Hypnogaja: Lucid Dreams
Hollywood rock band Hypnogaja takes its name from the hazy dream-like state between wakefulness and sleep, known in psychological circles as hypnagogia. “Throughout history, this enigmatic state has been thought to be a heightened period of creativity for the human mind,” says keyboardist Mark Nubar Donikian. “We really connected to the whole feeling of that state — when you really love a song, it’s the same kind of thing.”
The five musicians who make up Hypnogaja churn out guitar-driven, soulful rock with a subtle electronic backdrop using Power Mac G5s and PowerBook G4s, Logic Pro, Steinberg Nuendo and Cubase, and Propellerhead Reason. “Every single thing we do is on an Apple computer,” says guitarist Jeeve. “Whether it’s mixing audio, doing videos or artwork, or writing music on the road with a laptop, we wouldn’t be able to do it any other way.”
Living the Dream
You don’t need millions of dollars in promotion money to build a successful rock band. The guys in Hypnogaja knew that from the beginning and built their band accordingly, promoting themselves with technology. The group began as a studio band, burning tracks directly to CD and distributing them electronically through iTunes and other online music distribution systems.
“We’re kind of a self-contained business,” says keyboardist Mark Nubar Donikian. “It’s all technology based. In the past, you had to have a million dollar recording budget and a $200,000 video — you had to do everything really expensively. You don’t have to do that anymore. Files are the new format.”
“We do a lot of promotion ourselves using things like Myspace and our website,” adds Donikian. “We put together our own promotional materials using Photoshop and book our own tours. We keep track of it all using iCal and Mail. Using the technology, we can be competitive with people who are much further along and much bigger than us. And that’s a big thing for us; we’re able to build our fan base and grow and we don’t need millions of dollars to do it.”
Hypnogaja recently signed with a small Hollywood label — one that understands that CDs and traditional media are slowly being replaced by online music stores. “Union State Records has that ideology,” says Donikian. “They distribute our CDs in mom and pop stores, even big stores like Best Buy, FYE, and Virgin Megastores, but they also really push electronic distribution. They understand that virtual distribution is taking a huge part of the market share away from traditional music stores.”
Driving Tracks
Many of Hypnogaja’s heartfelt harmonies are born within warm, comfortable home studios, but some emerge kicking and screaming while the group is on tour. “When we’re traveling, I’m just doing tracks for the band all the time, recording constantly on the laptop while we’re rolling around,” says Jeeve. “Same thing in the airplane or the train or anywhere.” The guitar player has become the band’s unofficial road recording engineer, laying down tracks in the back of the tour bus between performances. Many tracks on the band’s latest album, “Below Sunset,” began life as a back-of-the-bus demos.
“Jeeve is amazing with the laptop,” says Donikian. “We did an 80-show tour last year from May to November. We were constantly gone, traveling across 17 different states, and Jeeve had his setup in the van, making music the whole time.”
Jeeve runs Nuendo and Logic Pro on a PowerBook G4, recording instruments and vocals directly to the laptop hard drive. He uses a pair of noise-canceling headphones to drive out engine and road noise and simply edits away. “You can do everything on the road,” he says. “I can record bass, guitar, keyboards, program drums, and have a track at the end of a few hours that sounds like a record. It’s unbelievable that I can do all that with a little PowerBook. And it’s so easy to get back home and transfer everything to the studio Power Mac G5.”
Though those demos go through some processing before they are printed or released electronically, “sometimes we keep some of the stuff from the on-the-road demo process,” says Donikian. “There will be some cool sound design stuff or a great part — maybe a guitar riff has something special because it was recorded on the laptop one day on the van. We’ll keep those parts for a signature basis and add things around them.”
