Fish Narc’s Ben Funkhouser has been an artist as long as he can remember. Pulling influence from all of his favorite mediums, he’s been working behind the scenes and on the main stage of some of the most significant alternative music movements of the past decade, including the continued rise of punk into the mainstream, indie rock, and perhaps even most significantly, Soundcloud rap as a member of Gothboiclique. Fish Narc’s latest output is approachable yet complex, blending the alt-rock sound of the ‘90s with more modern indie sensibilities. Funhouser is pulling from numerous influences when he’s creating, and one of the most prominent is his love of anime. I spoke with him about the new album, Frog Song , which anime helped shape the record and the indelible effect that anime has had on his perception of art. How does it feel to have your album Frog Song out into the world? Ben Funkhouser : It feels amazing. The album was something we conceived of on the road a couple of years ago and I've never really put the pieces together so fast to make it work. This album marks a departure of a lot of structure from my life and work and the imposition of my own usual structure on things. This is an album that I'm really proud of, and I love, but it also represents me, like, taking matters into my own hands and it feels great. So this is pure distilled you isn’t it? because I know you've dabbled in a lot of genres and a lot of styles of production. But this seems to be a departure from what you've typically done. Funkhouser : That's it. It was a lot of genre mixing and bending and stuff like that came from this idea that it's all bedroom music. It's all home recording, singer/songwriter stuff, and whether or not the drums have 808 or like the voice has autotune, in my mind that it's all kind of the same stuff. I think I got caught up a little bit in the details of being this rocker who was brought into an underground rap collective, partially because I was a punk and they wanted a wide array of different types of artists in the groups after Raider Clan broke up and different members started their own crews. That was the genesis of the Soundcloud movement. The one I was based in Seattle prided itself on having a lot of rockers in it. I didn't get into that intending to make rap beats, but I was kind of grandfathered in and taught. People said, “Oh you play guitar, you gotta make beats.” I was sampling from my own past as a rocker as I learned and eventually I got to the point where it really flipped and I spent more years doing beat making than I had been in bands before. So making solo records after that, I was always trying to show the rap production side of stuff because I wanted to represent that I didn't see making rap as a stepping stone for anything, that it was a true, like a huge part of my identity. In a weird full circle moment, this album, which has the least kind of obvious traces of that, is still connected in that same sense that I was trying to sample from the identity that would make this record when I was making. RELATED: BABYMETAL on the Success of METAL FORTH and the One-Punch Man Season 3 Opening Absolutely. I'm wondering if anime helped open your mind to your musical endeavors? Funkhouser : Dude. Part of what I was so excited about this interview for was that it's like anime is the connecting link, for I think a lot of the people of my generation. Where I was first encountering the most avant-garde music was the filler music in Toonami, and my first experiences of adult media, which sounds like I'm talking about porn but I mean like smart art stuff, actually good, intelligent television was anime. I didn't grow up in a house with cable, but I had friends whose parents had it. I started watching anime, probably around 1999, 2000. That would be at my friend's house with the parents who worked a lot and weren't around and didn't have as many rules. And they had a giant box TV, like the size of a king mattress. We would stay up really late watching Cartoon Network ‘til it ended and then I would see Tom. I have a memory of seeing a “Clint Eastwood” Gorillaz video on Toonami. I think it must have been in the early 2000s, and thinking what the f*ck like, I couldn't determine whether or not it was like programming from the network or something they were featuring. It was a precursor to my artistic output. My favorite anime is Samurai Champloo . I love the hip-hop aspect of it. I love The Boondocks as well, and The Boondocks is a great thing that was influenced by Samurai Champloo . In the Soundcloud movement, we were in a collective called Drax House and there was a person in Drax House who was a full-fledged member and all they did was make anime edits of songs and it was a real art form where they were bringing out like emotional sequences or things that showed power or reflecting on the themes of the songs. And, like, those were huge ways that that kind of music was disseminated. It wasn't just like, “Oh, one show or another really influenced me,” although I do have an example of a show whose soundtrack, like still, is actually really influential on this most recent album. But I can get to that later. But it's the world building aspect of it, like this sense of like a total work of art. Where you're watching this programming but then there's meta programming with the drama with Tom or his replacement. It was just opening my eyes to more intellectual ideas that could be conveyed with art. I mean I also watched Neon Genesis Evangelion as a kid, too young to understand, and then came back to it as a teen, able to understand, and thinking… still, to this day I can't think of any other animated media that's, like, really gotten at depression in that way. Sorry, I’m rambling (laughs). No, it's great to hear that there's layers to it. The packaging, the story content, it helped you and a lot of other people watching at that age realize what they were seeing was different from the norm of what was on television at the time. All of that was coming together and influencing you from a really early age. Funkhouser : Very early. Some of my earliest experiences with art, of noticing aesthetics, even the sense of a show like Dragon Ball Z , which is like, there's so much that's been said about it, but as a young person, I noticed that there was more artistry to that than there was to a lot of other animated programming. It felt like I was getting to cheat and see it staying up past my bedtime and seeing things that weren’t meant for me yet. That feeling of discovery is baked into my relationship with anime. It's coming back to me just talking to you about it right now, like I took some notes for this, or I was like, because I want to touch on this stuff and not and not forget. And I knew I was going to describe that. But like, it's actually making me feel something right now, just thinking about those hours on my laptop watching episodes broken up into 20 parts. So was there a show that influenced the new album? Funkhouser : So it was Penguindrum . I have been meaning to re-watch it. It's been almost 10 years since I watched it. But the aesthetics of the show, you know, and the fact that they had these weird breaks and the narrative was unclear. It's definitely a modernist thing, or maybe, like a postmodernist thing, I'm a little bit out of college to the point where I have my theory a little bit mixed up. But when it feels like you're in a video game home screen sometimes, or like the little extra stuff that's going on in the corners, and particularly the soundtrack to that show, and especially the ending credits. There was a song called “Dear Future” by Coaltar of the Deepers, which is like a J-Rock, shoegaze band. I mean, a lot of people got into The Pillows from FLCL , and I somehow missed that. But Coaltar of the Deepers was my intro to J-Rock, and in that song “Dear Future” they use Midi drums, and as a producer I was trying to figure out how to have realistic rock Midi drums just for economy. If that song came out today, it would be on editorial Spotify playlists and they’d be opening for Deftones or something. I don't know. That song just hit me. One of the singles from Frog Song called “Old Man,” when I was making it I was thinking I was trying to make something that hit like “Dear Future.” Penguindrum is a freaky show, though. It's a strange one. The way it looks and the era that it evokes and stuff like that, very cool, very cool show. I love the feeling of older anime Were you getting into music and making music around the same time as you were watching Toonami and feeling all of these feelings? Funkhouser : I got into anime before. I got into making my own music in 2007. At that point, I wasn't watching TV at all. I had a computer in my room. That was the era of me watching full shows on sketchy sites because I wanted to feel that sense of completion. I wanted to watch every episode of my favorite shows in a way that I couldn't do when it was just TV. So I was like, “I'm gonna watch every episode of Dragon Ball . And then every episode of Dragon Ball Z .” So at that point, I was also like, that's like web 1.5. I was madly involved with DIY indie punk. I was the youngest member of the Seattle DIY collective, which is like a lot of anarchists and like showgoing people through radical events. And at that time I was, like, just so feet on the ground, on the computer to only watch movies or watch anime or download music. And then I would put the music on my iPod and go, and at that time, there wasn't as much co-mingling as there had been previously, but that said my sense of beats and rhythm and sh*t absolutely developed before I was making music. Really, I just wanted to write guitar songs. Animal Collective was the most accessible kind of noise, experimental band for me. I listened to them and I was imagining really successful Toonami filler music. I didn't know who Flying Lotus was at the time. There is convergence there, but in my mind, I was drawing those connections as well. I think it really came full circle when I became like a beat maker. It was kind of in the post band era for me. I was 21 at the time, I think, when my last band before Fish Narc became a band again broke up. That was when I was watching Penguindrum . That was when I was watching Akira like once a month, and Ghost in the Shell and re-watching Neon Genesis Evangelion , and honestly, deeply, deeply depressed and consuming media that reflected that. RELATED: Blessthefall: Anime is a Vessel That Connects Heavy Music Fans You've mentioned how anime made you feel a bunch of times, and I'm wondering if that deep emotional connection is really what helped make anime resonate with the whole collective. Or fans of alternative heavy experimental music as a whole. Do you think that's what draws these groups together? Funkhouser : In my mind, the reason why anime is such a unifier and so popular is that it ties back to what I was saying earlier about people born in the ‘90s, that was the first media that we consumed that was emotionally deep and also artistically valid and unpatronizing and unco-signed by our parents and not understood necessarily by our parents. It’s something that we found. It just pulled any person who had an artsiness to them, or an atypical emotional framework, or outsider way of looking at the world. I almost can't say there's just no way to conceive of my art without that connection. There just wasn't media that was made for people, our age that had that much depth. I can't think of many things that are that important to me from before I became an artist and it's like it was punk, anime, and hip-hop. Fundamentally, it made me want to make better art.
