Josh Gard, more popularly known as Figure, sat down with the Emerald after his set with Big Gigantic in Eugene. The 26-year-old from Evansville, Indiana had never performed in Eugene and was excited to sit down afterwards to talk about his music, the state of electronic music and just life in general.
How are you a product of your environment?
It’s kind of weird, there is nothing going on there [Evansville, Ind.]. There’s no scene, there’s nothing. There used to be a punk scene when I grew up and a little bit of a hip-hop scene but it was pretty much all of our friends.
Do you think that the punk scene had an effect on the music you make now?
Yeah, because I’m used to not really being influenced by anything directly around me. So, I still live there and I get to choose what I pull in. If you lived in Los Angeles or Houston where stuff is going on, you would be most naturally influenced off of that but there is nothing going on [in Evansville]. I live deep in the country surrounded by cornfields.
Do you enjoy that isolation?
Yeah, I mean I love big cities, but I get the fix on the weekend and I get to go home to a house in the country, silence. I get to shoot guns while cooking burgers on the back porch. It’s great.
How would you describe your music?
Nerdy, kind of ADD, semi-nonmusical music.
So what other artists do you support?
It’s pretty typical for me to say this but it’s what I believe, it’s a lot of my friends and people who are involved in our label: Killabit, Dr. Ozi, At Dawn We Rage, Mantis, there are so many more. I also support a lot of underground hip-hop artists that I grew up with. We’re all starting to work together and take it outside of just electronic music.
So why do you think this bass-focused style of music works well with the hip-hop crowd?
That’s what I saw in it when I first heard “original” dubstep from Benga and all of those guys. It was just big, simple drums and tiny things going on that made a big impact. It just sounded like hip-hop to me. It was slower, because no one really liked the backpack type stuff I would listen to, which was at 90BPM, but this [dubstep] was at 70 BPM, so it just sounded like hip-hop to me and I found it really interesting.
That’s why I kind of morphed into drumstep. I wasn’t really a big drum and bass fan for a long time, I’m a huge fan now but I didn’t grow up on that. So I started doing drumstep which is basically half time drum and bass. But it just sounds like hip-hop, same drums with erratic and crazy bass lines.
So do you think you can thrive in an environment where you can just basically do what you want?
Yeah because I can make any tempo of music as long as it has my sound. If a rock band made a dubstep, drum and bass or house song, that’s the band’s effort to merge into that [scene], but we can just do whatever we want. We can pull any element in… I think it’s one of the most open musical outlets out there.
Where do you think that trend is going?
If you would have asked me that question like a year ago, I wouldn’t have a clue, but everything is so open now. You can play a house song for the kids here [Eugene] and as long as you present it right they dig it. I don’t think it’s going in one particular direction, I feel like it’s not doing the typical thing of ‘where is this going to go next?’ Rather it’s ‘where is it not going next?’ I know it sounds corny, but you can seriously do anything. I mean you have Justin Bieber rapping on dubstep but it didn’t change the culture.
What do you enjoy doing outside of your music career?
Honestly, all I do when I’m home is play video games, hang out with my girlfriend and mess with my cats. Sometimes I read comic books or ride a bike. I’m on the road a lot so when I go home it’s not like I have a whole lot of time off. The most time I had off this year was like a week and a half. I just try to be human I guess.
So what do you think of the mainstream proliferation of electronic music?
I think it’s good. There is a downside to it but there is also a great side to it. Say the more shows that Sonny [Skrillex] does and the more people he introduces to it, the more people will indirectly come out to one of my shows. The more people that hear about the music the better, it doesn’t matter how it happens.
What do you enjoy most about your career as a musician?
There are a lot of things I enjoy. I used to work horrible, minimum wage jobs. I dropped out of college to do this. I started getting gigs while I was in school and I couldn’t manage both.
There is a certain freedom to not having to clock in, and your mind opens up and you can make all the music that you want. Then you start relating because you get to know your fans and it starts to become a family. So you become this administrator of your personal brand. It’s just a traveling family around the world. I’ll go to Rome and there are a bunch of kids there that remind me of the kids in Kentucky or Ohio.
There are the same types of people all over the world and I get to grab these people with the music I’m making. A lot of them influence me to make this type of music because I see how they react to it at shows and I start to enjoy it and I talked to them.
The freedom of not having to clock in gives me the opportunity to see the world. I’ve seen things that I never thought I’d have the opportunity to see, and then I get to go DJ and meet awesome people. It’s a privilege.
What would be one thing you would say to your Eugene fans?
Keep it up and I can’t wait to come back. I’ve never been here before, but I knew it was going to be a great show because Griz and Big Gigantic were on it but now that I’ve been introduced here I can’t wait to come back.