The Shrieks of San Francisco

Mi Ami’s guitarist/vocalist Daniel Martin-McCormick doesn’t want you
to mourn his former band Black Eyes. In fact, he’d prefer you blot them
out of your mind for now and focus on Mi Ami, his current project with
drummer Damon Palermo and fellow ex–Black Eyes bassist Jacob
Long.

While Mi Ami will surely receive a boost in media attention and
music-fan respect for their association with Black Eyes (who recorded
for Ian MacKaye’s revered Dischord label), they aren’t the
laurel-resting types, though you couldn’t blame them if they were.
Black Eyes’ 2003 self-titled debut and the 2004 follow-up,
Cough, abounded with jittery, strident post-punk songs that
churned and burned with intense centrifugal force. Robust dual drumming
combined with clangorous guitar in an earnest, kinetic attack that
emphasized clamor over glamour and inspired more roughhouse dancing
than romancing.

Black Eyes were one of those groups who blaze too brightly to last
much longer than a few years. When Long moved with his girlfriend to
the West Coast, Black Eyes decided they couldn’t continue without
him.

Following Black Eyes’ split in 2004, Martin-McCormick embarked on an
odyssey of self-examination that involved playing in a few other
projects; touring solo; studying classical guitar; immersing himself in
ragas, classical Japanese music, and American minimalist composers like
Morton Feldman and Steve Reich; and moving to San Francisco to try to
“[figure] out who I was/am and what’s going on with me and music.”

In the Bay Area, Martin-McCormick hooked up with Palermo, and they
began a quest to create something that sounded like a mélange of
what they outline on their
MySpace page as “[eccentric nu-disco
producer] Daniel Wang, African disco, and gamelan.” The duo eventually
enlisted Long in 2007, and Mi Ami coalesced into the dynamo that made
the outstanding mini-album Watersports for Touch and Go
subsidiary Quarterstick.

Martin-McCormick says that Mi Ami are able to thrive in San
Francisco despite the high cost of living. “That people are willing and
able to make stuff happen all the time without access to affordable
living and without any strong record labels or general top-down support
system is miraculous. The city itself is beautiful and full of life,
and I think people draw on that ephemeral joy to keep themselves
going.

“I have never been in a place where so many people are making music,
which is both a beautiful thing and kind of a hassle,” Martin-McCormick
continues. “The upside is that creative energy is always there,
available and open. The downside is that people get so saturated by all
the different shows/bands/DJ nights that they end up just hanging with
their five friends and keeping it pretty insular.”

Watersports bears similarities to postmodern dance-floor
agitators like fellow San Franciscans Tussle and !!!, but Mi Ami have
also been influenced by some of the funkier post-punk bands of the
early ’80s (the Pop Group, 23 Skidoo, Bush Tetras, etc.). They’ve
slightly toned down the guitar onslaught of Black Eyes and opted for a
more spacious approach that’s danceable and also texturally
fascinating. The disc’s seven tracks reveal Mi Ami’s mastery of
tension-and-release song structure. Dominating the foreground,
Martin-McCormick alternates between fragile falsetto and primal-scream
theatrics (think Ian Svenonius at his most unhinged).

“Some of those groups (the Pop Group, especially) stand out as
pretty fucking stellar,” Martin-McCormick says. “But I think what I’ve
always taken away from that era [the late ’70s/early ’80s] was the
free-for-all approach to genre and the general fearlessness with which
people played whatever the hell they wanted. Dub, disco, Afrobeat, juju
music, free jazz, etc. are all genres [that] remain fertile as fuck and
continue to yield new, exciting sounds. We just dig all of it, and it
naturally makes its way into our music.”

With each member having broad and deep musical tastes, is it hard
for Mi Ami to find common ground when it comes time to write
material?

“We never talk about what we want a song to sound like, or what we
want to copy or whatever,” Martin-McCormick explains. “I often will
start writing from a specific point of inspiration (a song I love, or a
particularly cool part, or a weird idea), but it’s nice to keep it a
secret and let my own flawed, personal reinterpretation germinate and
grow into its own thing. I don’t know if that’s how Jacob and Damon
play or not, but I bet there’s some of that at work. We try not to talk
too much about it, though. It’s good to have a little mystery,
especially as we develop patterns and formulas and other stuff, which
can harden into artistic traps.”

As exciting as Mi Ami sound on record, they claim that they’re most
vital onstage. “Records are great, interviews are nice, and being
recognized in the community feels great, but it’s all hubbub if the
shows aren’t intense and real,” says Martin-McCormick. “If we’re
playing and it’s alive, then that’s enough.”