Mindwake – Interview
Interview with Pete Devine of Pete’s Rock News and Views (http://petesrocknewsandviews.com)
PD: What type of artist are you?
M: – litteraly – : Mostly a visceral one, I know if I like what I’m doing or not based on my own physical reaction to the music, if there isn’t one I have trouble making appreciations. – If that’s just an elaborate way to ask “who are you” – : Hey I’m Lou and I’m the drummer for Mindwake, we’re a nu-metalcore band from the French Riviera and we Released our debut album B-52 earlier in September !
PD: Tell us the brief history of yourself.
M: I started drums when I was little then stopped after three years, then when I was sixteen I got back into music playing bass with friends doing covers, I played some drums here and here but nothing serious, got pretty good at guitar and I mostly played guitar in bands until we formed mindwake, which, at the beginning, was more like a side-project. At that time I was already in a band that was playing pretty technical stuff (Subverses), and on the other side in Mindwake we were all beginners at playing Metal, but we made a good use of that in the writing of the songs so it was interesting, we weren’t taking things very seriously, sometimes we just stopped, but we always got back to it because we liked the music so much so that’s when I started wondering “hey maybe that’s really THE band”, and I knew Charley, our singer, felt the same. And yeah, seven years later, we may have lost people on the way, we may have lost years getting good at crafting vocal lines for a song, but I’m more confident than ever than it was the right choice to focus on that band.
PD: Who are your musical and non-musical influences?
M: Wow, there’s a really a lot of them I’m a real sponge you know, I could be inspired by a melody that I got stuck in my head because I heard it once without knowing what it was but there are certainly things that influenced me more than others, I listenned to a lot of Slipknot and Chimaira as a teenager and that definitely reflects into my writing, then later bands like Veil of Maya and Periphery and Emmure changed my perspective on how you can write a metal song and that’s something that you can totally notice in the songs I write too. Then it’s mostly game soundtracks that influenced me, especially since in the two thousands I’ve discovered a good half of the bands I listen to by playing Tony hawk and Need for speed games, but I especially always enjoyed Final Fantasy, Golden Sun, Zelda and Pokemon Soundtracks, which is an inspiration I use a lot more in my solo project – A.I.(d) – than in mindwake, but it’s a very very important part of who I am musically. Other than that I’m mostly inspired by my own life and emotions, the attitude I had to build to fit as a teenage boy in the 2000s is something that “leaks” a lot in my writing : I can fight it the best I always end up being mean, I grew up thinking it was cool. Now I know it’s not, and I can manage to be cool with other humans, I think it’s obviously better that way, but still now I’ve got a taste for metaphorical violence that I’ve got to spend somewhere, and writing metal music is really a perfect outlet for that !
PD: What are your dreams and goals?
M: I think my ultimate dream would be really just to tour with a huge band that we love, and for them to be really our friends, like we’d jam and everything when there’s enough time at the soundcheck & everything, laugh together, have wonderful talks about how we can all improve our songwriting while playing all of the best venues in the world, yeah that’s the life I dream of *laugh* More seriously, right now we’ve got multiple goals but I think it can be summarized very quickly : 1/Get bigger as much as we can by our own means 2/Get a team of partners around us to help us grow.
PD: Who writes your songs, what are they about?
M: For B-52 we wrote like the first four or five songs together, the guys came up at my place with riffs 
and lots weed and then I wrote every other riff and re-arranged everything into a song, and then I did the other half by myself out of impulse. Charley usually writes all of the lyrics (with the exception Dead Dreams, which I wrote), then when he’s done the two of us gather and start putting them into music, which often leads us to rewrite some lines, I think maybe we worked on the Lyrics for Gaia’s Throne and B-52 together. The topic of the songs aren’t following a common thread or anything like that so it will be very hard to summarize them in a sentence, it’s very lunatic !
PD: How do you promote your band and shows?
M: When it’s all by ourselves and a little club we promote things mainly online via Facebook/Instagram But when we’re on a bigger show usually the organizer will have flyer printed and the band will be given some, they’ll spend some money on sponsored online ads and they’ll have some local radio coverage, it’s not huge either but it really brings more people than just being online.
PD: What do you think about downloading music online?
M: I’m glad it’s there cause gear is expansive and you can’t download gear ! More seriously, it’s been a thing since I’m in my teens, I grew up with it, and by now I think most bands and artists have adapted to it. I think the most frustrating thing about this, is as a musician you’re not paid very often for your work, and everyone downloads music or stream it for free, but when you’re working with someone in another art field like visuals or photography, they always expect you to pay the full price they’d charge for a company or a wedding and will call you out for being a cheap fuck as soon as you start to negotiate, that’s not very fair, like, we’re expected to do everything for free but to pay for every damn thing we need to make our project into a living, how are we supposed to do, it’s kinda hypocritical.
PD: What song do you wish you’d written and why?
M: Any song that has a simple yet catchy two-notes riffs, It’s always very frustrating when something that was within your reach was discovered and popularized first by someone else hahaha, the intro riff of surfacing by slipknot is a good example of that ! Or any of those chords progression like in the intro of stairway to heaven that is so obvious because it’s a chromatic descent but at the same time it’s so identifiable so it’s not like you can incorporate it as it is into one of your songs, also very frustrating ! Or Shitstorm by Strapping Young Lad because it’s so shockingly crazy agressive and imaginative at the same time that I really wished I could have wrote it !
PD: What are some of your pet peeves?
M: When I watch a guitar demo on YouTube and everything was done professionally, except the guitar tuning. Very annoying !
PD: What is your proudest moment in music?
M: Seriously, even if with some of my past bands I had the chance to open for bands like Everytime I Die, Hypno5e or While she Sleeps, my proudest moment is just to be on stage playing drums with Mindwake and nailing the songs, it was so much more sacrifices to get there compared to any other thing so that’s what makes me the proudest.
PD: So what are you working on at the moment?
M: Well, there’s going to be an EP next, all the music is written, we’re on the vocals right now, it’s a more modern take on the style we’re playing, and then I’m starting to write some stuff for the next album, I don’t wanna tease too much but I really can’t wait to be there, there is a lot of cool stuff in there, it’s a more evolved sound compared to B-52, which I also love, of course !
PD: What music have you available online and where can we buy it from?
M: It’s available pretty much every streaming platform but if you wish to support us directly the best way to do it is to buy it from our bandcamp at mindwakeofficial.bandcamp.com and If you really liked it and want to support us even more you can grab some merch at mindwakeshop.bigcartel.com
Mindwake links:
Band/Artist location – Antibes France
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Check our page for Mindwake
