Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2008-02-14


Interview:
Drawing from influences like U2, Depeche Mode and The Cure, Flurish banded together to create intense, beautiful rock and roll and that's exactly what they do. Over the years, their craft has matured as their sounds range from a flurry of athereal orchestral rock to 80's electronic pop that makes you want to get up and move. Not only does Flurish constantly strive to reinvent the limits of pop music, but their unorthodox live performance has been turning heads for years. For such a massive, sweeping sound, one would be surprised to find only 2 guys onstage. How do they do it? One might ask. With the masterful use of technology and an electrifying dynamic, Flurish has discovered that 2 is all you need. When taking the stage, the band is confident in their ability to take the crowd to the next level, giving them something they've never seen before. We had the honor of sitting down with Rage and Ryan at a local Atlanta coffee shop to talk about music, touring, and their favorite television shows.

How did you guys get started?

Rage: I met him in 4th grade back in Tucson, Arizona. His family moved there from California, so we've been friends since 4th grade. We started playing music in 9th grade, because sports weren't really working out for us. Our high school actually needed a freshman band to play a chapel, and no one played any instruments. I had kind of messed around on drums and he had messed around on guitar, so we decided to play that. And ever since we've been playing music nonstop.

A couple years after that we added a bass player/ keyboard player and became Flurish. We moved to Tennessee in 2001 to finish school, and we graduated in 2004, and moved to Atlanta. And it was down here that our keyboard player left us first, and our bass player left us not very long ago. At that point we decided not to look for anyone else, it had always been the two of us anyways. So we put everything down on tracks, and it wasn't until then that we really started getting our sound. I wouldn't call what we did before this Flurish. Electronic music and track-based music and just rocking out on top of that is what we're all about.

Did you have a completely different sound before you lost the other two members?

Ryan: We've always had the ambiance that we have now. We were listening to a lot softer stuff in 2000, 2001, stuff like Gloria Record... Pedro the Lion, Bright Eyes, Sad Bastard... we were trying to emulate that. We didn't know ourselves as musicians. It really just took us taking this big leap and saying you know we've lost our keyboard player, our bass player, but screw it, let's go, let's do this. I think that showed me what I could do electronically; I do all the programming and song writing. And it showed him (Rage) how he just needed to be the strongest drummer he could be. We had to fill the space of 4 guys, with just 2 guys.