Crossing musical frontiers in every direction they tread, Almost Everywhere are a San Francisco based EDM collective that have some serious vibe. Mostly anonymous, largely faceless but hardly talentless, they’ve already built a strong Soundcloud following which belies the group’s age.
But thankfully, they’re not uncontactable! Eager to find out a little more about this mysterious group, we recently got in touch.
A tour-de-force of audiovisual production and creative intrigue, Almost Everywhere are the American collective on everybody’s lips.
HAPPY: Hey, how are you going? What are you up to at the moment?
AE: Things are great. There’s been such an awesome reception to our releases. We are dialling in the next batch of music and using what we learned from these releases to hone in our tracks even more.
HAPPY: You’re an ambitious project. Where and how did Almost Everywhere get started?
AE: Almost Everywhere was born out of the idea that music can be new and fun, mark a point in time, and also have deep meaning. We wanted to create a project that encouraged our audience to understand our messages of honesty, vulnerability and reflection.
HAPPY: I love the mystery behind the act – why did you decide to keep your members a secret?
AE: Almost Everywhere is a big idea. And much to our promoter’s chagrin, we try not to drive the act with overt sexuality of young women or images of us. We believe that approach is painfully one dimensional. Instead, we seek other ways to tell our story. And as more of our singles come out, our fans will be able to piece the puzzle together, and it will have everything to do with the content and very little to do about the team behind the curtain.
HAPPY: Your three songs seem to cross a lot of ground, sonically. Is this diversity something you hold at the centre of Almost Everywhere?
AE: We are the biggest fans of music and sound design. We regularly audit tracks, film scores and dialogue treatments, and talk about their sonic qualities from an emotional and technical standpoint. In the end, it always comes down to, how does this make us feel? That’s the million dollar question. And how can we contextualise those emotions for Almost Everywhere? Thankfully our production team has decades of experience in other production disciplines. Film, video games, ads, corporate etc. That experience allows us to reference sonic signatures that can make our music cinematic in some sections and club banging in others. Nothing pleases us more than when we can keep that kind of diversity and surprise in our music.
HAPPY: There seems to be a ton of you involved. How do you find working with such a large collective?
AE: We feel very fortunate to work with each other. Almost Everywhere is a collective of music producers, designers, coders, animators, photographers, videographers, and other multi-hyphenates. In one way or another we have been working with this core team for over 12 years on various paid and non-paid projects. We still see and hear a lot of our corporate work all over the world. We try and not let the creative of Almost Everywhere fall down anywhere. From the production to the designs to the videos. We always strive to get it right in the time we have, and there would be no way for us to produce the quality work we do if we did not have the team that we have. There are disagreements, but in the end we always concede to the vision of the project.
HAPPY: Are you each involved with your own music projects?
AE: There is no exclusivity contract with our project and every artist is free to work on what ever they want to produce. As we know in show business, finalising, releasing and promoting the tracks is the real challenge and we are happy to support each other with other projects.
HAPPY: The Survival clip is nuts. Who did you work with on this one?
AE: We have been HUGE fans of the Academy Of Villains for years. They are hands down the top hip-hop dance crew in the world and they have rehearsal studios near us. We reached out to them to see if we could collaborate on the Survival music video and things progressed from there. As you can imagine they are super busy but somehow the stars aligned and we were able to get a window of time to make that happen.
HAPPY: Your live show also seems like it would have to be huge. Can you tell us about it?
AE: We are a very visual project and creating an atmosphere to stage our music important to us. Also being San Francisco based, there is a high bar to impress an audience that has literally “seen it all”. We are currently prototyping different set-ups of projection, aural treatments and live choreography and performance to create an experience that not only will scintillate the eyes and ears of our audience, but also tingle their brains and hearts. We are striving to create those moments when the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
HAPPY: What have you got coming up?
AE: We have more chapters of our story to tell. And a show to put on when it is ready. Stay tuned for more from us, as we are just getting started.
