Seattle's Wild Orchid Children. Photo: Hayley Young.

Every so often a band comes along that challenges the status quo, turning its back on the obvious influences that fuel 95% of the indie rock market and spinning its tunes from a different deck. The kind of band that inspires imitations rather than produces them, that challenges our monotonous diet of soft rock wannabes and Coldplay clones.

Wild Orchid Children might just be that band.

Formed in Seattle from disparate elements of Gatsby’s American Dream and Forgive Durden, Wild Orchid Children provide a much-needed shot in the arm to a music scene that feels like it’s treading water. Their debut album, Wild Orchid Children Are Alexander Supertramp (released today on Equal Vision Records), is a wild, organic mash-up of Jimi Hendrix’s style, Parliament’s free-flowing funk, and even the occasional hint of Rage Against The Machine. It’s eye-opening, addictive, and undeniably original.

We caught up with vocalist Kirk Huffman and guitarist Thomas Hunter prior to the release of Wild Orchid Children Are Alexander Supertramp, to chat about influences, cults, and the appeal of disappearing into the wild.

Dan Coxon: What does it mean to be a wild orchid child?

Kirk: We hope that whoever embraces being a Wild Orchid Child gives their own insight into what it means to them personally. It’s a non-exclusive group, but from our standpoint being a Wild Orchid Child is most importantly just a name for embracing the limitless potential inside of us as human beings, and using it to celebrate and unify everyone’s own individual interpretation of what being a Wild Orchid Child means to them personally. This music is for people who still believe in the power of music. One of our favorite groups, Shabazz Palaces, put it best: “Find out who you are and be it.”

Thomas: Being a Wild Orchid Child isn’t just about wearing our shirts, or coming to our shows, or tweeting about us on facebook, or whatever. I feel a sense of importance when I’m on stage with my band. I know that every single note I play is the most important note that could possibly be played at that given moment. I know that every hand that gets thrown in the air at a show is the most powerful hand on the planet. We are perfect beings. We are powerful.

I’m not just trying to make fun little records for people to buy song-by-song on iTunes. I’m trying to change the world. This music is a weapon. It’s stronger than any drug or political belief. When I die, there will be a massive offering left behind. The only offering I have for this world is my music. We all play a part. It’s not being afraid to stand the f*** up and do something loud.

Wild Orchid Children Are Alexander Supertramp.

DC: You seem to be gathering a cult-like following. Do you think this pairing of music and community is something of a necessity for a new band?

Thomas: Any band needs some sort of community/audience to pair its music with. Honestly, the Jonas Brothers have a more “cult-like” following than we do. They have dolls made of them, and pre-teen girls have Jonas Brothers pillow-cases, and Jonas Brothers blankets that their pubescent selves sleep under every night. Yeesh.

When music writers refer to us as having a cult-like following it’s usually disguised dialect meaning we have a small number of fans and no commercial accessibility. We’re fully aware that our music is hard for a lot of people to ingest, a small part of the reason for starting the band was almost a reaction to the consistent praise Kay Kay and his Weathered Underground received. We wanted to challenge the listener’s palate and sometimes that comes with also alienating them, but that said, we are indeed very thankful for those who are into the band because their rapid positivity seemingly comes from an absolute sincere assertion that they need our music/performances in their lives, and shows their willingness to accept musicality even if it comes delivered like a sonic boom.

What is a communal necessity for us, is to have devoted fans or the ones that seemingly “get it” at our live shows. In that respect our devoted following is as much a necessity for us sounding great as are our amplifiers, because we’re reciprocating positive human energy and feeding off of what we both need.

DC: Can you talk us through your influences? I heard everything from Parliament and Gil-Scott Heron to Rage Against The Machine in the mix!

Thomas: I see this band as a dance machine. A giant rhythm instrument. You mentioned Parliament. I’m heavily influenced by Funkadelic. Maggot Brain is one of my favorite records of all time. Eddie Hazel is one of the most underrated shredders of all time. That motherf***er has so much soul. He can play a 10-minute guitar solo that takes you somewhere. He’s got something to say. His guitar is his voice. He’s not just playing pentatonic scales. Patterns are for babies.

My biggest goal is to move people and make them move. I draw a lot from Nigerian rock and dance music. Like Bongos Ikwue, Jay-U Experience. More raw African rock like Ochestre Poly-Rythmo and Ebo Taylor. And of course the Ethiopian jazz monster, Mulatu Astatke.

I’ve also spent so much time living while listening to Coltrane, Miles, Bird and Wes Montgomery and Joe Diorio (who was an actual mentor of mine). I learn everything I can. It’s all inside my head. My vocabulary is getting bigger, and at the same time more refined, every second of every day. I know there’s never an end to this road, so I’m just running down it as fast and loud as I can.

Kirk: Sweet, we don’t get asked this question enough, and the music we listen to and hold dear is very crucial to what we we define and interpret our sound to be. The music we derive our songs from easily gets lost in translation because we’re very hard for a majority of people to define, but with writing new material right now, we are really making fine definitions of where our tunes come from.

With respect to our influences, the two ideas behind the entire premise of the entire band were: first, to essentially do to Afrobeat and Ethiopian and Nigerian melodies what Led Zeppelin did to black American blues. Channel direct sources of inspiration and mold them into and present them in a new and distinct sound.

Secondly, if anybody has seen Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, which is the debut of his “Band of Gypsies” with Mitch Mitchell, it’s pretty obvious from not only a sound and instrument aesthetic, but from a visual one too, that that set catapulted what we wanted people’s perception on a whole of us to be, acid head percussion players and all.

Vocally, I was just literally trying to mash up the vocal style on the tunes ‘Speaking in Tongues’ and ‘King’s Dominion’ from Black Eyes’ first self-titled record, and the lyricism and atmosphere of The Last Poets ‘This is Madness’. Those tunes, especially the vocals, floored me, it seemed that whatever the two were saying in both bands was so dire and urgent. It conjured up the same emotions I get when I glance over the cover of The New York Times or watch Fox News in passing. It wasn’t until after we released the Elephant EP that critics and bloggers started to throw out the “Beastie Boys” and “Rage Against the Machine” tags. We understand those immediate interpretations, but it bears little truth to what we were actually striving for sound-wise.

Here are some more songs and records that influenced the group’s sound:

Bo Diddley – The Black Gladiator
Eric Burdon and War – Black Man’s Burdon – ‘Paint it Black’
Eric Akaeze – ‘Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham’
Jimi Hendrix – Band of Gypsies (Live at the Fillmore East)

DC: As for the album, you must be excited to have signed to Equal Vision Records. Are you hoping they can spread the Wild Orchid Children’s message across to the East Coast too?

Kirk: Yes, they are all Wild Orchid Children. We are very, very excited to be working with the folks at Equal Vision, we’ve all in some respect known them for quite some time so it’s great to be building upon a relationship further. We’re hoping they can spread the Wild Orchid Children’s message to coasts and mainlands everywhere, that was really the point of pursuing a release with them.

It wasn’t the bands on the label past and present, and it wasn’t the label’s target market, it was based on their positivity towards the record, their willingness to distribute it worldwide, the fact that they’re extremely hard working and honest people and their openness to give us total creative control with our product shows a deep understanding and respect for what we’re trying to achieve. We’re trying to reach as many people as we can. We feel even more fortunate for their help when you consider the potential commercial failure for what we do. We’re all smiles.

DC: The album’s title mentions Alexander Supertramp, the name Christopher McCandless gave himself when he turned his back on society and headed Into The Wild. Do you feel a particular connection to McCandless?

Kirk: I think that story is fascinating because everyone should feel a particular connection to McCandless, no matter what your opinion of what he did and his eventual death is. For me personally, I sympathize with the internal rift of wanting to live from under societal control – everyone does, nobody I know likes paying bills or working a job – but I also rely on the grocery store and restaurants for food. Know what I mean? Being placed in a position knowing that the other option from modern civilization is a retreat to archaicness with the very real possibility of death, like McCandless, in the toughest of elements, is a very human internal struggle or at least one I think of often.

Hopefully, musically we can be an allegory that captures the spirit of bravely facing your own naivety, or the feeling of being pressured by society’s processes, and at the same time the desire to dismiss those processes all together.

Thomas: The connection I make to the idea of Alexander Supertramp is one of dropping out of our current musical society, Laozi style. We’re taking the things we know and love and taking them to tape and to the streets. There is, of course, the more literal reference to our skipping town to record in the woods at the late great Tom Pfaffel’s studio in Black Diamond. But to me it’s about shedding all the majority bullshit (at least my personal idea of what’s whack) and using our own unrelenting souls to do what we do and bring people together.

DC: So what can we expect next from the Wild Orchid Children?

Kirk: We’ll continually be delivering live show bootlegs on our bandcamp page as well as lots of live video content, until we’re able to get out on the road for a full US tour early next year. We’re planning on having a music video put together towards the beginning of the year similar to The Strokes’ music video for ‘Last Nite’, in the fact that it’ll all be a live performance, both video and audio. So we’ve been putting together the logistics for that, as well as an idea the band has been kicking around for a while: taking a producer’s approach to creating instrumentals for pairings of some of our favorite MC’s for “The Wild Orchid Children Present, The B Boys on Acid” mixtape.

We’re pretty excited about it and it’s just in it’s infancy, but we hope to have that available as a free download sometime in 2011 to promote some of our favorite hip hop artists spun through the rhythms of the Wild Orchid kaleidoscope, so to speak…

Thomas: You can definitely expect everything from us. We’re always growing. We’re never going to stop. It’s not just one specific thing that we do. We’ll just keep putting out the best music we can.

If you’re craving a fix of the Wild Orchid Children, check out the video for ‘Ahead Of Us The Secret’ (below). The Wild Orchid Children Are Alexander Supertramp is available now.

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