Funky, Fresh, Ambient

An Interview with Dank Kraft

By Liz Elkind

There’s a lot of fresh, funky, ambient music coming out of Northern Virginia (think Explosions in the Sky mixed in with Parliament & Funkadelic). In addition to being the recently-christened Some Kind of Miracle and half of Dank Kraft, Eric Greene has been playing in Relaxafunk, with Devin Spear. They thoroughly rocked their face-meltingly good first show at Vienna’s Jammin’ Java just before the new year, but haven’t made definite plans since.

Eric, you’re recording right now as Some Kind of Miracle and with Relaxafunk - is there still a Relaxafunk?
E: Relaxafunk is in full funk. Not really though, it’s kind of on pause, but it’s OK ‘cause I’m making music right now with Burke [aka Re-al Dank]....Together, we’re Dank Kraft.

So when you’re jamming together who’s playing what?
E: I make the music, he makes the beats....I lay over tracks with instruments and then he puts a beat behind it, like a drum beat, or whatever we want.

What’s the main difference between Dank Kraft and Relaxafunk?
E: Dank Kraft focuses more on beats. We use the beats to make song layouts. It’s more structured.... Relaxafunk is more spontaneous, we just have more fun jammin’ for whatever we want and as long as we want. Basically, no structure, but it sounds amazing.

What do you mean by song layouts?
E: I have a big focus on instrumentals. I feel that you can feel the artist more through just listening to the music. And you can relate to it better.

If you had to, how would you describe your music genre-wise?
E: Some Kind of Miracle - ambient, healing, and, ah, just beautiful. Dank Kraft - dank. Something to move to. And then Relaxafunk is more music to feel, music that makes you think.

What, if anything in particular, would you like people to feel? Or think?
E: Just good. That’s all I can say; I really want people to like my music. I want people to feel like I felt when I wrote it.

What are you normally feeling when you make your music?
E: Bliss. Pure bliss..... Anything that could possibly be on my mind during the day, good or bad - it’s like it just up and disappears, like it was never, ever there.

Who or what would you say are your main influences?
E: Nothing that a normal person would know. By normal I mean people that listen to the radio, MTV, VH1, et cetera.... STS9 - Sound Tribe Sector 9 - that’s a big one. Jel, Digby Jones. Anything funky.

B: Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey Pop Festival...Watching bands perform like Pretty Lights and Bassnectar and how much fun they have. It’s pretty inspiring. Emancipator, too.

How long have you two been playing together?
E: About a year now, off and on. We just started up again and now we’re doin’ it doin’ it.

Do you have any goals with your music?
E: Yeah, I want to play with Pretty Lights and Emancipator. And make two beautiful albums per year. With each group. So that’s six albums.

...Anything else?
E: I want to heal, I want to inspire. Because that’s what music did for me.

Could you elaborate?
E: I was in a really bad accident in which I came very close to dying. My lungs collapsed and my heart stopped. I had to have a fucking tube in my throat that I hated.... I had a hard time listening to music. After my accident, I didn’t want to listen to anything at all. And finally I started getting back into the music that I was starting to get into before my accident, and it was ambient music, and it was all instrumentals, and for some reason it soothed me. It healed me. So I have devoted my life to doing the same thing for others. This is completely off topic, but I was thinking of spelling Some Kind of Miracle with a “u” so it would be SKUM, not SKOM.

I guess you could just cut it out entirely and be S.K.M...
E: Right, “of” isn’t really a real word; Google doesn’t even count it.

So that’s where your name comes from, you surviving your accident and injuries?
E: Yeah. I don’t know what kind of miracle I am.

And what’s up with the hyphen in Re-al?
B: The real story - I was wearing those 3D glasses and they said Real D. And then I saw Madrid playing, Real [pronounced re-al] Madrid.

E: That’s not what I was expecting - “the real story”. You could’ve made something up.

B: I like what Eric said, about I want to make music to heal people - and so my child will know the power of music through me. I’m having a baby in August.

Congratulations, that’s great.
E: You can tell people that they can send money to help us. And to check out our websites:
myspace.com/dankkraftmusic
myspace.com/somekindofmiracle
myspace.com/devinspear
...We like to play beer pong. We’re really good at it. We love to play house parties. We’d love to play one any day of the year.

B: Any day of any month of any year.