Disturbed Furniture reunited after a decades-long hiatus and are back in true form. The band recently dropped their comeback project Continuous Pleasures; a five song EP. To keep up with the latest on Disturbed Furniture, follow along with them on their social media. Alexa Hunter of Disturbed Furniture spoke with LM2’s Dylan Bowker for this installment of Liberty Music.
Continuous Pleasures
Despite being dormant for three decades, the band emphatically and spontaneously burst back onto the scene. Hunter stated, “It’s very exciting. It’s very unexpected. It kind of began as a one-shot….I was inspired to contact former members of the band and suggest getting back together. We just got swept into the swirl of this reinvestigation of that time. Late 70’s-early 80’s New York band scene.”
An influential set of live shows created a ripple effect that would eventually lead to the recording of new material. Hunter said, “The museum show was up for seven or eight months in New York. I went back on three different occasions. We kept getting booked. Bowery Electric and the Mercury Lounge…..I realized that it was moving forward like a little snowball getting bigger.”
Hunter continued, “I thought it would be really cool to go back in the recording studio….It was rather spontaneous. I found a studio in Brooklyn that was really analog oriented. In the beginning, the recording was an analog recording project. It ended up having some digital overlays on it but the heart and soul of it was analog. Get back in the studio and bring those old vibes back from the 80’s. It’s just warmer. It just felt warmer.”
Disturbed Furniture
Visual art and music are important to the life of Alexa Hunter. They inform each other to a degree but the inspirational spark does not occur in the same part of the mind for each creative endeavor. Hunter stated, “Sometimes a visual will come to me in the middle of writing a song and it will hit me in the face. It will just seem like the perfect colour..or whatever the subject is of the visual. It’s not completely separate but I just call it a different part of the brain; the visuals.”
Alexa Hunter has tons of stories that are equal parts great and immensely disappointing for the band. One such story includes the one Hunter told me about how a lost lead guitarist lead to missing out on playing a gig with The Clash. The band learned lessons that Disturbed Furniture would use to inform their present-day reunion efforts.
Liberty Music
One of the lessons learned from the early days is the importance of making everyone in the band feel heard. The tight rope act of making everyone in the collective feel like they have commensurate influence and value to the group. Hunter quipped, “It’s very hard to be democratic in a band. When you’re the lead singer you can often become the mouthpiece. You want to take into consideration heavily everybody in the band. Otherwise, it’s just “for hire” musicians backing you up. So it was a group project by that point. It’s hard to have five people work intensely on these kinds of projects.”
As a parting thought, Alexa Hunter stated “I hope people download the songs. They’re going to be on Spotify shortly. We’re working on videos. I hope they buy the vinyl. Go to our website disturbedfurniture.com. Like us on Instagram. Join us on the world of social media.”
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