It’s all Relative
By Arien Rozelle
Pete Miser is energetic. He’s excited. He’s busy. “If I’m out of breath, it’s because I’m lugging this big bag of stuff from Brooklyn Industries right now, so forgive me,” he huffed during a recent phone interview.
Half Chinese and half white, 33-year-old Miser is a burgeoning creative force out NYC’s underground hip-hop community. He’s a DIY rapper, producer and record label owner (Ho-Made Media) hailing from—of all places—Portland, Oregon.
In October 2004, Miser released his second solo album, Camouflage is Relative, with 14 imaginative tracks, including “Scent of a Robot,” a song about a man who discovers he’s actually a robot.
When I caught up with Miser, he had recently completed the video for the song. “It’s super fresh,” he said. Created by UV Phactory in New York City, the video is part computer animation, part film. “It’s about this guy who works in an office at a company that designs robots. One day he gets an email that his boss accidentally sent to him and it has these descriptions of the robots. Then the guy realizes that he’s just one of the robots that they make,” explained Miser.
“Basically the whole video is all these robots, but anytime you see them from the perspective of the robot, they’re live people. The only time [the main character] sees himself is in the mirror and reflections,” he said.
With such creative, thought provoking tracks, Camouflage is Relative makes no mention of “bitches” or “bling.” Maybe it’s because that’s just not on Miser’s mind. “I just start rapping and then see what comes out,” he said. “Eventually, it starts to make sense and it starts to gel a little bit. But it’s definitely not one of those situations where I sit down and say ‘ok here’s the concept of the song and I’m going to get it all out.”
Miser said his songwriting process comes pretty naturally. “The first words out of my mouth are usually the first words of the song,” he said. Miser writes the first verse, figures out the main idea of the song, and then he sums it up in the chorus. The second verse will support the first and so on. “It’s weird,” he said. “To me it makes perfect sense, but a lot of people don’t do it that way. And I don’t usually do a lot of editing, either.”
The songwriting process, however, is nothing new to Miser. He’s been in the music scene since he assembled a nine piece live band out of Portland, called 5 Fingers of Funk, in 1992. As the band’s front man and manager, he toured the U.S. and shared stages with bands like The Roots and Run D.M.C.
After six years with the group, he decided it was time for a change. “It just got a little stale,” he said. So he packed up and moved to New York City-- but it wasn’t easy. “I came out here and I didn’t have any money and I lived in a van for the first week,” he said. Before he made the move, a friend had told him that he’d be hooked up with a job and a place to stay. “Turns out he didn’t have either, and it was winter,” said Miser. “It didn’t take long to work things out, but this isn’t necessarily the place you want to be landing in that kind of a way,” he said. “But, New York always seems to take care of me.”
New York took care of him in a big way in 1999, when Miser was recruited as the DJ for British singer Dido’s tour. He was DJing at a party in New York and started talking about music with a guy who turned out to be the drummer for her live band. “He told me about Dido and I had never heard of her,” Miser said, explaining that this was before she lent her vocals to Eminem’s “Stan.”
A couple weeks later, their DJ ended up skipping out of the tour the week before it was supposed to start. “So they called me up and they were kinda panicking,” said Miser. He filled the slot and toured with Dido for three years. “We went to Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. I was in Paris on my birthday, that was pretty fresh,” he said.
After touring the world, Miser began work on his 2002 solo album, Radio Free Brooklyn, which won critical acclaim and includes “Might Be,” a poignant track about 9/11. In 2004, he returned to the studio to work on Camouflage, and hopes to tour in support of the album later this year. “But being the independent artist that I am, it’s hard to get on tour,” he said.
“I’m kinda in the mood to make another album. Just when you get done with an album, all of a sudden you wanna go in and make more music,” he laughed.
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