Sounding Out: Flash Fiktion

Flash Fiktion is a band on the rise, ready to release their debut album in mid May. The first time that I heard the band, a big smile came over my face. Flash Fiktion’s music is upbeat, happy, and fun and makes you want to get out of your chair and dance. With only a few songs released over the past few months, I wanted to track down the band to hear more.

A few days ago, I had an opportunity to Skype with the band from their London studio, where they are putting the finishing touches on their new album. They were excited to talk about the band and their music.

Having been together for two years, Dan Peranic, Matt Rokk, and Olie Thomas have found a sound and musical style that is quite different from what they were doing before they came together. I had read Matt describe their music as an eclectic mix of everything they love. Flamboyant melodies with Cuban beats dressed in electro hooks. Music that will make you jump up and down, he said.

“With this project we wanted to try something different and more organic than what we had done before. The sound that we are doing initially came by accident.” Dan said.

At the time they all met, Matt and Olie were trying to find a different sound, from the more straightforward stadium oriented rock that they had with their last band. Dan, who plays the drums, grew up on the coast of Croatia, and had a very different musical background. He explained, “The music along the coast is quite light and bright and summery and is heavily influenced by Afro-Cuban Jazz and reggae. Luckily, when we bumped into each other, we were all mentally looking for something different and things just clicked straight away, which made it easy to start working together.“

Flash Fiktion takes its name from the literary term flash fiction, which refers to story telling being done in an abbreviated fashion, usually in 300 to 1,000 words.  Olie had said in another interview, "It's not like a novel, drawn-out, something that thickens and develops. It's a narrative with a quick impact.“ They said that they are taking this idea applying it to songwriting.

On the forthcoming album, they said the songs are stories about real people that they know or knew and events that the three of them have experienced. Dan referred to them as chapters in time. As an example, they talked about the song Capsules Of Sun. “This is a song about a girl who went to school with Matt who ended up using too many drugs from being too stressed from life and having a kid at a very, very young age. She just ended up ruining herself in that manner.”

I told them that this was dark material for such an up beat song. “If you are listening to……good pop music, the melodies should be catchy and fun, but behind it there should be thought and intelligence.”

Capsules Of Sun   

With such abbreviated story telling, I asked if all the songs needed to be a certain length of time? “In the process of writing this album we let our hearts decide how it was going to sound. And we never actually thought about how long a song is going to last. We just write it. If it fits for a song to be two and a half minutes that’s great. If it needs to be ten minutes, it can be ten.” Having said this, Dan added, they did not want to go into anything that was too self-indulgent.

“We wrote lots of songs. Some go seven or more minutes. We just did not know how those longer songs would reflect on a first album. We are trying to combine the pop side along with the artistic side and make sure that we do not loose our audience. People love putting music into boxes today. And from our perspective, as soon as you do a ten-minute song they are going to say ‘ah, that’s a bit too proggy.’” And with that they said, the focus that they want the audience to have with their music and what they are all about musically may be lost.

I wondered if it was difficult to balance creating songs that are at once pretty complex in form and yet sound fairly relaxed and casual.

"That is the most difficult thing to do". But they said making a difficult thing sound simple was one of their goals. “It’s like you listen to a song and think, oh this is quite simple and then when you actually go and analyze it and you can hear that there are four key changes and 15 chords…..We take what we do very seriously and loads of work have been put into these songs to make them as good as possible. Every element on every song has been thought through and is intentional, right down to smallest shaker that maybe in the background of a song."

Dan added that in wanting to make the album sound as good as possible, they sought input from people in the industry. Unfortunately, there was disappointment, when, after months of requests, they got no responses. Then they heard from Alex ‘Lexxx’ Dromgoole, a highly regarded engineer, who has worked with artists from Arcade Fire to Madonna.

“Lexx decided that he wanted to work on it because he loved what we were doing. It was obviously not about the money because we could not afford to pay him much of anything. It gave us confidence and a boost that there are people who are recognizing and like what we are doing.” Now, they said, it all comes down to marketing and getting their music out there.

In another interview the band said that they did not fear the current music environment and finding a place for the band and their music. I told them that while I appreciated the band's confidence, I was curious how it is that they are not more anxious about launching their music and finding an audience at a time where there is so much easily accessible music for people.

Dan said, “No matter how cheezy it may sound, we are definitely confident in the songs and in our performance. And we are definitely excited.” They then went on to say that they believe what will help make them successful is that their music cannot be put into a category and will stand out. They said this feeling is drawn from the past experiences that Matt and Olie had with their last band.

“All of us have been in bands or played with people even when it didn't feel quite right. All of us went though the stages in our lives when we were hoping that our previous projects will make that huge impact. But in the end you realize that you have be true to yourself. That's why this feels right. You have to wear the clothes you love and you have to play the music that REALLY is YOU. As soon as there is too much input from 50 different people, mess begins, and before you know it you are doing something that's not you and an audience can feel the fake. Sure, you can always bombard people with your music and put millions of £££ behind it but it will never stay."  

They added that hundreds of bands in London today look the same, they have the same haircuts, and they sound the same....and they don’t think young people today have as many options for music as people had growing up 15 or 20 years ago. Dan said, "UK TOP 20 in is either indie/electro or R&B and that's where it ends."  

I asked them if not having a more categorize-able musical style could backfire on them in some way. I told them that I had read one, not so great review of a show that the band played back in November. In the review, the writer took issue with the fact that they thought they were going to hear a band with one kind of a sound and got there and heard a different kind of a sound. Dan admitted that what they are doing is a bit risky.

“It is a really bizarre thing here in England at the moment. Everything has to be boxed and there is not a lot of room for somebody trying to do something different….I don’t understand it. For us the music that we do has to excite us and has to be exciting. If you are going to come to rehearsal or go to a gig and have this feeling of being bored to death, then there is not much point in writing it.”

Me And Mr. E   

They said the response that the writer of that review had of the band’s performance is exactly what they want to avoid, but not because what they are doing is wrong, rather, it's because the expectation of the listener needs to be different. I told them that what I found interesting about our discussion, was that while they are talking about not having their sound or style being put in a box by others, it seemed to me that the band actually wants to create their own box and do have some kind of description that they want people to be using in talking about their sound. I asked if that was a fair assessment.

“Exactly it is.” Said Dan. “We do want people to hear our music and say ‘oh yeah, that is Flash Fiktion. For us, with every band that we listened to growing up, you could hear straight away what band it was. We want our music to be recognizable like that.“ I asked them about this box that their music fits in. “It’s a bit extravagant sounding. It’s quite dancy, it got electro-indulgence, it’s got Cuban and Indian influence in it.”

Flash Fiktion has a game plan and it seems to be working so far. Their single is being received very well and is getting quite a bit of airplay. They said that it has been a ridiculous amount of work, but that the band is happy to have produced something that they really believe in. “Even if nothing happens now, ten, fifteen years down the line, we want to be able to listen to this album and say wow we made some great songs and we are proud of what we have done.”

Listening to this album, I would tend to agree with them that their music will find an audience, and a pretty broad one. The songs on this album are just great and I have been thoroughly enjoying the fruits of their labor.