Blackbird Blackbird's 2012 EP Boracay Planet takes its name from two sources: Boracay — a beach-filled, postcard-perfect island in the Philippines — and a dream Mikey Maramag had about the tourist trap, despite never having visited. "Instead of being an island, it was also a planet," the band's 25-year-old architect says with a laugh. "It was kind of a trippy dream." Hallucinatory, subconscious neuron firings sound apt as inspirational fodder for this project. Maramag's mellow, electro-inflected dream-pop comes from a post-reality zone where colors are both turned up and weirdly washed out, and every building happens to float.
Raised in Hawaii and the Bay Area, the Oakland-based Maramag's history of playing music is heavy on punk and hardcore. He enjoyed playing drums in Murder Practice, a high school hardcore band, but when he left for college he had to abandon them. In his new environment, he got into Apparat, Modeselektor, and Aphex Twin before moving onto more ambient stuff. He launched Blackbird Blackbird as Bye Bye Blackbird in summer 2010, and its discography has quickly grown.
Maramag's music-making these days stems from a "neurotic urge to record things" that can be traced back to his days tinkering with TabIt, a "shitty" lo-fi piece of tablature shareware. "Live shows are the biggest challenge because I want to bring that homey-ness that I have in my recordings," he says. "It's going to be really fun to see how that plays out."
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