Meet the indie Bandier student artist who rose from SoundCloud

Meet the indie Bandier student artist who rose from SoundCloud

Q&A: The self-taught musician talks his latest indie-pop-alternative single "Tease."
Published: December 9, 2018

SU freshman and Bandier major Aidan Ochre latest single 'Tease' has over 22,390 streams on Spotify.

 

The NewsHouse: When did you first start recording music?

Aidan Ochre: My junior year of high school. I’d been playing music a little while before then. I took a couple guitar lessons but then I decided to just be self-taught, basically because I didn’t like taking lessons and they were kind of expensive, so I was like, ā€˜I’m just going to figure it out myself.’

So I would play covers of songs and sing and play guitar. Then one year my parents got me a microphone and an interface to plug my guitar into my computer. I didn’t touch it for a while, but then one day I just decided to set up a studio in my basement basically which is just my computer and my amp and my microphone and I started making some songs.

 

The N.H: What made you want to start recording music?

A.O: It always seemed like something I could do but I just never knew where to start. And then I got really into the band The Internet and their guitarist, Steve Lacy. I got into his solo work, and then after doing some research I found out that he recorded everything on his iPhone using Garage Band. Then I thought, ā€˜Oh, I have Garage Band, so I guess I can do this.’

 

The N.H: What drew you to the Bandier program?

A.O: I didn’t know what I wanted to go to college for and then I started to make music and it started to be something I really enjoyed doing. And I was like, ā€˜Ok, I’m clearly very passionate about this,’ and music’s always been kind of been a part of my life so I might as well find a way to study it without being a musician necessarily. Because I was never classically trained or anything, I wasn’t trying to go to music school. So I started looking at programs that had a combination of business, communications, music and Bandier happened to be one that I found.

 

The N.H: When did you first start recording your latest single, ā€œTease?ā€

A.O: I recorded it over the summer. I sat down and had the chord progression already figured out because I had already been messing with that. Then this idea popped into my head, I wanted to make something that was kind of more indie pop or indie rock, so I laid out a drum beat that I felt would be infectious and then I just put the chords over thatĀ and did the bass and vocals. I had a rough demo within an hour. From there, I added some new parts, some different instruments, but it was basically all done within one sitting.

 

The N.H:Ā So what genre would you describe your music as?

A.O: It’s hard to necessarily pinpoint a genre. There’s always been this blanket term of ā€˜bedroom pop’ but I don’t really consider myself as someone who makes pop music. Even the bedroom pop term has a negative connotation to it now. People seem to think if you’re a bedroom producer, that it’s amateur in a derogatory way.

A lot of people don’t want to be affiliated with that. For me, I don’t really care, you can call [my music] whatever genre you want. People have described me as R&B, alternative, indie, I don’t know. ā€œTeaseā€ was a little different from my previous songs, it was more like an indie pop/rock songs whereas my older songs are indie-R&B or something like that.

 

The N.H: Which musicians do you draw inspiration from?

A.O: Steve Lacy, Pharrell, Tyler the Creator. I’ve been listening to a lot of Benny Sings lately and I really like the way he writes. The Internet is a big one for me just because of the way they craft melodies.

 

The N.H: Are you planning on releasing an album or EP anytime soon?

A.O: That is the goal, though I don’t know how ā€œsoonā€ soon will be. Over winter break, I’m planning to just hole up in my room and just write a bunch of music.

 

The N.H: Which platform do you prefer to release music on?

A.O: For a while, it was primarily SoundCloud, and then I finally started releasing stuff on other platforms. SoundCloud is important to me because I got involved with a community of artists on SoundCloud, like other independent artists. Now I’ve become friends with a lot of them, people who I used to listen to even. I definitely want to continue to release through SoundCloud, but right now I think Spotify is the best place to release music. The algorithms they have to promote independent artists are definitely better than other platforms.

 

ā€œTeaseā€ is available now on all streaming services.