An Interview with Bambara

Bambara is a trio out of Athens, Georgia and their recent release “Dog Ear Days” received plenty of positive press.  Below is an online interview that the band conducted with I Heart Noise in which they discussed summer tour and new EP (among other things).
What’s in a name? Why Bambara?
Is it safe to say that part of the reason is that its not a type of name that would lead to any associations right away?
We chose BAMBARA because we thought it was a word that sounded cool and isn’t really associated with any type of genre. It was the name of a dude in an episode of one of our favorite shows, Aeon Flux, and we always liked it. Later we found out that it is actually a language spoken in Mali and parts of Western Africa.

What are some of your musical influences?
Some of our biggest musical influences would probably be My Bloody Valentine, Nick Cave, Elliott Smith, Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel…a lot of folk music. Most of our songs actually start out as finger picking acoustic numbers and then we flesh them out with the full band.
What about non-musical ones?
We spend a lot of our time watching movies. Some of our favorite directors are Michelangelo Antonioni, Godard, Wong Kar Wai. They all work so well with space and real human emotion, both huge influences on our music. Also, experimental film maker Peggy Ahwesh is one of our favorites. We actually used stills from her film The Color of Love for our Dog Ear Days album art.
You just released an EP (“Dog Ear Days”) and finished a summer tour. In general, it feels like anyone is ecstatic about this record.
What’s next for the band?
Ha thanks. Yeah we had a killer summer. We did 2 tours up the coast, pretty crazy. Boston was the furthest north we went and it was probably our favorite show of all.
Next on the agenda we are going to release a cover of Bowie’s “Modern Love” that we have been working on along with some remixed Dog Ear Days tracks from some cool electronic artists like our friend heRobust who just released a really solid debut album. We are also working on writing some new material; we have a few songs finished already that we are extremely excited about. We will be touring up the coast again in October for CMJ and hopefully be able to go back up to Boston if we won’t miss too much school.