Exclusive Interview with Opium for the Masses

A Band You Should Know, You Can Find on MySpace

I'm not a MySpace junkie who spends all day looking to meet new and interesting people to kill. (Little Vietnam-era joke there.) I have a MySpace page, but I'm rather stingy about accepting friends. I like the friends on my MySpace page to be either genuine friends, Associated Content writers, or strangers whom I admire for one reason or another. Recently I got an invite from the band Opium for the Masses and as soon as I checked out their MySpace page, I knew I had found kindred spirits. They combine two of my musical passions: Gang of Four style Marxism with New Order style electronic music. A duo formed by two guys named David-David Mirand and Dave Pollack-Opium for the Masses is a band you should get to know. I conducted an exclusive interview with band member David Mirand:

Let me guess. You and Dave Pollack were both originally trained as classical musicians at some snobby musical conservatory and fell into electronic music by accident.

We actually have no musical training at all. I simply picked up everything from my friends. Dave Pollack, on the other hand, has always been that guy with the acoustic guitar who taught himself. Dave Pollack does most of the writing, whereas I do most of the engineering and arrangement. We both use Apple Logic Pro to build our tracks with its built in instrumentation, but we also use guitars externally.

Electronic music was really at the forefront of the social counterculture in the 1980s. Even a band as big as New Order is still considered something of an underground cult band in many ways. That electronic revolution exploded in the 90s with the rise of the computer and the democratization of art. Where does Opium for the Masses fit into this evolution?