Interview with Shinobu - Podcast 13

hello this is sound scene revolution and we're shinobu kind of three of the four guys

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this tuesday uh this week we're gonna bring you a very special interview with local guys shinobu or rather three-fourths of shinobu we sat down with mike john and bob of the band uh i believe it's matt uh yeah matt the fourth member he couldn't make it he was too cool to sit down with us but we got most of them so we're pretty happy with that so you guys should tune into this interview really cool band they talk about everything from uh japan and anime porn to more anime porn and video games somewhere in there we may have talked about music but it's mostly porn so before we kick into the interview we're going to play a track off of their cd which is called hero status verse time it's available on let's go records which is right out of campbell if you guys know the bay area anyhow we're going to play uh track number two which is called existentialists of the world unite and then we're going to kick into the interview so uh stay tuned

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i guess not really our office it's nairman the sound guy's office but i call it our office because i use it we're sitting here with uh shinobu uh all three members right three out of four damn i thought there was another guy we always miss one all right so the three of the four of you if you guys could introduce yourselves and just say what you do in the band and whatnot hello i am mike and uh i play guitar and sing and i'm currently putting my name on this cup we have etcha cups what are they called nice they're etcha cups excellent my name is john and i play percussion john's not etching his name on a cup because he doesn't have one i'm bob and i play bass all right fantastic i feel like i should ask a follow-up question like in grade school like and what's your favorite baked good baked good baked good baked good well you like baked goods as a fan of baked goods uh pretty much any baked good will do as long as it has been baked thoroughly beforehand that's pretty good you guys like butterfly cookies you know what i'm talking about what like mexican people make them like chinese people make them and stuff too i you gotta ever go to like mexican bakeries i don't think i do know i will never eat mexican baked goods they're always dry and flavorless they always look really good no they're good man i just i was at a taqueria like today and i had a bunch of mexican cookies and they taste kind of buttery actually do you know well you're going buttery but like do you eat that stuff i cookies yes but you don't need like like like like like ethnic food do you i eat some ethnic food no no they're more like like sort of flaky and well i guess we're sort of i don't know bob bob your favorite baked good i'm mexican and i don't know what john's talking about so let's chalk it up to that and i've just insulted bob's heritage by calling their pastries dry and tasteless i'm sorry so all right um let's just go into i guess really quick if you guys can just give me the history of the band how you guys started what what got you interested in music to begin with the typical you know getting to know you uh when i was like in middle school i or in elementary school actually i really like green day and offspring and then in elementary or middle school i started to like more mediocre punk bands and then um and so i started a mediocre punk band when i started high school and then uh i met bob and other friends who are also in bands and then i started playing in bands with them and so i knew bob and then john was playing in a band called argyle and me and a friend started hanging out with them and then they lost a guitarist and so i became their other guitarist and then um uh i got a free guitar out of the deal how'd you get a free guitar out of the deal the uh the guitarist for the the band had a telecaster that was just sitting in their practice room and he never did anything with it and i was like how much do you want for that and he's like just take it and i was like okay and so now i have a free guitar that i play um and then uh i wanted to start something different um more like what i was getting into at the time and then so i asked john if he wanted to start a band with me and so i kind of stole him away from his old band and then i told him i had more songs than i did so like we started we started the band really you had like one song yeah literally i had one song stolen from another band and then lied to him about the songs i had and i quickly ran home and wrote a few more songs so that he'd believe me they had more songs yeah so pretty much we all hate each other now and uh and that's where we are today i'm still writing a few more songs so john can believe that we're a real band you have to write songs just so you can lie to people and be like no no we're swear to god we're a real band that's cool like what bands like any bands of anyone would know out of that you guys run in high school or whatever uh the rapscallions from san jose just say it like with confidence and everyone will be like they'll like they should have heard of them yeah pretty much i was the driving force in the rapscallions san jose's number one hip-hop crew but now we're moving on to the chilling dogs and um pretty much uh shinobu could be a lot more productive if we didn't still have like 12 side projects because we really do the chilling dogs is only one of them but um all right so alphabetically so the chilling dogs are like the the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the rapscallions i can't do it alphabetically all right so going back to your comment um we got the perverts that's my band my cheesy pop punk band and then we got what do we got we got the runaway five which is our our pop band that our friend dan started taps brigade mike drums in that band and it's a history core punk rock band where all the songs are about history what poo and friends um wait wait christmas that poo and friends that's a theoretical band um john food and the futons we got daddy and the babies our r&b band we got a lot of bands so why the inability to settle on a single band hey i i only got one band pretty much all right i got two bands if i play in there after the futons oh yeah i forgot about that but how many of these bands have ever practiced and how many of them are just in your own hand most of them do not practice at all but rapscallions played with some pretty big acts in their day rage against the robots played with tsunami bomb and a couple other ones and uh test brigades played a few shows uh uh runaway five pretty much just plays parties and stuff well when shinobu started when we started like three years ago for like the first year most of our friends wouldn't take us seriously because we had so many side bands they'd be like oh when's rage against the robots gonna do another show and we're like oh man i'm so ashamed of being in rage against the robots quit asking me and then now i'm pretty much not ashamed of anything because i'm in the chilling dogs for goodness sake you've lost a horrible group but but what do we like yeah you know we were you know we're pretty serious about it and it's always good like you know if you take it too seriously and you're like oh gotta practice seven times a week for shinobu no and we just go write a crappy rap song or write a reggae song we're like oh man this sounds like the bad band down the hall hopefully they aren't listening to this podcast by the way but they aren't we can tell you right now by our listenership they're not listening all right so yeah that's about it that's good to know so i don't think we ever figured it out just you guys enjoy doing like all sorts of different goofy crap that's kind of where all the side projects came from we just always have bad ideas and so like some ideas are like not necessarily too bad so we can put them into shinobu and other ideas are really bad so we need to just get them out somehow else and so we start like we'll be like i got this idea for a song it'll be about like cups and so we're like we got this new band called like the cup boys and so we write like one song for them and after a while realize that we need to either drop it or write more songs for the cup boys and then we write more songs for the cup boys basically instead of dropping it you're like well we gotta put out more songs we have the band yeah exactly we're already in a band we already got one other guy that isn't in our in shinobu already so how do you continually recruit people for these projects we have like a like a crew for like 10 to 15 people who like we all just like doing annoying things basically and so we just kind of get together and a different person gets to be like the front annoying guy for each band basically do these bands ever like play together we've we've at the we put on shows that are practice based like every couple months and um we usually get a couple good bands to play and then we play and then we usually we and then we also like subject people to like usually like one or two of our side projects as well so so it's it's good times do you guys ever like when you're doing the side projects like what was something something in the futons john fu in the futons john fu in the futons do you guys ever like get like too embarrassed to actually like do it or you're like no this is just too bad or you're just like yeah sometimes i feel kind of bad about it but other times i don't feel this the least bit bad sometimes i feel bad for everyone else for not being in the band it's not nearly as funny for the people who are watching that's fair now do you guys well it's clear like you guys don't take yourselves all that's like too seriously i mean respectable but not too serious is it like what goes into like the writing process what helps you decide like okay this is a shin this can be a shinobu song and this can be something that we do with whatever the millions of other bands uh i guess i just like generally there's a few songs that we like collaborate on mostly i just write the songs at home and then bring them to everyone else but um uh i don't i i don't really write many other songs i mostly just like make parts for other people songs for other bands so i i guess you know was the only one i really like actually write for and it's the only one where like whenever i like a song that's not like i'm like man that that you know like regulator song is really good and when i when i hear a song that like i think is actually like really good music and inspires me then that's generally the one they make for shinobu ripping off a good song so please tell us some of the songs you've ripped off for a shinobu let's see uh don't worry no one will sue no one listens we promise well they're all yeah they're all probably bands that don't exist anymore anyway i know i definitely rip uh ripped off seven though at least at least once like consciously i was like i really want to write a song like this and so i did and neutral milk hotel song uh that's true yeah that was basically an exact ripoff you got the night ranger song we have that night ranger song we got that that cutting crew song temple the dog the one with eddie vetter and the guy from sound garden yeah i'm really thirsty i didn't think anyone would ever rip that band off too good to be ripped off too original fair enough um let that one slide so i gotta all right so we'll take a real quick break in the interview right there we'll hop back into it in a minute but before we return we're going to play another track off of shinobu's album hero status verse time probably saying that wrong but that's as close as they're going to get next time they'll name their album something simpler and we won't have this problem for everyone in shinobu i hope you heard that uh we're going to play track number four which is i am a lightning bolt because uh i like the title i haven't listened to it i don't plan to i just want you to know i picked it solely because of the name so keep listening when we come back we'll talk about japan and claw machines uh porn um ninja turtles and porn there's there's a lot of porn going on basically that's where we're going

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to figure out what your name meant i figured it had some sort of japanese connotation but other than that i mean there were artists who came up with the name shinobu and all this but is there a specific meaning behind it or just like the the words well when me and mike first started hanging out channel 54 for the local the local listeners in san lise channel 54 it's pbs channel and they used to show uh anime on sunday nights so there's a show called urusei yatsura and it's like it's really the most obnoxious show ever like every episode has the same formula where like the perverted uh the perverted hero everyone just gets mad at him and his girlfriend shocks him with electric shocks and there's the girl he really likes but she thinks he's a pervert because all these other girls are all over him and the girl who he really liked was shinobu and the the hero would always get shocked and he'd be like shinobu and then that's pretty much where we got the name so interesting what was the name of this show urusei yatsura it translates to uh those obnoxious aliens i gotta i gotta find out i gotta see this show is it on is it on dvd somewhere yeah i actually i work at an anime rental video rental shop so if you want to come down and rent the series but that would involve stepping inside an anime video rental shop and that would scare me do you guys get weird people at the anime video yeah what do people rent at the anime well it depends on the type of people because there's there's like there's the really gross porn and we get like regular customers who will rent any of the gross porn they just come in and get whatever's new and it's gross it's really gross bible black is the most popular porn title but right now some of the popular ones are hot juicy teacher um taboo charming mother uh and these are all like cartoons right these aren't like actual people yeah these are all animated wow that's weird but then like among the non-gross stuff yeah the stuff that there's like the the nerds who would never get caught watching a romantic comedy except all they rent is like the anime romantic comedies where it'll be like a nerdy dude with like five girls in love with him which is like that's how it goes the most common plot in anime if you if you pay attention to it so we gotta look who's probably the audience you know the audience and the artist it's how it works out but um wow there's a whole world there i'm totally unexposed to so do all you guys like anime or just one two of you uh let's see the only asian guy in the band doesn't watch anime actually there's like probably like five to ten series i think we all like think are really good um like there's i used to always think it was like the dumbest thing ever to be honest when i was younger but there's there's a couple series i think are like really just really compelling and some of the best writing i've seen dragon ball z right especially dragon ball z and it's like the only one i know you you hack a show and uh i don't know whatever else is on all the ones that show up on cartoon network during the day yeah one of our songs is distinctly about the first episode of cowboy bebop oh wow so how how's that go how's dude the first episode is a touching story i remember i have i've seen the cowboy bebop movie and all i can remember after it was done was just what the hell just happened i i was i'm sure it was but i totally was like okay i must have fallen asleep because i missed like half of that doesn't make sense to me well to be honest like since i started working at the store like i've only watched like one anime video because i'm just not really into it anymore but there's lots of cool live action at our store but they're really like mike said there's lots of there's some really good stuff and just it's the same thing with like anything like it's a niche and like if people are too into the niche then they'll be like they'll watch all the crap you know just like someone's like really into punk rock they'll be like oh you know there's plenty of good bands they like jawbreaker and then they'll be like oh i'm gonna go listen to i don't know i don't want to design any bands but just let's just name a few who are really not all good not all punk bands are good you know but like i think there's good stuff in everything so yeah that's fair you can dabble in so because i want to write this down and remember later what's good anime so i know all right so cowboy bebop is good great great jumping on this one great teacher onizuka is great um rusa yatsuda is good no of course like lots of people have seen the movie akira that's good what did you just say sex taxi all right john's just recommending adult titles now it's weird because john's saying he's not into it and yet john knows the names of all the porn sounding ones so john what's up what do you got so what do you do since you're not and we have to figure this out you're the asian guy you're not into anime what's the other asian thing oh yeah i play video games sometimes occasionally i feel we should talk about music but i'm really more interested in all the music nothing dude let's talk about video games man all right it seems it seems video games seem to be the topic of choice favorite video game system system yeah do you have a favorite system i do i don't know it's sort of a tie between the regular original nintendo and the super nintendo like i mean my favorite game final fantasy 3 is on the super nintendo yeah super nintendo was a pretty good damn system would you say xbox or a playstation i own an xbox i don't own a ps2 but i mean like hardware wise i mean the xbox is better than the ps2 but as far as like titles and licensing deals and stuff the ps2 blows the xbox away interesting i'm impressed by this like normally my conversation with guys in video games revolve around like first person shooters and stuff i'm glad we got a little more in depth going here of the new systems the obviously the xbox 360 is already out yeah the other two are coming out later this year is it yeah i think ps3 is in march and revolution is a little bit after that yeah what do you think what are you what are your bets 360 is a piece of shit oh bill gates is listening he's the only person actually i i forgot to mention that he's i was actually you're dead now well i was i was actually about to wait in line for like like like 16 hours to go buy a 360 yeah but i wasn't actually gonna really play it i was gonna buy and sell it oh yeah i just wanted to make money so three hundred dollars yeah and uh the ps3 is looking pretty good because like a lot of the xbox titles are moving over to playstation now and i mean i was just looking at the 360 it looks totally unoppressive like games aren't really that great graphically and etc i haven't seen much on it i mean i know they had the what the world war ii vietnam whatever yeah what does that do for me what what that's a sound guy there i mean he knew it was called call of duty because he's been playing it for eight days straight non-stop he smells horrible it fills this entire room as we speak so anyhow moving let's let's try and bounce back to music i guess really quick has there been was there like a point in any one of your lives that um was there a point like that you got realized that you really wanted to play music like was there a song or just a particular moment that really kicked it for you uh not really i just always really like uh really besides video games is the only thing that ever really like actually like like got me really excited and then later on like like books and certain movies did but um but really like in in fourth grade like i decided that i really liked music a lot and like it hasn't really changed too much since then i just realized that i also hate a lot of music but uh there's a lot more of it to hate the more you know much like much like anime there's like a handful of really good music and there's so so much awful awful music out there very true i'm gonna keep hounding you guys for like bad music come on just a couple of names people you might meet in the street you know so they could be mad at you no we'll get there it'll it'll come out later we'll get you guys drunk and then we'll find out who he really disliked that's cool has there been like a moment for you guys like playing or recording something where you were just like this is why you got into it like this is you know if every moment could be like this this would be you know be perfect it's hard to say like we've got a couple of shows that i think were extraordinarily good and like a lot of fun and like japan japan we went to japan you played in japan yeah we didn't really play to that many people but it was it was so much fun and like the the clothes were really good and we got to just see japan basically as a band and like it was a lot of fun we got to play the claw machines we got to play john got to play we all said three hundred dollars in claw machines in japan john won so much on the claw machines in japan he had to buy a duffel bag to fill up with the stuff he won and then he had to still give us stuff to put in our backpacks to bring back home are you just really good at claw machines or did you just spend millions of dollars on claw machines he's really he's the only person i've ever seen win an american claw machine and he totally got this sweet yoda pillow out of a claw machine which was the best do you still have the yoda pillow i still have the yoda pillow it might actually be in my car still so how did so how did you become so good at the claw machine well years of training basically i mean like with a lot of things with claws especially like the american claws like you could tell they calibrate like the strength of the claw and like a lot of them like sort of spin as they're going down yeah it's really like 50 percent luck i would say 25 like knowing when to take an advantage of something and the other 25 knowing when to walk away which i don't really follow most of the time obviously they said you said what three hundred dollars three hundred dollars i was about to try to win a freaking bag to put all my my stuff from a claw machine there's a yoda duffel bag i could get that the best was we went to this arcade and um in the corner there is like this claw machine where you could win dvds and there's like this girl like they had this really pretty girl in like a yellow bikini on the dvd and john was like oh i'm gonna get this porn i'm gonna get this porn and he spent like i don't know he spent a good ten dollars on it and he got the dvd and he was so disappointed him and our roadie jason jason who's a little bit of a pervert himself john and jason jason watched the dvd together and they they were so disappointed when it wasn't porn it was just this girl rolling around in her bikini kind of creepy seriously how long it was like 20 minutes but like we actually did go into like some porn shops like but don't worry we got porn and not only do they have like like bundles like pantyhose like bundles and bags to sell they also had a claw machine where you picked up scraps of paper and on some of the papers they had like a like a note written on it that said like you would win like a free dvd and stuff so i probably spent like another ten bucks trying to win that to win any of those anything was there a claw machine with like white cotton underwear in it i know that that would have been tight that would have been another ten dollars in that claw machine are they like really big in japan is that like claw machine yeah yeah they call them uh ufo catches there uh they're a little bit different because like over here we have claw machines with like three clawy things or four clawy things three prong type deal but their thing is like it's like a two-prong thing it's more of a matter of tipping it into the hole rather than actually carrying it and bring it into the hole and actually have people there to like work the machine so that uh like they'll be just they'll go around and they'll like see if something's like slightly off and they'll actually go and set it up so that someone can win it like they it's it's actually designed so that people can win instead of just like looking like you can win basically but then just sort of you have to know the trick to win it also and there's pretty much an arcade on every block literally and most of the arcades are about 80 percent claw machines and 20 percent games so pretty much everywhere we'd go john could peruse the selection this magical world called japan filled with video games and claw machines i have to check that out one day i have to go there do you guys how much did it cost roughly do you know i'm not just i'm hitting you up for travel advice no it was like just shy of a thousand for tickets and then almost another thousand for hotel and expenses and everything so not bad how long were you there for we're there for me and um our guitarist matt were there for 10 days um and we all stayed together for 10 days and then john went to visit his family in hong kong for a bit and then bob and tyler our friend who put out our last record and jason jason our friend who came with us and who rodeed with us two summers ago um uh went and hung out longer and jason went and stayed with his family for a bit and then bob and tyler rode the rails and whatnot so uh japanese hobos fantastic well that's that's crazy man okay um so i guess real quick we gotta start wrapping things up before this gets too long i'm really interested you guys no one else may care but i'm totally interested in how this is gonna go but before we uh wrap this up i want to uh question i ask and it's been rephrased so we're gonna there's a couple of additional parts to this but the first question is someone asked me this a while ago and i try to ask everybody i get the chance is if the smurfs fought the ninja turtles who would win that in your opinion ninja turtles ninja turtles i'll go with ninja turtles yeah ninja turtles tends to be the sweeping answer in that people some people have leaned towards the smurfs just because of pure numbers but i just don't remember anything about the smurfs honestly i just remember the smurfs and how they got beat up by the ninja turtles oh yes that episode and there's recently there was some unicef commercial where the smurfs are the smurfs are running away from like bombs and yeah that's the only thing i remember about the smurfs as well because i don't remember ever seeing them when i was a child no how old are you guys i feel totally what are you like 12 damn it i look i look old for my age i'm 22 all right 23 21 there's no excuse for not remembering the smurfs at 21 all right maybe i don't know now i'm worried y'all may not know this i i saw them on i just never really watched the smurfs i think fair enough thundercats versus ninja turtles anyone remember thundercats man thundercats yeah dude i thundercats is another one that i kind of missed the boat on where i saw it every now and then but i didn't really watch it that much i unfortunately as i've heard but uh you were filled with japanese when i moved from mexico to the u.s when i was four one of my earliest memories is i had my panthro action figure from thundercats and i was playing with him outside of our apartment and i threw him up in the air and he fell down and crashed and broke oh and that was like my last action figure from the thundercats who were my favorite in mexico but yeah the thundercats had totally beat up the ninja turtles as much as i like the ninja turtles that's fair in case you ever run into them on the street you're gonna be like i really like you guys wasn't trying to be rude i just they're the thundercats fair enough um so before we go you guys got future plans what do you guys have going on uh we're just finishing up a lot of recording actually we're doing a cd for japan right now oh wow um and then in the spring we're gonna record an album for asian man um and then also a seven inch for asian man possibly a seven inch with our friend split with a friend's band so you have to start writing the fucking song yeah pretty much and possibly another split so we have quite a bit of recording planned and a fair amount done so that's cool yeah um when any idea when the well i guess you haven't recorded at all so i guess i can't ask when you think the album will be out yeah um depending on what we do with the the japan album i'm not sure if it's going to be we're still not sure exactly if it's going to be made here and then give a couple copies of the dude in japan or or if it's going to be made there and we'll get a couple copies but so we'll have some for mail order i think but then we'll probably have the asian man album ready for summer where we'll be touring again most likely excellent um you guys website anything like that you guys want to plug shows coming up um i don't think we have any good job guys just make something up um but like all the obnoxious bands that we were talking about like the 12 or so stupid bands that we're talking about you can find them all at bob's website fat and funky dot com spelled p-h-a-t-n-p-h-u-n-k-y dot com fat and funky and you can also find our website at nice shinobu dot com yeah why isn't the nice before that is there any particular reason or is it just a url that wasn't taken nice it's pretty nice yeah super nice kind of guy you'd let your sister date assuming i don't know you guys like guys sisters don't worry we can edit that out all right so um yeah that about wraps it up i want to thank you guys so much for uh taking the time to come on down thanks for having us no problem yes thank you for having us thanks it's what we do it's how we get content all right well that wraps up the interview i would like to thank shinobu for taking the time to come on down and talk with us break in our new studio christen it kind of rub their stink on it whatever shinobu does when they come around uh other than that check those guys out their website is nice shinobu dot com they have a myspace we should have the links up on our site so you could check it out uh coming up next week we should have a whole bunch of new bands coming in we got people from out of the area people who are local people are who are famous even if only in a very small circle like their family or their friends or their own mind but they're they're cool they're famous we ain't we ain't gonna judge no one uh so be sure to check that out we got a special treat for you wrapping up this show we're gonna play a demo track from shinobu from maybe one of their forthcoming split cds or one of their forthcoming lps which is going to be on asian man like we talked about we're going to play a track that they're demoing right now called boo urns you can't find this anywhere else this is the exclusive hot shit should have funk master flex screaming like exclusive over it but we won't because we like you so uh it's called boo urns and it should be on one of their forthcoming albums so that's shinobu uh be sure to come in tune in in the upcoming weeks right here at sound scene revolution