We Spoke With The Disco Biscuits' Jon 'Barber' Gutwillig To Discuss Biscoland Festival, New Album Revolution In Motion & More [INTERVIEW]

Today, ahead of next month’s year two of The Disco Biscuits’ new festival, Biscoland, we had the honor of sitting down with The Disco Biscuits’ guitarist, Jon ‘Barber’ Gutwillig. With Biscoland returning to Wonderland Forest in Lafayette, New York just in a number of weeks, they are elated to finally unveil the daily lineup.

With four sets of The Disco Biscuits as well as a Tractorbeam set, and huge performances from Nora En Pure, Lettuce, and Mark Farina, this year looks like a booty-shaking amazing time! We love how the Disco Biscuits incorporate a mixture of dance music and improvisational jam and that’s exactly what they’ve done with this lineup.

Biscoland will be an intimate experience at the beautiful and entrancing Wonderland Forest and will host some HIHF favorites like Manic Focus and Late Night Radio, two of the best electronic performers in terms of creating an atmosphere within their work, something The Disco Biscuits also do impeccably well. The Biscuits, of course, will be headlining each night. On top of their five shows lined up throughout July 4th weekend, there will be many unforgettable performances from other talented artists across the genre spectrum like Break Science, RAQ, Lespecial, Cofresi, and tons more!

Barber was an absolute pleasure to speak with and we know his bubbling and positive personality shines through in the interview as it did when we spoke face to face. This creative is extremely talented and his abilities go much further than him being able to shred on the guitar.

We hope you enjoy learning more about Biscoland, their new album Revolution in Motion, their Why We Dance 2024 tour, their Tractorbeam sets, and more in this exclusive interview with Barber from The Disco Biscuits. Massive shoutout to the TDB team for making this happen!

Many of our contributors here at Hearditherefirst.blog have been huge Disco Biscuits fans for years, so this is a huge full-circle moment that we hope you can appreciate as much as we do! Check out the Biscoland By-Day Schedule and enjoy the interview below. You can also grab tickets for the special and intimate festival experience here.

HIHF: First and foremost, thank you so much, Jon, for sitting with me today. As a longtime fan, it is an immense honor to have the opportunity to pick the brain of one of my idols.

I feel as if my life was forever changed the day I witnessed my first Disco Biscuits show at the Capitol Theater in 2017. Closing out your first set with a “Confrontation” X “Rock Candy” sandwich and then finishing off your second set with a diabolical “Digital Buddha.” Little did I know, this show would spark a flame in me that would truly find its fuel at Camp Bisco 2018.

Something I’ve always admired about TDB is the raw and primal synchronicity between the band. I couldn’t help but notice that after Covid, there seemed to be more of a tailoring in the band’s implementation. What I’ve always found impressive is the band’s ability to maintain that fervid and unrestrained form while honing in on your sound as a complete unit. Can you tell us what led to that point and the laboring process behind it? Has the band noticed a change in their level of performance over the past decade?

Jon ‘Barber’ Gutwillig: We’re making all these adjustments trying to make the sound better, constantly changing stuff. There’s definitely been a lot of different additions of vocal samples to the set, which gives it a super awesome effect. We’ve been doing a lot of breaks, like dance music changes, and it just makes a completely different feel to the performance. When we execute the dance music counting correctly, even the most noodley jam becomes very dancey. I mean the samples are just a huge change too. They’re just a massive change. There we are, in the middle of a dancey part of the show and then we’re just dropping vocals from other tracks or different eras from artists that grew up in the hometown that we’re playing in that night. There’s just so many angles and people find it very entertaining, you know?

HIHF: I think that’s so cool because it allows you guys to bring that Tractorbeam vibe to other shows. It lets people get just a little taste of that and it really adds a special element that your fans appreciate!

Barber: Tractorbeam definitely created a bunch of what you would consider, dance music changes. We had to make a bunch of changes to make Tractorbeam work because the whole point of Tractorbeam was to do it almost exactly the same. Even though you can never do it exactly the same, there’s a lot of things in there that you know, we just do in the Biscuits because they work great. If something works in Tractorbeam, then you’re going to do it in Biscuits.

HIHF: I also wanted to mention the progression of the band as vocalists. Your new rock opera comprises fourteen songs that showcase each member’s vocals. How did you guys practice or prepare for such an undertaking?

Barber: One big thing is, we move the keys of the songs around like you’ll hear when we put in new songs. I was a key person where I wanted the song to be in a specific key because I wrote it in that key, and then I kind of proved myself wrong inadvertently in the studio one time by mistake. Then I was like, okay, the key doesn’t matter, and then we started moving the song keys around so that the high notes aren’t too high and the low notes aren’t too. It’s made a huge difference because those moments where the high notes are too high and the low notes are too low, you just mess them up and every time you play the song you’ll mess that note up. You mess it up either little bit or a lot depending on how good your voice is.

I think that’s the biggest single thing and you’ll see that with a lot of the new songs. We’ll move the keys around quite a bit. We have this new song where the lows are too low and the highs are too high in the same song. So, what do you do? I gotta figure out how to sing it differently but we’re prioritizing making things singable as opposed to any other reason. It’s the top reason. The song has to be singable for me on a bad day, the entire song, or we move it.

That’s why “Wormhole” got moved. A lot of people were like, why did you remove it? But, you know, “Wormhole,” which seems like a pretty easy song, those notes were just high and it just was too close, so we ended up moving it. I think that’s the biggest single thing. We do it with Magner’s and Marc’s vocals too.

HIHF: Honestly, it’s been a noticeable difference having everyone involved and I think has resulted in bringing in new fans!

Barber: You can pretty much sing something today, or you can’t sing it today. There’s no like, “I’ll get there” in vocals. See guitar is different, you can get there in guitar, but you probably can’t get there in vocals. It’s a weird thing. It’s a whole different ball game.

HIHF: Is there something that you find helps inspire you and drives your innovativeness as a band? Whether that be inside or outside the music world.

Barber: I think there’s a lot of inspiration in the music business right now.

There’s a lot of different kinds of music being made. I mean, if you’re not inspired by that as a musician, you’re crazy. There’s so much stuff being done. And so many different categories. You can get free music for days that is like all different stuff. You don’t have to make the same old thing nowadays. There are plenty of examples of how to do stuff, and if you don’t know how to do it, you can just go to YouTube and type in “I want to learn how to do this,” and YouTube will teach you how to do it in like three days.

So there isn’t even a barrier to learning something. It just seems like you can hear a lot of things that are different and weird to inspire you, and you can learn anything that you feel like you don’t know how to do. It’s just such an interesting time. There’s a ton of possibilities.

HIHF: TDB refers to Revolution In Motion as a “space opera”; for the fans that don’t know, what is a space opera and how does this differ from your 1998 “rock opera” Hot Air Balloon and Brownie’s Chemical Warfare Brigade in 2000?

Barber: Well, it’s very similar in the operatic sense. It’s a story with characters and plots. The difference with the space opera is that it’s just all done in kind of a techno mindset. It’s kind of a dance, music, burst, opera. Where the other ones I think were writing more to draw the picture for you —type of stuff.

There’s a lot of really picturesque music in the Hot Air Balloon that’s supposed to set the scene like a score of a movie. That if we were shooting the movie it would work. I don’t think that we did that with the space opera. There’s a little bit of course, like we’re trying to make the songs vibe with the lyrics but the songs are all dance music all the time.

I like the idea of writing an opera from the storytelling point of view, for the characters, and for being able to write songs about things that the characters are going through. Those are things you may not have written songs about if you had shown up in the studio without the space opera, right?

“To Be Continued” is a really interesting concept of just like, what does it mean when you think you’re going home, but you may never go home again and you realize it. What is that emotion where you realize that your plans of how your life was going to be continued were flawed, and you may never go home?

That’s the thing about the end of the space opera is they think they’re going home, but if you travel around in space, doesn’t time change too? So they may never go home. They may never see their families again, and they’re realizing that in the lyrics.

They’re like, “Oh man, miscalculation in the heat of the moment. This isn’t great.” You would never write that song without the space opera creating the conditions for it. You would just never write it, but it’s a cool thing to write about. “The Deal” is kind of similar, too. You would never write let’s make a deal unless you have a negotiation like that to be represented in dance music.

It just wouldn’t happen. So I don’t know, that’s what I like about the operas. I just like writing like that, it’s fun, it’s cool, makes the job cool. It’s fun chipping away at a bigger project like that, but I also wanted to write a lot of dance music, and I didn’t want to sit down and have to score things.

When I was younger, I was really into the concept of sitting down and writing vibey music that elicits a picturesque idea. But I mean, that last two years, when we started the space opera, we were just like, “Yo, we gotta write some banging dance music. That would be fun.” So we just went that way.

That’s why I get space opera instead of rock opera, because it’s not raw. You know, it’s techno the whole time. There’s no rock in the whole space opera. So rock opera wouldn’t really fit.

HIHF: I’m so obsessed with the whole idea. I love that it shows such a creative side of you guys. The entire thought process that went into the story is seriously so cool.

Barber: Yeah, I mean it did take a lot of thought, a lot of time, and talking through the scenarios, but the original idea of the story came very quickly.

A lot of it was just being open and receptive to having fun and coming up with a cool idea and everybody having fun with it. It wasn’t like a job necessarily, it was just something cool to do. It was a pandemic. Everybody’s been doing crazy shit. So that was our crazy shit.

HIHF: Once it becomes a job, it stops becoming fun. You want to have fun with it, and I think that really comes through in the work. Your fans can tell that you guys had a lot of fun with it and let it take off.

I also wanted to mention one of my favorite new songs of yours that you unveiled at your NYE show that isn’t on the new album, “Fire Will Exchange.” I first heard it live at my hometown show in New Haven, CT at College Street Music Hall and instantly was entranced.

Barber: We have been playing a group of songs that are probably not going to remain unreleased very long. The new crop of songs, we decided to write individually. Which I think everybody kind of likes. We’ll probably go into the studio and start making the next album. I think these songs are good enough as people seem to be resonating with them at least. We play them live and people are requesting them.

HIHF: You recently announced more tour dates for your Why We Dance Tour, on top of Biscoland, are there any dates you are especially hyped about?

Barber: I’m very excited about all the shows. We don’t really have any bad shows on the calendar right now. We’re getting great slots at all these festivals. We’re getting a really good booking run right now and it’s pretty cool. So, I’m pretty excited about mostly everything that’s going on to be honest.

HIHF: Are there any standout shows from your most recent Why We Dance Tour that have been some of the most memorable for you personally?

Barber: The other night at the new Solshine Fest at 3AM. The whole festival was at our show. It was crazy. We were the only stage operating at that time I think. The whole festival was there at three in the morning and we played maybe the best we’ve ever played, a lot of people are saying.

So that was very cool. It just seems like we’re at this stage now where I feel like the band this week is just better than the band last week.

And that’s been happening. Like it happened with the vocals. It’s happened with the jams. It’s happened with the samples.

It happened with the Tractorbeam stuff. It happened with the dance counting. It’s happened with the guitar. It’s happened with the bass and keyboard. Like it’s happening over and over and over again. Each one of those things has added a gear to the show. Where the show feels like if you took that gear away, it would be just like a little bit more boring now, right? So that’s fire, right? The new steps of all these new things are coming in week after week after week and it just seems like now the band is a different experience than it was even one year ago and then one year ago was different than a year before that. So there’s just like a drastically different band.

I don’t know if I could go back to, just sort of the open jam band stuff that we were doing a couple of years ago.

HIHF: So I’d like to rewind a little bit. I imagine it must’ve been a pretty difficult and emotional experience when COVID-19 flipped everyone’s world upside down. As a band, you not only saw the loss of countless shows but also the conclusion of Camp Bisco. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend in ’18 and ’19. The mountain, the vibes, the experience, and the music, left a significant imprint on my life and I know other writers who’ve attended in the past feel the same way. Being able to contribute to the second Biscoland and interview you through Hearditherefirst.blog, is so incredibly rewarding. How does it feel to be back celebrating your music with your diehard fans, but now in a more intimate festival setting with Biscoland?

Barber: I mean, this is the year the festival is going to be what everybody wants it to be, all the time, when you’re a much bigger festival.

You know, when Camp Bisco was thirty-five, forty-five thousand people a year, people were like, “Oh, I missed when it was five to six thousand in the hills.” This is the year that we do that again. So, we’ll see if people show up for this and what happens. But, all those people were complaining all of those bigger Camp Bisco years.

This is the year for them to get the festival that they want. And then, maybe, next year too. You never know. Then we’ll see what happens. This setting is just beautiful. I mean this place is gorgeous and it’s nice in the summer. It’s just gonna be great. I’m very excited. They gave us the July 4th slot. It shows they have a lot of faith in the band and what we’re trying to do. The lineup is so fire and it’s just gonna be a great weekend.

HIHF: Do you have any exciting new things you’re bringing to Biscoland this year that you can tell us about?

Barber: Mostly new songs. A lot of people have said they’re the best songs we’ve written.

So, things are moving nicely. We’ll probably debut them at Biscoland. I hope things go according to plan. I’m working for the next couple of weeks in the studio so we may write some different stuff, so we’ll see what happens. I got a little time to cook some other musical stuff up. There’s also our Tractorbeam set.

HIHF: I, for one, am extremely excited to witness my first Tractorbeam set! For those who don’t know about Tractorbeam, what can fans expect from this set?

Barber: We’re already starting to plan that for Biscoland. So it’ll be totally different from the last Tractorbeam set. It’ll be just as sick, but probably even better because, you know, we’re working out a lot of stuff from the last Tractorbeam set. Like, does this work and what not. Now we’re in the stage where we know it works. We know people like it. The question is, how do we just make it so, so, so fucking dope, you know? It’s going to be something new and undistinguishable from huge rave music.

HIHF: Honestly, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t watched that set probably a dozen times!

What have been some of your favorite collabs over the years? Is there anyone specific that you’d love to collaborate with?

Barber: Well, I really like the Webster Hall collaborations with Erin [Erin Boyd of Resistance Revival Chorus], Matteo Scammell [The Very Moon Musical] and Cloudchord on stage when we debuted this space opera show. I really thought that was amazing. They were all so cool on stage and so much fun. I just had a great time with them. I love the Kamika Moore one. She did “Have a Cigar” with the band and she was so good. I gotta get her in the studio somehow. I mean, her voice is incredible. It’s just so good. I gotta get her in the studio or maybe just put out that “Have a Cigar.”

I like what a lot of musicians are doing nowadays. I really do. I thought what the Vulfpeck guys did at Texas Eclipse was great. Those guys are all crazy musicians.

HIHF: Well, thank you so much for your time today Jon. It was truly such a pleasure to sit down with you and pick your brain. I am so incredibly hyped for Biscoland and experiencing all the magic it will be!