Jason Hann: In EOTO world it changed quite a while ago. When we first started we had quite a few String Cheese fans since they were the only ones who knew about us.  A lot of them didn’t really like it at first because it wasn’t as organic as String Cheese and featured the use of computers. We weren’t drawing large crowds in the beginning and began to see even less fans so we decided to take a new approach as if we were starting a new band with no fanbase. We began to develop our own sound and even took the String Cheese affiliation off of our pages to get rid of any expectations fans may have had.  It was just two dudes showing up to play improvised music.  There was a huge boost in our fan base once we started incorporating the ‘Dubstep’ into our music. Especially since when we first started doing it, it had not really hit the states yet in the more aggressive, rage, full teeth and nails, style that you see today. It began much mellower sort of the way EOTO’s dubstep began and developed into the sound you hear today. As the sound developed the crowd did as well and became much younger and more accepting of all the kinds of sound we produced. This bass music that’s out today is kind of these kids’ rock and roll. Kids come out in piles and piles and can’t get enough of it.  It’s amazing and we’re honored to have them come out.

Jason Hann: Well the guys in the band never minded the EOTO side project, they just thought we were crazy. But it was never that they didn’t like it. The electronic sound has always been in Cheese since 1999 and Sound Tribe Sector 9 was a big influence on that. And if course Travis was on the playa with Loren (Bassnectar) back in ‘98.  So its always been around but this year, and at Electric Forest in particular was probably the first time we felt like we were cohesive going through all the styles. If you look at our setlist it wasn’t as if we played a lot more electronic music, but when we did we were going for a very specific thing so it felt like it had more impact when we did do it.

Oh yeah that’s definitely one everyone was talking about and you get kind of a love or hate thing. Some people hated it but there were so many kids who came up to us afterwards and said, “That was the fattest bass thing all weekend.”  So it’s a mixed bag and as far as our other stuff goes Travis and I will rarely say, “Hey lets do something electronic.” If we’re trying to re-arrange a classic cheese song.  On the other hand, with Joyful Sound, Keith really didn’t want to sing that song again unless we did something different with it. We just search to keep pushing. It’s not always an electronic push sometimes it’s more of an African push or some other kind of style of push. That being said, the electronic style is probably the one that gets the most noticed especially since we have the EOTO side project.

It has definitely been growing. We have been selling out larger venues than before and headlining festivals such as The Big Up and Rhinofest this year.

Yea all the songs I sing I pick totally on the fly. I have my ipad up there and that’s kind of a word reminder for me. All kinds of songs go through my head while we’re playing but I don’t really know the words to any of them. At some point I decided that I needed a way of when a song pops into my head of having a good chance of accessing it, putting an effect on it and making it seem like a live remix of a song. The music underneath it is going to be totally different so its kind of like dropping an a capella in and pitch shifting it or doing something else weird to it. None of it is planned out it just happens in the moment when we feel it would be a good place to do it. It doesn’t always work out, but usually it feels good. Especially when it really taps in and you can feel the surge of the crowd being like is that? is that? Oh Oh it is! It has really been a fun thing to do in the last year.

Tonight for instance we decided before the show to start out with some drum n’ bass just to do things different because there’s been a really long time where when we come out and the crowds energetic we just decide to do the nastiest thing up front. For instance there were a couple of sets that we did this week where we started with something different like a120 house beat or a 105 bpm funk thing and those ended up being great because the whole dynamic of the set changed for us. Tonight we started out with some drum and bass and then went into some drum step and then based the whole profile of the set from there.

The drops don’t necessarily come off the crowd but you can usually feel it. Yeah we’re the ones doing the drop but the crowd does the drop too and sometimes that’s when you want to do it. Other times you want to do it when people are least expecting it. If were doing a trance thing and we can tell everyone is tranced out then we might decide to mess that up a little bit. Then when we break that you see it in people’s faces and the crowd gets wild. It makes it feel playful and much more interactive.

Thanks. It’s made by this company called Spaun drums. They’ve been making custom made drums for a bunch of years. They aren’t a huge drum company but they’re very specialized. People that get their drums know that they are really great quality as far as the sound. At some point about 6 months ago I was looking online to see what kind of led lights you could put on a drum set. But most of them looked more like Christmas lights strung on the drums which I thought were kinda corny. When I saw these guys’ set I thought the effect looked really nice with an almost cloudy light to it. Since then we’ve met this lighting guy from the midwest named Herm who wants to take my drums and do really individual things to them to get patterns going. Almost like deadmau5 ears or something or have different words scroll on it. We’ll see how it goes.  It’s quite the endeavor but we’ve had a good response with them so far so lets see how far we can push it.

It’s a smaller drum kit than normal but the same size set I’ve always used for EOTO. My piccolo snare drum has a 13” diameter. I have another little snare drum called a popcorn snare drum which is only 8” in diameter so it’s kind of abnormally small. The kick drum is also small with an 18” diameter but only a 10” width. They are really odd sizes. One reasons why they’re that size is so they could fit in the RV that we have always traveled in and also because we have gotten so used to the sound. It also sounds like somewhat of a different drum set and we were going for that too without putting electronics on it.

Yeah you did as a matter of fact we now are traveling in a full size tour bus, no more Rocky.

We’ve got Minneapolis this year and the day before we’ll be in Salt Lake City. The show in Salt Lake City is with a guy that runs this stage at Burning Man called Temple of Boom. He’s got the most amazing sound system on the playa. We played there for the first time this year and he hadn’t heard of us. But when he saw us he was like, “Oh man.” He deals with all kinds of really big acts, he’s had Bassnectar out there for years and he hadn’t heard of us. But he knew our manager and we were able to work out New Years Eve so that should be a really big show. And Minneapolis, ever since the first time we played out there it has been a really big city for us. Really feel love and great energy there.

When I think about the special guests we’ve played with its pretty cool. We had this lady play with us in Hawaii, Toni Childs, who is a singer/songwriter who had some really cool hits out in the 90’s. We also had 5 drummers from the cast of STOMP play with us. They were doing a show in FortColins at a theater across the street from where we were playing. They had just finished rehearsing and decided to come to the show. We got talking and they brought pots and pans over and we set up mics and started playing together. We played in Boon, North Carolina the same night Umphrey’s was playing and all the guys from Umphrey’s came to our show and all the guys sat in except for Andy. But all the rest of the guys: Kris Myers, and Jake, and Bayliss, and Joel all got on our EOTO gear and myself and Travis sat back and let them take over for a while.

We’ve also done a bunch with Steve Kimock and Jamie Janover sets as Praang which is always a lot of fun. We have also played a few times with Kyle Hollingsworth and Michael Kang. We have done a few shows the last one we called The Trancidant. It just puts everyone in a different mode of thinking. There was a soul singer who was my original inspiration for looping in the mid 90’s. I played with him for about 3 years overseas in Europe and he sat in with us. Ultimately the sound in which we are most comfortable is when we are doing our duo thing, but that’s the fun part about guests once in a while because it makes us have to play different too. Listen to that other instrument and kind of blend our thing with them.

No, not yet we finish with EOTO on Halloween night and then November 5^th we will get back in the practice studio with String Cheese and practice the rest of November. Then fly out to Asheville and have Thanksgiving out in Asheville, North Carolina together, play the next night and start that whole tour. That’s going to be amazing because we’re all getting in the bus together again and we haven’t done that in years…It’s a pretty big step you know because we’re going to suddenly be together for that amount of time after not doing that for three years maybe more.

Yeah that’s the plan: spending a couple hours practicing at sound check each day or learning a new song. There’s just that day in and day of doing it and not necessarily going home at the end of the day. It’s another thing living it on the day to day with the guys you’re making music with. Everyone’s super psyched and were looking forward to it.

Possibly the very last night of Chicago I will probably do a Prophet Massive DJ set but other than that we kind of made a pact with the other members of Cheese for each other that we wouldn’t do our side projects for after shows because you deal with not only getting other band members out there and flights but also you worry about sound check. The day of the show we want to make sure we can concentrate on just String Cheese for the day. Sometimes when you are thinking about the after party, do I have all my gear for that band?  How do I get it out there?  Did the other people make it?  It can be distracting. It’s kind of like how at ElectricForest we didn’t do our set until the last night, after we had finished playing all of the String Cheese shows.   It feels good like that because when we are in String Cheese mode we are all very present and not thinking about other stuff.

It’s just been a long time since Cheese has been on tour. Besides Hampton, Virginia it has been a long time since we have been to the northeast which is one of the reasons why we’re touring there and Chicago We really haven’t done the west coast I mean its just been a really long time. It’s been a lot of Colorado, and Horning’s, and ElectricForest, and of course Rothbury. It’s a good start, we will get together and see were we are at, at the end of it.

Ahh, not immediately. When we get together in November we will have a meeting and plan out our schedule for the following year and at that point we will see where we are at. We won’t be doing a New Years this year so I’m almost positive we will next year. Everyone was itching to this year we just thought about it too late so I’m pretty sure we will plan to jump on a New Years show early to secure exactly where we want to play it and do things the way we want to do them.

Probably not. It will be all full nights with String Cheese. We’re playing on smaller stages and its going to be a little bit much to have to strike any gear or anything. I think we just want to feel like we’re where we’re at and that it is our home for the night. Same for the String Cheese fans we want to be able to play a lot more music than normal and use all the time we have and make each of those shows as special as we can.

Hmm, what would it be?  I don’t know, probably something like an intergalactic squid. It takes all kinds of forms and shapes, we definitely change up the tone and texture of it throughout the night. There is definitely some pretty alien stuff going on, on stage some stuff is kind of beyond our control… I don’t know… definitely some kind of space creature. I’m not committed to it, but let’s go with that for now.

Eric: My name is Eric McEwen and I play keyboards.

Aaron: My name’s Aaron Morey, I play drums and cymbols.

Luke: Luke Stratton, I play guitar and I sing.

Matt: Matt Drummey, I play bass.

Eric: We met at Berklee actually. Aaron and I were the first ones to meet. A long time ago at Berklee… 2008 maybe?

Aaron: Before that even.

Eric: Oh yea 2007, the band was formed in 2008. Aaron and myself met at Berklee. We played a lot of jam band music together at Berklee and shortly after that, Luke came along.

Luke: Well we met in a class called Jam Band Ensemble. We were all kind of black sheep at Berklee because we all thought, well at least I thought that there would be a lot of “jam kids” there but there weren’t really. And this guy named John Funkhouser taught this class first semester and we were all signed up for it but I had actually moved home for a year. So they met in that class. Then a year later, Aaron took it again and I took it. From there he was like “Oh I know this keyboard player…” and it sort of took off from there.

Eric: We played with another bass player for a really long time named Wally.

Luke: Yea we’ve played with a couple bass players.

Eric: Matt, who’s on the bass currently, joined in April which was only three months ago. And let me tell ya…

Luke: Yes, we kinda feel like now the band is really starting to take off.

Eric: Yea we feel like we really have a band now.

Luke: Welcome buddy [to Matt].

Aaron: No comment.

Eric: No comment!

Aaron: It was Luke.

SCR: Off the record?

Matt: I was not involved.

Eric: Let’s just say one of us has a huge penis. [laughing]

SCR: Oh I see…

Eric: Just kidding.

Aaron: I say, you might want to Google that.

Eric: Yea Google it.

Aaron: I think what it came down to is we just really liked it.

Luke: And it’s memorable. Mondo also means big and world and geckos are cool animals so…

Eric: This is the most beating around the bush answer [laughs]

SCR: It’s a cool mascot.

Aaron: You nailed it.

Eric: As a group that’s definitely true.

Aaron: For me, you know, the Dead and Phish are equally at the top of my list.

SCR: Of course.

Aaron: Some Zappa, Steely Dan, jazz and classical music. Those come right after.

Luke: The coolest thing about being a part of Mondo Gecko is it’s pretty much a dream job. You get to play whatever you want and it’s like “Oh this song really affected our lives, whether it’s a Led Zepplin tune or a Phish tune.” Or “This song’s really important to me…let’s play it”.

Aaron: Yes I was at Lowell.

SCR: I was too.

Luke: I didn’t but I did see a bunch of the Phish shows. Phish was definitely the reason I started playing guitar. But you know anything from Pink Floyd and Bob Marley to drum n bass and techno are big influences on me.

Luke: It’s both really.

Aaron: A lot of it is a group effort. Luke writes a lot of material.

Luke: Yea, I think right now Eric and I both write a lot of different stuff. But we’ll often bring an idea in and then kind of massage it and mature it as a band. Sometimes it’ll just be one part like some vocals or a chord or something. Sometimes it’ll be fully written out. We try to do as much like “Oh you know, this is the idea, but lets tweak it and try a different feel and add new parts on top so that it becomes something better than the sum of its parts.”

Luke: You mean in the writing process?

SCR: Yea

Eric: We’ve never started on a jam.

Aaron: I think sometimes we’ll have a groove in mind. I know Luke starts a lot with lyrics, right?

Luke: Yea I go back and forth but lately I’ve been writing a lot of the songs we have now by starting with a lyric or a chorus or something. Then we add other parts to it.

Aaron: We wrote a new song over the last week, for tonight.

Luke: That song, we don’t have a name for it yet but it started with a bunch of lyrics then we just kinda shaped it in band practice.

Eric: Yes.

Luke: We have a lot of songs that maybe we’ve played before but we decide to rest it for a while or come back to it later.

Matt: We definitely have some songs now that are out of the rotation.

Luke: But that’s cool though because it makes them kind of rare and then maybe later we’ll love them again.

Matt: They’re bust outs.

Aaron: At this point we’ve scrapped quite a few songs.

Luke: We’re working on it.

Aaron: We’ve attempted to record one several times but then the bass player flaked out.

Luke: Yea, we’ve had a lot of member changes.

Aaron: But now we have a solid lineup.

Luke: And somewhere to record.

Aaron: The plans are in the works.

Luke: So, the answer is it’ll be out in the fall. We actually have a live EP called Above The Notch that we just put out online. It’s a free release. We did that show up in Franconia, New Hampshire and it’s got a bunch of covers strung together with a few originals. It was a real magical night. We also have a demo.

SCR: Yea I’ve listened to that. It’s really great.

Luke: Next weekend we’re in Maine at the Somerset County Jam. It’s one of the Maine Vocals events. In October we’re back at Harvest Fest. We’re also doing The Big Up with The Breakfast and RAQ. That’s gonna be our biggest festival yet. We’re doing Nectar’s up in Burlington, Vermont in August, Brattleboro, Empire in Portland, Maine. We got a bunch of them all in New England really. Go to the website and check them out.

Luke: This guy named Andrew.

SCR: How do you know him or how did you get the gig?

Luke: I think that he just wanted to throw a Breakfast festival and called them and said “Hey, I wanna throw a festival” and Adrian the drummer was like “Oh cool, that’d be great. Do you have a name yet? No? Why don’t we call it BreakFEST” and Andrew was like “Oh…sick”. And Adrian asked if he had any other bands lined up and Andrew said no not really. This is our fourth show we’ve played with The Breakfast so Adrian was like “Well, how about Mondo Gecko?” and Andrew said “Okay, ya cool”. For us it’s great. We love these guys. This is one of the few bands we’d go see anyway. So to not only play right before them but actually share the stage with them at the beginning of our set, Tim and Jordan were up playing with us, it was really cool.

Aaron: We think these guys are one of the top bands on the scene.

Luke: They should be up there with Umphrey’s and String Cheese.

Aaron: And they’re super cool guys.

Luke: Have you seen them before?

SCR: No I haven’t.

Luke: Oh they’re gonna blow your mind.

Aaron: I emailed them and a friend of mine is doing all the visuals for the people who put it on like projections and stuff. So I think he might have passed our name along.

Luke: Honestly, it’s sort of slowly beginning to seep into the jamband collective’s mind. You know we do a lot of stickering at Phish shows, and Nateva and Dead shows. And we know these guys (The Breakfast) and these guys know RAQ and I kind of know Chris from RAQ. So all that slowly starts to help us make our way.

SCR: Nice.

Luke: Matt, anything you’d like to say? Usually Matt talks a ton when it’s just us.

Matt: I mean it’s just really fun to be able to go up on stage and anything goes and if you feel something you can play it. The three of them are just along for the ride at that point.

Luke: It’s really anything goes at any moment.

SCR: That’s awesome.

Matt: I mean anything can happen. It’s really nice to have that feeling while you’re up on stage that anything you do will be absorbed by the three other guys. They’re actually listening to everything you’re playing and they’re not just playing their part.

Luke: I would say, the biggest piece of advise I can give is to not give up and to give it 110%. That’s a little cliché but we’ve played with some bands along the way who we thought were better than us but who already have no fans or have broken up and had problems because they weren’t “in it”. That’s the problem, everyone in the band has to be into it. If somebody’s not into it, you need to find somebody else.

Eric: Enjoy future shows everybody. Look us up.

Luke: Yea hang out on MondoGecko.com where we have all our news. And look out for our new album. Check us out on facebook too.

SCR: Alright well thanks a lot guys.