Can you just introduce everyone in the band?
Ms. Wings is the vocalist. We have BrassWax who plays trumpet. Sandon the drummer. Tacket plays the vibes. Pudd’n plays the guitar and bowtar, and I play bass. We’ve always been calling each other these names. A couple of the nicknames are people’s middle names.

Is it difficult working with so many people?
That’s probably the hardest thing. Everyone has so many things going on. Some people are married, some have babies, some have full-time jobs. It’s hard to get everyone together sometimes. We’re going on tour for a week and a half, and that was a pain of the ass to schedule. I wish we had more time, but I don’t know, I devote a ton of time to it, because that’s my thing. People are at varying levels of commitment. Everyone is into the music, but not everyone can play shows and that kind of stuff.

How would you describe your music?
There are a bunch of different titles, but I guess “avant-pop-chamber-rock” is what we’ve said. It’s kinda jazzy, but it is a good combination of electronic stuff and acoustic stuff. All of the electronic stuff comes from sounds we’ve made acoustically. If we’re recording an album or recording sounds for vibes, we’ll record ourselves and then use that, or we’ll record ourselves when we’re playing, and manipulate that. I guess if people like electronic stuff, it’s good to check it out, because the sounds don’t come from typical methods. It’s more organic. It starts with someone actually making it, as opposed to somebody typing on a keyboard.

What kind of instruments do you guys use?
The main instruments are the bowtar, the vibraphone, acoustic and electronic drums, bass, and trumpets. Everybody has their own set of pedals – a lot of guitar pedals and that kind of stuff. When we play live, we have a big mixer that everybody’s sounds plug into, and it sends the sounds to all of the different pedals. During the show, the trumpet player can be messing around with the vibe sounds, or the vibe player could be messing around with the vocals. There’s a lot of criss-cross. Sometimes when we set it up in the studio recording, we’ll come up with a cool sound. If it’s too hard to recreate with the set-up we have, we just record it and play it back, but a lot of times, it’s the criss-cross thing that makes all of the sound. We also use a lot of percussion - anything that can make sounds that are kind of electronic.

Do you find random stuff to use?
For the last couple of albums, we’ve walked around with a mini-disc recorder or a laptop set up. We rented an old farmhouse to use as a studio for one of our albums, and we just hit all of the pipes and rattled all sorts of shit. We’d go outside where my dog was barking. It’s fun to get a lot of cool sounds which all start with something that happens in real life and not in a computer. It’s all started by humans.

It always sounds better when it’s not off of a keyboard. You can totally tell.
Yeah, you can totally tell. And the worst thing would be to make something on a synthesizer, and have someone who owns the same synthesizer have that same sound say, “I know where that comes from!” Some people ask us what synthesizers we use because they think that our sounds come from synthesizers, but they don’t. That’s the fun part. No one can ever duplicate it. I mean, we can barely even duplicate it. Sometimes if we whip something up and we need to do it again, it doesn’t ever come out the same way. All of the elements of the music have an improv element to it – even the electronic part. You don’t see that a lot, because with the way electronic music works, you usually have a laptop or a bunch of sounds. You have to have it figured out ahead of time. We know there will be a bunch of weirdo sounds going on, but we won’t really know what they’re going to be. We kind of make them up as we go.

When you play shows, does your music vary?
Yeah. There’s definitely structure; we’re pretty structured in terms of all of our songs having verses and choruses. We have singing in all of them; they’re not super out-there noise avant shit, but I guess in every song, there’s always space for some weird texture thing. But it’s always within a pop context. It’s not just eight minutes of [insert-funky-sounds]. [Stuff like Mars Volta] is cool too, but it’s just not what we’re doing. We just take elements from what we like. We all like pop music, and we all like funky stuff, jazzy stuff, electronic stuff. We all just meet in the middle. That’s the whole point.

What do you think when people compare you to completely different musicians like Radiohead, Indie Arie?
It’s sometimes easier to quote other people than coming up with our own definitions, because you can come up with something you think is descriptive, but after a couple of songs, it may not really fit. I kind of like when people start talking, because you want to make music that makes people feel something, and the people they are comparing us to are great. There are some bands that we’ve never even heard of, like Prefuse 73, but we were compared to them. I was like, “Who the heck are these guys?” and when I ended up listening to them, I thought, “I can see how they drew the similarities.” If they say something like Radiohead and Björk, which we’re all really big fans of, then it’s cool. We kind of made that person feel the same way that Björk has made us feel, which is a really good thing. Even if it’s wrong, it’s cool. You have to try to put someone into a little hole, because you have to try to describe them. You can’t hate it, but most of the times, it’s not 100% correct. Even I am just as faulted in that regard, I guess.

How have you guys been trying to promote your third full-length?
This is our second tour. We had one in February where we went to L.A. and back. We’ve been sending it out to a bunch of radio stations, and it has gotten some pretty decent reviews in a bunch of magazines. We’re trying to hit it as much as we can at a certain time. We’re coming out with a new little EP. We always have a free EP inbetween albums, and that’ll be the one that we’ll give away at tour. This one will have some songs off the album and some remixes that sound a little different, like a drum n’ bass version.

There isn’t really an established base for your type of music, whereas for music like drum n’ bass and punk, there are already-established fan bases. Is it hard?
Yeah. It’s different out here [in Seattle]. When we were in Michigan, we played in Detroit a lot, and it seemed like the group of people that liked that kind of music had boundaries that were a little more grey than out here. We played with hip-hop shows and DJ’s, and we’d tailor our set accordingly. It’s fun to pair up with different bands to collaborate. When we came out here, we figured that because there are so many different types of music, there would be the same vibe between musicians. We haven’t really found it as much. It is kind of weird. We’ve played some shows with the 4 Cities Crew, but that’s mostly electronic. When we do some of our other stuff, they don’t really dig it. When we play with a rock crowd, they don’t really dig the other stuff. It hasn’t clicked here like it has in Detroit. I guess we were in Detroit for like two years, and we’ve been out here for about two years, and the level of success we had in Detroit was higher. That’s why we’re doing more tours. I like San Francisco a lot. It’s not that Seattle doesn’t have an eclectic scene; it just doesn’t blend as much. I’ve seen a lot of shows here, and there’s a lot of great people playing, but they’ve just got to get together.

To learn more about Full and to listen to their music,
visit their website at http://www.rememberfull.com.