With their latest album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? at the top of WBAR’s charts and two shows on March 9th and 10th at Irving Plaza, Of Montreal‘s been keeping busy as they’ve made their way into the hearts of many a college hipster here in New York. Bwog contributor Ashley Nin caught up with keyboardist Dottie Alexander for a quick chat.

Quick intro: on which albums do you appear?

We all got together about nine years ago and recorded as a band for the first five albums, and then Kevin Barnes since then has kind of done his own thing on the most recent three, though we still work together on the live shows and the videos.

And before you started playing with Of Montreal, you and Jamie actually played together in Lightning Bug vs. Firefly.

Woah, that’s a blast from the past. Yeah, Jamie and I just experimented with music on drums and keyboards together doing small gigs until Kevin Barnes kind of took us under his wing.



Was the music you played then similar to the type of music you played with him?

Yeah, Elephant 6 totally influenced us, so even twelve years ago, the stuff we were playing was along the same vein as what we play now with Kevin.

Ok, so who’s the best groupie you’ve ever had?

Ryan always gets the best groupies. He had one that we’d call “the brute witch.” She was this spooky lady who’d come up to you and just bless you with these spooky witchy words. And she smelled bad, so she’d dance around at our shows and there’d be like a 10ft radius around her in the middle of the crowd. Eventually, she stopped coming and we assumed that she had descended back to the underworld.

What is your least favorite show?

A few years ago, down in South by South-West, we’d play cramped up in these tiny venues, and this was back when we were transitioning to using backbeats at live shows and it just sounded bad and was awful.

Ouch, and what have you never covered but wish you would?

I would have to say, that Tears for Fears song, “Head Over Heels.” You know, the one in Donnie Darko? I really like that song and think that we could really make something crazy out of that.



And on what movie soundtrack would you most like to play?

I’d say anything by Fellini. Just because surrealism is to film what we do for music. Or even something like Eternal Sunshine. I just love Michel Gondry and all of the stuff that he does.



Great, thanks for your time. By the way, my friends wanted you to know that they love Du Og Meg.

That’s great, we’ve been playing that a lot and so I’ll definitely pass that along.