed on the front and started wearing them at our shows and giving them away. Some people may not have gotten the joke, but it was all in good fun. Now when somebody comes up and makes a similar comment, I try to be a lot more patient and explain it to them. Admittedly, it's not the sort of thing you see every day.\nKyle Birkemeier (a.k.a. Dr. Mindbender) does all of the visuals live on one or two Macintosh computers and a top-of-the-line video projector; some of it is stuff he did from scratch and some of it is "sampled" from various sources and mixed/mangled -- film excerpts, digital video bits etc. He's essentially doing the video equivalent of what we do musically, so it complements us well, especially since what we do on stage is not always especially exciting to watch. Plus he's damn good at it.\nQ: Is this just a hobby for you guys, or do you hope to eventually work in the sphere of electronic music as a career? Do you hope to take Terminal Minded beyond Bloomington?\nA: Well, after pouring thousands of dollars and hours into this enterprise, we can't really call it a hobby anymore. I'd like to say that we definitely have goals beyond the scope of the Bloomington scene. We're already venturing out of town to do shows -- we just played in Kalamazoo, Mich. on Feb. 15, and we're performing in Lafayette (Ind.) on March 2 -- and a tour is probably inevitable at this point. Kyle's networking skills have gotten us some label attention as well, so we're currently putting together a handful of DJ-friendly tracks that will hopefully see a vinyl release. Unfortunately, Bloomington is too small of a town to really support us in a financial sense. We love our friends and fans that come to see us, and this will continue to be our base of operations for the foreseeable future, but, yeah, at some point you've got to get the word out to as many places as possible, and that means putting out records and touring.