The most difficult aspect of the music business for a young band is the business itself. Forming just two years ago Percolator has created a good-sized catalog of music, some inventive flyers, and a few homemade discs. But how does a band gain a following, distribution, and a legion of young girls rushing the stage? Well, I thought I would ask Ben Sachs, Matt Collander, Phil Bertulfo, and P.J. Macklin of Percolator about distribution and the struggles and joys of being a young band in Chicago.

The Deli: You recently self-released an EP, Illegally People, and have been selling them at shows. What has been the biggest challenge of self-releasing thus far? Have you looked into CD Baby or i-tunes?

Ben: The biggest challenge of self-releasing?  I'm not sure I could name just one.  We're still pretty green when it comes to the business of music, which seems to be mutating on a weekly basis now, and we haven't quite figured out what record labels want.  The word on the street is that they're mostly interested in bands with a strong live following.  We don't quite have that yet, as much as we love to play live.  I think we're most comfortable sitting in Matt's bedroom, writing and recording songs.  Unfortunately, this doesn't make us very good salesmen, even though we have so many songs to sell. (Honestly, I think we've written almost 50 songs since we formed two years ago.) So, making CDs on our own and handing them out was a way to expedite the process of getting our songs to anyone who wanted them.  I-Tunes sounds more practical, though, now that you mention it.

Matt: 50 songs is a gross understatement!  We've written far too many to count, keep track of, or record.  The biggest challenge has been wanting to stick with one recording long enough to get a sense of familiarity...we've got too many songs for that.

PJ: Exposure is really hard to get.  That's what a label is for, right?  Getting the word out about a release and generating interest is pretty tough when you're doing the whole thing DIY.  Without money to spend on advertising or whatever, we can't really generate massive buzz about it, unless it's word of mouth or through good press (like this)!  Also, as mentioned, we have so much material that it's hard for us to focus on one disc and push that for all it's worth - we're already excited about the next batch of songs, so we get less excited about relentlessly promoting the current project.  I'm sure a lot of this is marketing 101, but I'm afraid we are rather inexperienced in that department.

Phil: In my mind, the biggest challenge of self-releasing would be availability.  We sell these things at shows, and I think we do a fairly good job of getting them into people's hands, but we only play like two or three times a month.  So really, people only have like three opportunities a month to come and buy our record.  (We should see if local record stores would sell our stuff, though.  We haven't really looked into that yet.)  On the other hand, self-releasing ensures that our stuff WILL ACTUALLY get released.  It's nice to know that if people DO in fact have our music, it's because we've rolled up our sleeves and have made it so.  There's a certain sense of workman-like pride I feel about it.

Promotion is another challenge.  We have a ton of stuff up on our website, but it's not like the music-loving masses are crashing our servers, itching to hear us.  I would f**king love it if that were the case, but so far, no luck.  So we're still figuring stuff out, figuring out how to get people interested.  It would be great to have some help, and as I understand it, that's what record labels purport to do.  So we're trying to figure that out.  We're looking at other options.  iTunes seems pretty good, too, and we're (slowly) looking into that.

The Deli: I really like the cover art and the over all artistic direction of the band. Who does your artwork, and is there certain direction or approach that the band is taking in regards to its image artistically?

Ben: Matt and PJ switch off on the artwork, as both of them studied art.  They'd have more to say about their ideas regarding our image, but mainly it comes from constant drawing on their part.

Matt:  Pj's taken care of the website aesthetic.  He's got a really solid sense of graphic design & illustration.  I do a lot of posters & the art on the covers thusfar.  I love alot of comic artists, so my head's really firmly set in pencilled and inked imagery.  I borrow alot from alot of people (Jon Kricfaluci, Egon Schiele, Chris Bachalo), but I'd like to think I've got my own style.  Not much of an over-arching stylistic plan, though...I'm less interested in the imagery being designed to brand the band and more in it simply being representative of the art that we actually do.  Being in a band has been a great excuse to draw more, so it's basically a soap-box for the things I'd want to draw anyways.

PJ: Right.  Matt has a comic book aesthetic; he's an incredible penciller and inker!  That lends itself very well to posters and cover art.  I've got more of a classic illustration approach - I've been influenced by designers and illustrators like Herb Lubalin, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Jim Flora...more flat, pictoral kind of stuff.  Plus, from my graphic design background, I'm very into lettering and typography.  Visuals are very important.  In crafting a visual identity for the band, up until now the idea has just been to let the ideas run wild, but lately there's been talking of merging the styles or at least sticking to a consistent look for the band, so we'll see where that takes us.

Phil: Matt and PJ do all the artwork.  I really like that everything has been in-house so far because I believe it makes it so that our "brand" (so to speak) is uniquely, intensely us.  Though Matt and PJ often allow Ben and me to make ridiculous suggestions to factor into the artwork, I think Ben and I have largely been happy to sit back and watch these guys do what they do.  It's been a real treat being associated with such talented artists.

Incidentally, I think this sort of goes hand-in-hand with how we've been self-releasing stuff.  We've written these songs, arranged them, we recorded them ourselves, we drew the art, we screenprinted it onto these sleeves, packaged this all together, and we want YOU to have it because we're proud of it and we think you'll like it. It's very DIY, but not in the f**k-you-corporations mold (though seriously, f**k those guys).  Again, it's that workman-like pride.

The Deli: All of your music is available for free download on your site. How did you guys decide to release it all for free? What has the response been like?

Ben: How did we decide to release the music for free?  Again, it was a matter of just wanting to get it out there.  Since very few people know who we are, it doesn't seem fair to charge for something they don't know.  And since we have so many songs, we can still charge for some of them.

Matt: Self-releasing material for free has been, in my mind, a matter of giving new listeners a foothold in our catalogue so that they've got something they want to hear at a live show.  It's a real chicken/egg, horse/cart kind of thing.  You can't sell music to an audience you don't have yet!  It just makes me happy that people are listening.  Pj's got the google analytic numbers on the downloads, I think.

 PJ: Well, we wanted something people could instantly have, and Man Is Not A Bird (our first album) was the first piece of music we recorded.  The idea was basically that if people like us, as long as they remember our name, they could have a significant piece of our music to chew on without any kind of hassle.  The downloads aren't ridiculously high, but at the very least, people seem to stream it when they visit the site.  We'd like to make our website a place where people can really spend some time with our stuff, but it's just getting to the point where people can do that.  We've been doing this thing we hope will catch on called Single of the Month, where people can download or stream a new song for free.  We hope people will be interested in coming back and hearing something new from us that they haven't heard before, and that there will be something fresh up there each month. 

Phil: I think we just sort of figured that no one would buy music from a band they'd never heard before, so we put all that stuff out for free to encourage people to download and listen. I think the response has been alright.  After a show, there seems to be a little spike in listens/downloads.

The Deli: What can people expect from a Percolator live performance?

Ben: What to expect from performances?  A lot of tangled guitar cables.  Matt, Phil and PJ all write and sing songs, and whoever sings generally plays rhythm guitar as well.  So they're constantly juggling guitars and bass between numbers.  It looks a bit like the hat scene in "Duck Soup."  I'm usually bleeding or breaking drumsticks, as I tend to forget my own strength when I play.

Matt: I know I don't look at the audience much.  I think we've got a very complete sliding scale of introversion & extroversion in the band.  Phil once ran suicide sprints in the middle of a song while I was probably looking at the ground.  You might want earplugs...Ben is a formidable drummer.

PJ: Phil is definitely the wild-man of the band in the live setting.  Between him and Ben, the energy level is very high.  The most common adjectives I've heard attributed to our shows are "energetic" and "loud."  We all have a lot of fun playing live, and we keep things pretty loose.

Phil: I think people can expect a certain... I don't know... appropriate amount of wildness and weirdness.  A lot of instrument switching.  A lot of nonsense inside-seeming-jokes.  If Matt's drunk and pissed off, you're in for a real treat.  We f**k around a bit.  We try to make each other laugh as we play sometimes, so maybe a bass lick will be more ridiculous than usual, or I'll try a new awkward dance-step in the middle of a song.  I'm a big fan of frantic absurdity.  Broken sticks sometimes fly out from behind the drum kit.  It's a fun, beautiful, loud, wacky, noisy, well-oiled machine.

The Deli: What are your thoughts on the current state of Chicago music?

Ben: Thoughts on the current state of Chicago music?  What's not to like?  One of the reasons I love Chicago is that every arts scene is so nurturing--be it theater, visual arts, music, even curating.  The city is large enough to offer a lot of opportunities, but very few people seem ruthless about staking out a reputation.  It isn't cutthroat at all.  In fact, most of the bands we've played with have been exceedingly friendly.  I don't go to as many shows as I'd like, even though there are a number of bands out there who (to my knowledge) have never put on a bad show:  Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan, the Nothingheads, Alla, Netherfriends, Odawas, Le Concorde... there's really too many to name.

Matt:  I'm really proud of Chicago's "alumni."  I'm extremely pleased to be in the home of the Kinsellas...Joan of Arc and Make Believe are just incredible.  I actually spotted Bobby Berg getting into a van in Wicker Park and nearly shat myself, which is pretty ridiculously geeky.  I really love the Fiery Furnaces, though I believe they now live in Brooklyn.  It's great that there are so many venues to play at...it really allows up-and-comers the chance to do the rounds & get a broad range of experiences & different local audiences.

PJ: The local scene is interesting.  I think because Chicago is so big, there are lots of different scenes that have a real sense of community and support, but the different scenes don't really intersect.  We recently played a couple of shows in Minneapolis, and both shows had a hip hop act in the line up.  I found that to be really surprising.  In Chicago, at least in our experience, that doesn't really happen.  We mostly play with like minded indie bands.

Phil: What I like about the Chicago scene is that it seems like anything goes.  It's a big enough place that SOMEONE will like whatever crazy thing you've got going on.  It's really that it's up to YOU to get it together, and the venues and show-going crowds are usually generous enough to let your act find its footing and mature.  People genuinely listen here, and it's great.  I grew up in LA, where you have to be a f**king cut-throat douche-bag coked-out asshole to make even the faintest impact on the scene.  It's such a relief to be here where it seems so diverse and welcoming.  There's such a wealth of truly unique, diverse acts in this city, and it's been a real pleasure playing with and befriending so many of them.

The Deli: What's next for the band?

Ben: What's next?  We're recording a bunch of new songs.  We've written a bunch of concise ones lately, and I think they're our best material yet.  We generally have more songs on the docket than we know what to do with, so I think we're compensating by fitting more ideas into a shorter amount of time.  PJ just wrote one called "Kentucky Marmelade" that has maybe five movements in as many minutes.  I've been listening to a lot of early Todd Rundgren lately, so it makes sense to me; if all goes well, other people will like it too.

Matt: We're hideously back-logged with songs that haven't been recorded & we're dying to record.  It's been suggested that we play songs that people might know, which prevents us from playing all the new songs we wrote last week.  The next big thing for us, I think, is to record LP2, which is looking like it might be of "Wowee Zowee" sprawl.   We just realized yesterday that alot of our songs are barely 3 minutes long, which I think permits a 20+ track album that isn't unlistenably long and over-bearing.  I'd really like for people to get a taste of the full range of our musical inclinations...in a 7 or 8 song live set, it's hard to get that across, and people leave going, "Oh, that didn't make any sense.  Who are these people?"

PJ: Recording!  We've been trying to lay low on the live scene for a little while while we record this massive batch of songs we've got.  Between 3 songwriters, we've got more than we know what to do with.  We've been cultivating these songs for something like a year and a half now, so we need to record this thing for our own sanity.  That and just trying to get the word out about the band.