Alazarin Mondrain has been performing as The Invisible Band! since the early '80s. I was able to catch him at a few of his shows in Second Life, and he agreed to be interviewed for Firefox News. The interview was conducted entirely in Second Life over text conferencing in late June of 2009.

Firefox News: Testing ... everyone here?

DeForest Shatner: Hi!

WallaSan Grommet: Meep.

FFN: All right, awesome. Thanks for agreeing to this interview.

FFN: To open things up, can you tell us a little about yourselves and The Invisible Band for those readers who might not be familiar with it?

Alazarin Mondrian: Right, where do I start?

DeForest Shatner: Well, Alazarin started The Invisible Band way back in 1981.

WallaSan Grommet: After failing a bazillion auditions for other bands.

Alazarin Mondrian: Yes, I decided the only way forward was to form my own band.

DeForest Shatner: So with borrowed money and blind faith in his material, Alazarin spent the next few years going through various musicians and line-ups in a slow-motion train wreck...

WallaSan Grommet: ...that left him with a lot of badly-recorded material and an ex-girlfriend who resented the lazy layabout.

Alazarin Mondrian: Needless to say, I wasn't about to give up! Oh no! After that much failure, who could resist more ;) But seriously. I went on after the first incarnation of The Invisible Band crashed and burned and went back to busking out on the street. But soon got bored with being robbed, beaten up and playing the same old crap over and over.

FFN: So you're saying that the early band fell apart, but you kept it going, even on your own?

Alazarin Mondrian: Yes, basically I needed a name of some sort if for no other reason than to have a label to attach to all the material I was writing at the time. Bear in mind we're talking about the late 80's to mid 90's here.

DeForest Shatner: By which time our halfwit dragon discovers computers, sequencing and multitracking in a big way.

WallaSan Grommet: At least you didn't waste all your time on the internet back then and wrote better music.

Alazarin Mondrian: Yeah but the masters of those recordings are all lost.

DeForest Shatner: And whose idea was it to archive everything on DVD's?

Alazarin Mondrian: yeah.. I know, I know. Mine. I have loads of files that look like they're the .wav files and data for the recordings but they're all scrambled. So all that's left is the mixdown. Like the piece we're listening to right now? This is one of my orchestral compositions.

FFN: It's very nice!

Alazarin Mondrian: Yes, I was blown away with how well my orchestral tracks turned out. They made a lot of my other work sound banal by comparison.

FFN: Was it difficult for you to go back and remaster some of that old material once computers became more accessible in the 90's?

Alazarin Mondrian: So long as the data files and .wav files are good then it's not much of a problem. What happened to me was that 15 - 20 years worth of recordings had become corrupted. It was something to do with archiving them on DVD's. A biiig mistake.

DeForest Shatner: Which he learned the hard way.

Alazarin Mondrian: I've got them as a matter of fact; I've even copied all the data onto a backup HD, but they're all scrambled. At a casual glance they look ok. The filenames are correct. The extensions are correct. Even the file sizes are correct, but they're all mush.

FFN: Have you considered getting them looked at by professional data sifters?

Alazarin Mondrian: I have considered such things, but that costs serious money and I have trouble finding enough money to pay my gas and electricity bills. If I could hire their services, I would do it in a heartbeat.

FFN: Yeah, that's true. Might be a good idea to hold onto them for now.

Alazarin Mondrian: Oh definitely.

WallaSan Grommet: And we fill up the gaps in his work today. I like playing it, but if he'd been more careful we could have had a much larger catalog of material to choose from.

FFN: I notice that you guys have quite the back catalog of albums on your website. But taking into account the material you lost, that must only just scratch the surface.

DeForest Shatner: The big plan was to hold onto those old recordings and then release them in later years.

FFN: So "WallaSan" and "DeForest". How did you come into the band?

WallaSan Grommet: I was in a club with my friends and then I noticed a strange sweet-smelling odour in the air... Next thing I knew, I woke up in a dark room with this strange music all around me.

DeForest Shatner: You're lucky; I woke up chained to a drum kit.

DeForest Shatner: He's eb1l!

FFN: Did you meet Alazarin over the Internet, or did you know him and his musical efforts in real life?

DeForest Shatner: Chloroform..... we was press-ganged!

Alazarin Mondrian: Hey, I was desperate.

DeForest Shatner: We've known each other for a long time. Not that we have always got along too well, but we're working together now and I’m enjoying it.

FFN: That's good to hear. Your performances sound great.

Alazarin Mondrian: without WallaSan and DeForest, I'd just be playing alone... and who wants to listen to a bunch of random guitar and keyboard noodlings? No, it's their work that makes it all take shape and give everything context.