Listening to Beats Antique is like immersing oneself into a musical melting pot of cultures. Combining Middle Eastern styles and other world music with dubstep, electronica, and roots music, Beats Antique sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before (Check out Daniel Burnett‘s review of their performance at Seattle’s Decibel Festival here). The trio of isn’t your ordinary musician fare, either. Though their latest album Blind Threshold debuted at #2 on the electronic iTunes charts, David Satori, Tommy Cappel, and Zoe Jakes are actually working towards much more than fame and fortune: they actually want to help people with their music. I had no idea until I spoke to them on the phone on Friday, and they quickly filled me in on their experience raising money for Haiti victims as well as raising awareness about sustainable living on their tours. We even had time left over to discuss their album and the importance of proper crowd surfing technique.

BnB: In addition to spreading your music to more people than ever before, you’ve also been very involved in spreading the word to your fans about sustainable living. Can you tell me more about how you’re doing that?

Zoe: David spearheaded that whole project, let me put him on…

David: It’s part of ‘sustainable living road show’ that’s five years along: we’ve set up eco festival villages from Bonnaroo to Louisville to West coast festivals. It’s just an opportunity to spread info about sustainable living. I’m one of the parners, Beats Antique is parterning up. We’re allowing space for everyone in every town to have info about these projects and other businesses like that in each community so our fans can connect with someothing sustainable.

 

In addition to your sustainable living goals, what else do you hope to accomplish with your music?

We did a track for Haiti around March, and we raised around $2,000 just by selling a track online for donations. That’s been really cool, to send money to build geodesic domes for hospitals for women to give birth in. A couple thousand babies have already been born in this hospital. It’s been a big project that we’ve helped out with. We’re also talking about documentaries in the Midddle East with a more politcal angle. We just want to help enrich cultures by working with organizations that are helping facilitate that. We just want to build bridges.

Tell us about your new album Blind Threshold.

Tommy: We released it early, because it leaked out. We decided to move forward and go ahead with it: that’s why it debuted at number 2. It’s been a really cool experience to be able to see the reaction of people on Facebook and our Myspace. We’ve gotten a lot of fans on our Facebook page recently and it’s been fun engaging them and getting them to our album; it’s been very grass roots. Musically, it’s more of a journey. What we did was we took a lot of the electro sketches we’ve played out in our DJ sets and re-orchestrated them with real instruments. We took more of an acoustic approach. We went farther with it then we have before, and I think it’s more of a round object. It feels really good, it covers a lot of ground. We also had more vocalists: three vocalists are featured. We usually only have one or none, so we’re experimenting with vocals and we also had John Popper as a guest.

Do you have any guests in mind for your next project?

I like Ratatat, Fever Ray. We want to get Maynard from Tool on a track, Les Claypool too. We’re trying to go as deep as we can.

What’s different or unusual about your live performances?

Animal masks. Lots of animal masks. We’re constantly working on how to improvise with electronics, it’s a little bit more challenging. We’re expanding our horizons with new techniques in composition and performance.

Do you have any pre-show rituals?

Zoe: I put a bunch of makeup.

David: We hug and say ‘jam’ really loud (laughs). Zoe started it, she’s like obsessed with that word. We just incorporated it into our daily ritual. It can mean a lot of different things.

Any crazy tour/fan stories?

In Portland, we played a sold out show and we were rocking out and this guy got excited and jumped up onstage wearing…like, a hippie diaper. He jumped up for about 5 seconds only to jump off stage and jump into the crowd. No one knew what he was doing so they got scared, and he just jumped off. We do crowd surfing, we understand that you need to let the audience know. They’ll tell you if they’re ready: you don’t just jump.

Beats Antique will be performing at The Music Box in Los Angeles on October 30th. For more information on Beats Antique‘s upcoming tour dates, please check out their MySpace page. To learn more about their sustainable living tour project, please visit their website here. Their latest album Blind Threshold is now available on iTunes.