Interview with Shawn Knight (Child Bite)

I met up with Shawn Knight to talk about his band Child Bite performing the Jurassic Park trilogy at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The show can be viewed live at MOCAD Sunday or listened to on the radio at 104.9FM.

So what would you describe Child Bite’s sound as? I saw you guys at the Electric Six: it was high-energy rock n’ roll, you’ve got synthesizers, playing with a joystick to generate sound at one point–

It’s hard to say– everyone says that, even if they do sound like a certain something. I guess the music I was into when I was growing up was punk music, so I feel like there’s a lot of that in there. Those are the types of bands that are influencing me.

How long have you guys been a band?

Most of three years, about.

Do you think the band has changed a lot since your first started?

Yeah, it has and it’s mostly because we added people and changed who plays what. So obviously that will change things, more so than if you see people doing the same thing. In the beginning it was just three people. Then Zach switched over to guitar, we got Sean to play bass, the saxophone got more involved.

At what point did the joystick become involved?

That was at the beginning, actually. That’s an old song that we continue to play to keep the joystick involved here and there. We don’t play it every show but it sneaks its way in there from time to time. We keep playing it faster and faster, though. The recording is kind of mid tempo and then now it’s like just as fast as we can possibly play it. It’s kind of fun.

So MOCAD this weekend, this is part of a larger exhibit?

It started in September and goes to the end of the month. They have different artists who are curating different segments of time for it and we were asked to do something for six hours.

So everything that will be part of the exhibit will be broadcast live on the radio?

Yeah live on the station, I don’t know it off the top of my head, it’s short range, I think it’s only a couple miles because it’s like… illegal to be doing that. I think it will be archived somewhere. But people can also come down and watch us doing it live. That’s part of the installation, we’ll be there at a table with mixers and microphones and samples and stuff.

You will be performing the Jurassic Park trilogy… as a radio play?

Yeah. Kind of like the old time radio shows like The Lone Ranger.

Will you be performing as Child Bite? Will there be instruments involved?

I think we’re gonna do the theme song on sax, because he learned that. So I’m sure there’s going to be sax in there somewhere, maybe scoring certain parts to it. But for the most part we’re going to be different characters, and doing the sound effects to go with what’s happening. Zach doesn’t want to play a character so he’s going to do narration.

Who’s gonna be the dinosaurs?

I don’t know man, we haven’t really played it yet. It might be kind of off the cuff.

It’s almost like a punk rock show that way. Like a rock n’ roll radio play.

Yeah. It’ll just be for a long time– we might need like… buckets or something. Well, maybe we’ll do an intermission. That makes more sense.

Are you worried you won’t finish in time?

I don’t think there’s anything lined up after us. I think we’re gonna have to try and pace ourselves. They’re movies, so we’re going off the scripts for the movies, and the movies are a certain length.

Where’d you get the scripts?

They’re all over the internet. Danny was in charge of that. He said there were some discrepancies over which ones are the most accurate. We haven’t printed them out yet, they’re pretty massive. I might have to do that at work.

What do you do for work?

I am a graphic designer. For the most part I do all our stuff. Sometimes I get people to do posters and stuff like that.

It seems like these days, with label support really dwindling and things being self-released, it helps to have someone in the band who has graphic design knowledge.

It’s really helpful. We have a lot of friends who have an engineer, or two, in the band, which is a really awesome thing too. We don’t have one of those, though. We just have what I do.

What’s next with Child Bite after this?

We’re starting to write for our next record. We usually don’t spend too much time doing it. ‘Rushed’ has a bad connotation to it, but I like a good, high-pressure short period of time to force ourselves to be creative in two weeks. We’re trying to give ourselves a little more time this time. I always book the studio time before we have our songs so that we have some sort of structure, and if we don’t have a deadline…

…you could end up with the next Chinese Democracy.

Yeah, and we’re not interested in that! We’re going to record the majority of it in Baltimore with this guy Jay Robbins, who we’re big fans of.

So you guys are going all the way to Baltimore?

Just for a couple days to record really fast. We’re trying to spend a little more time, but not very much more. To mix a whole album in two days…. I think both of those days were 18 hour days. For the last one we went to San Francisco and we’d start at noon and end at like, five in the morning or something, walk a mile back to our hotel and sleep for six hours and do it all again.

So that’s how you like to record?

I like going to different places, working with different people, see what happens with their involvement. People who we’ve heard their work and we trust, to see what they do with our stuff. We do it differently each time, so that each album has its own personality. It’s just fun. We’re going to be spending our money on it, we might as well go somewhere and make it an adventure.

I’ll swing by at some point on Sunday. I don’t know if I can last six hours…

I don’t expect anyone to do that. I’m assuming nobody’s listening to this.

I’ll try and come by during Jurassic Park 2.

You can do a raptor scream or something.

I’d be honored.