(2011 Oct ?) Wheel Scene publishes 'A Leap of Faith' - interview with White Ring

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(2011 Oct ?) Wheel Scene publishes 'A Leap of Faith' - interview with White Ring

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The magazine was out w/c October 9, 2011, based on https://www.facebook.com/wheelsceneblad ... 0749930549

Wheel Scene Issue 04/October 2011
https://issuu.com/wheelscenerollerbladi ... ber2011pdf
Click to read magazine version
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Online version was published on WS website Nov 21, 2011
https://www.wheelscene.co.uk/2011/11/wh ... interview/
Click to read the online version
White Ring Interview
Nov 21, 2011

Words: David McNamara
Photo: Dani Amour

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A Leap of Faith

White Ring’s Bryan Kurkimillis explains why he moved from New Orleans to New York to form a band with a girl he met on the internet.

Bryan Kurkimillis is either very brave or very stupid. The 26-year old producer moved over 1,300 miles from New Orleans to New York to form a band with Kendra Malia, a singer from Seattle that his only relationship with up until that point had been over the internet. It sounds like the beginning of a gruesome thriller where a young man agrees to go on a date with a pretty girl he met online online only to wake up in a bath full of ice with his organs sold on the black market for a healthy sum of money, but Kurkimillis assures us that there was nothing seedy going on.

“We met on Myspace on our music profiles,” he says. “She had a solo music thing and so did I. I somehow stumbled upon hers and asked if I could do a remix of this song she had and then she suggested that we work on songs together – that was in 2006.”

Back then, Kurkimillis was living in New Orleans and already creating music as White Ring, the moniker he used for his dark, menacing rap beats that contained industrial and gothic references, but it wasn’t going down too well with his friends or the patrons of the local rap club where he used to DJ. “I remember when I would play stuff for my friends in New Orleans and they would not like it at all,” he says. “I would DJ and play some of our stuff and it would clear people out of the room.”

Fortunately for the aspiring producer, he had found a kindred spirit in Malia, who, in addition to having a deep appreciation for rap music, was heavily influenced by trance and industrial electronic music. The duo began sending each other mixtapes featuring their favourite musicians and came to a mutual understanding of the type of electronic music they wanted to create. The next step involved sending rough tracks back and forth online until they came up with a finished product that they were both satisfied with.

“There isn’t a set way but usually it works out with me coming up with something on my computer and emailing the idea over to Kendra for her to put an idea over it and we bounce it back and forth until it feels done.”



After three years of working together like this, Kurkimillis decided it was time to take the next logical step. Life in New Orleans was taking a turn for the worst as a result of heavy partying and substance abuse, and the fact that no one seemed to understand his musical vision didn’t help matters. At the beginning of 2009, he decided to move to New York and set up home in Brooklyn in order to pursue White Ring full time with Malia. While discussing his reasons for leaving New Orleans, it becomes glaringly obvious that the band was not his only motivations. Kurkimillis resolved himself to the fact that he had to get out of the destructive social circles he was moving in if he was ever going to pursue music seriously.

“New Orleans is just a party town. It’s the only place you can drink on the street and 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Bars don’t close so all the people that live there are part of a small scene. A lot of people party really hard out there and it’s cheap, so if you work at a bar you can make your rent money in a night and there are a lot of drugs. It has become a pretty small place after Hurricane Katrina and you would end up knowing everyone, and a lot of the people that I knew sold drugs. It just got messy.”

White Ring’s output is heavily influenced by late nineties rap, especially Cash Money releases, Juvenile, Mystikal and Drama. The duo have been labelled with the tag ‘witch house’ or ‘drag’ and put into the same category as Michigan outfit Salem and San Francisco’s OOoOo, probably because of the creepy imagery and slowed-down, syrup-covered rap beats and gothic aesthetic. Despite being pigeon-holed as ‘witch house’, a genre that was apparently started as joke by Travis Egedy in 2009, Kurkimillis is actually quite pleased that people care enough to label them at all.

“I don’t hate it,” he offers. “I think it’s flattering that there’s a name for something like this in the first place. We know OoOO and Salem, and they were independently doing stuff and then someone caught on to all of us until a momentum built up and they needed a name for it. I am glad there is something there for people who like what we like to get into.”

The duo recently signed to Rocket Girl Records and are set to re-release their debut EP, Black Earth That Made Me, as there are only 250 copies of the original and they are currently selling for a ridiculous price on Ebay. It will act as a prelude to their upcoming debut album, which is set to be released early next year and, according to Kurkimillis, is almost finished.

“We have more than enough songs written and Kendra has got over half of the tracks laid down and I am going to do some vocals as well. We have a month or two left of recording, then a month of production and then we will just be waiting around for the promotion to be done. It’s going to be all over the place and not very cohesive. There will be pop-trance songs and really slow, pretty ethereal songs.”

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