After Snakes Say Hisss! (of Famous Class) turned out our Super Sloppy Summer Kick-Off party, we just couldn't get enough of these guys!  Then, The Huxtables (of Famous Class) played our Last Night of Summer Party and just bookended the whole damn season. Turns out that Snakes and Huxtables are each just one of the many incarnations of Famous Class.

So we had Cyrus and Perry of Famous Class over to the office for a chat about all of it.


Chief Magazine: You guys are brothers, right.  Do you each play music?

Cyrus: Perry does more of the artwork, I do more of the music. I guess we both do video stuff a little bit.

Famous Class is an art collective, a record label, a comic book publishing company, a t-shirt company; what is Famous Class?

Cyrus: I don’t really know. It’s a name. It’s all of those things. Those things are all projects and we put ‘em out through Famous Class. That’s the way we’ve been able to do it so far. It’s certainly comic books, like the Duck Bill [zine], and t-shirts and all sorts of goofy shit. Just sorta like making things. What would you say, Perry?

Perry: It’s an attempt to be all those things. The name’s most important because there are a lot of other people besides the two of us who are responsible for this stuff. There’s probably a dozen other people who worked on these things.

When did you guys decide to start working together creatively?

Cyrus: When I was still in high school and had the shittiest band ever and [Perry] did artwork for that. Once I stopped making the shittiest music, more collaborations made sense, and also my music started sounded like the feelings of the drawings or something like that. It’s like the noisy, kind of loose ideas... maybe some of the artwork..

Perry: I think so.

Cyrus: it was like 2004, or 2003.

Perry: 2003, or 2002 when we started that stuff.

Cyrus: That’s true. We’ve been sort of dicking around with it until 2005 or 2006.

Perry: Yeah, last year.

Cyrus: We started to get our shit together more, in terms of actually trying to make more than 500 of something and actually have people be able to get it who didn’t know us.

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Famous Class is an umbrella name for all these other projects, be they visual or music or otherwise?

Cyrus: That’s a good way of describing it.

Perry: We work on stuff together all the time ‘cause we’re hanging out all the time. Also it’s easy to work on stuff when we’re on opposite sides of the country.

Cyrus: Yeah, you were in school in California when I was in high school, and I was in D.C. when you were in Boston, so we’d be able to zip ideas to each other without having to be talking too much about them, so the collaboration side of it was sort of more natural because we weren’t super directly influencing each other verbally, we were just doing it through our drawings and music and things like that.

So it was easier because you were farther away.

Cyrus: I think at least initially

Perry: The root of it is not being good at video games or sports or I don’t know what people do when they hang out, watch cable or something, but instead of that...

Cyrus: Instead of getting baked and watching videos we were making cartoons. We just like projects.

Perry: Having something that’s fun that takes up your time is probably my favorite thing about any of this.

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Did you guys study graphics or illustration or music in school?

Cyrus: I studied music in college, but it really has nothing to do with any of this. I can do a counterpoint harmonization, but when I play the drums I just smash and wiggle my wrists. None of the actual training... the only thing I guess, I did some music tech stuff in school which came in handy with the albums, putting them together. We recorded everything ourselves, mixed everything ourselves; The Huxtables CD is where we were in our understanding of recording technology and microphones, it was like four microphones or something, and direct-in on the guitar which is the dumbest thing I ever heard of, but somehow with having no knowledge that came out pretty well. I think that one sounds pretty great. The Snakes Say Hisss! CD is more of a demonstration of things we figured out after going to school. It actually sounds like a real thing.

Music-wise or recording-wise or both?

Cyrus: The guys in Snakes Say Hisss! are more, I would say they’re more like musicians.

Perry: They’re recognizable as a band. There’s not the same number of people who play in that band  in The Huxtables, but from show to show over the past few years..

Cyrus: I think there’s been ten people in The Huxtables so far, and two of them, it was me and Mark when it started and it’s still us two plus this rotating cast of characters.

Perry: Everybody knows how to play their instrument and was okay up on stage.

Cyrus: Perry was in The Huxtables once, and it was like the series of worst shows ever.

Perry: We played a battle of the bands at a high school.

Cyrus: And none of us were in high school.

Perry: It was supposed to be really funny. We were gonna videotape the whole thing and it was gonna be this awesome video of high school kids and us up on stage, and a janitor unplugged us. Not ‘cause we did anything exciting or funny at all, but it was like ten pm or something.  It was over. He wanted to sweep the floors. Maybe that was funnier than anything we could’ve done, but the video wasn’t really funny.

Cyrus: At the time it didn’t seem that funny.

Perry: I think I was legitimately embarrassed by the whole thing.

Cyrus: We had planned for this elaborate video setup that totally didn’t work, this weird vocal contraption that blew out a speaker, and everything was against us.  

You were experimenting.

Cyrus: Yeah. That was like our second show, that meltdown. But you grow from there. I don’t know.

So how do you choose the guys that are going to play with you now?

Cyrus: It was me and Mark and Perry and my friend Johnny who’s done a lot of the video stuff, he’s the terrain link on the Famous Class website, and he did some of the videos for The Huxtables.

Perry: I think that one day we’ll figure out how to make his stuff work live with music and everything.  

Cyrus: Johnny does fucking totally crazy shit.

Perry: It’s really cool. He has MIDI inputs that control videos and he builds guitars himself.

Cyrus: He built a crazy MIDI mask or something.

Perry: It’s sorta like what I wish I knew how to do; exactly what I wish I knew how to do, he does.

Cyrus: He most recently built something to replicate zero gravity, it’s like a super streamline...

Perry: It’s like a coffin.

Cyrus: A coffin that you get in from the rear, and you get inside and it’s this membraney material stuff, you lie in it and it has humongous subwoofers built into it that blast bass frequencies below human hearing. So you’re trapped in this weird case with no lights except for maybe the Plexiglas is glowing or slightly pulsing.

Perry: It sounds like horseshit science of art kinda stuff, but he actually knows more about the science thing. There’s something to it.

Cyrus: If you go on his website there are like nine pages of research. It’s totally fucking crazy.

I was looking at it today and trying to wrap my head around, I had to take a step back for a second.

Cyrus: It’s totally nuts. He’s been applying for grants and he’s getting grants, but he’s trying to go to Mongolia for a year and study the frequencies produced by Mongolian throat singers, the dual pitch... That’s what he’s on right now.

Are you gonna find a way to incorporate some of his ideas?

Cyrus: We did a project a few years ago with Boogie Boarder and him and we hooked up MIDI controllers to all the instruments, so this crazy video of skulls and snakes would react to the music and then we’d be watching the music. This was back in 2004, 2005, when I knew even less about that shit. He had two computers that he’d borrowed from people. That type of thing I feel like if he pared it down or somehow made the code easier, I think that’d be pretty cool.

Perry: The quality of the videos was pretty different than animated gifs or something, it was all this like 3-D modeling stuff but with some bitmapped images... it was different than what I expected but it was cool, really cool. All that stuff kinda disappeared, there was no way to wrap it up and put it in a comic book, which is sorta what we were trying to do with all these things: figure out a way to combine more than one piece of something that was big or had some overall narrative to it and make things like... a story that stretched across more than one of these books or like a continuum or a world...and characters...

Actually create your universe?

Perry: Yeah, that was the idea, I think.

So are the people you’re playing music with pulled from the pool that you work with creatively as a whole? Is it the same group of people?

Cyrus: It’s not all just like buds hanging, but it’s a lot of that.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it being an evolution from a bunch of buds hanging.

Cyrus: We all hang out 'cause we’re into similar things, we like doing these types of things.

Perry: I’ve lost touch with so many of my friends from school except the ones that I still work on stuff with. For me, that’s a really big part of it, actually. Otherwise there’s something sort of pointless about sending e-mails back and forth to people, you live far away...not pointless, but it’s really different.

I can see it getting really repetitive and mundane unless you’re actually doing something or planning something or just constantly updating people on what you’re into or up to.

Cyrus: It’s been cool, sending rough drafts of an album, and bouncing ideas off...Dave, for example, he did the artwork for the Snakes Say Hisss! book, he was at the Chief show on Saturday. We were talking about the new songs and his ideas on what he thought they could use.

Perry: What did he say?

Cyrus: We were talking about how they balance against the older songs, how the structure of the older songs is like... they’re generally weirder and .. I don’t know how to describe it but we were talking about the general feel of the old songs versus the new.

Perry: It’s easy to be sentimental about the old stuff without saying it’s good or bad, to be really attached to it personally, especially in that way. The new stuff is pretty different and in some ways it’s sort of sad to change things ever, but doing the same thing over and over again is not great.