I know I usually showcase bands primarily from South Florida, but there's one local band from Pensacola that I just had to share with you all. Their name is ISLE, and once I hit play on their song Bayview, I felt like I was whisked away to a tiny oceanside cabin to dream sweet synthy-pop dreams. I sat down and spoke to the band about how they met and their upcoming show dates.
Introduce yourselves to us!
Hey, my name is Mikey. I sing and play guitar, synth, and bass for a band called ‘ISLE’. The other members of the band are Tobi Echevarria, who plays bass, guitars and synths, and Brandon Warren who kicks the beats.
Are you originally from Florida?
Yeah, We are loosely based in Pensacola, Florida. We all grew up and are very much rooted there. Currently I am living in Gainesville and another member that plays in our live band, Tyler Walker, lives in Nashville. So right now it’s pretty tough to get us all together, but Pensacola is definitely home and our music is very much a part of that.
Briefly explain the musicians/musical inspiration behind Isle?
The musical inspiration tends to come from a lot of different things. I think overall the thing that seems to inspire me the most is the openness of Pensacola, and the really beautiful water-scapes lying around, I try and keep those things at mind whenever we are writing our songs and I think our album reflects that.
The lack of time we have now that I live in Gainesville gets me in the groove of writing and creating also. Whenever we get together now, we know that we don’t have much time to work on things so we work off of really simple structured melodies that feel really natural, which tends to make for some honest, interesting tunes.
If you had to define your “sound” how would you describe it?
I would say our music is a mixture of Kraut/Shoegaze but still having pretty poppy elements to it. So I would say if you take those elements and drop them into a body of salt water on a hot summer day, you could maybe hear whispers of our sound.
We all kind of come from different era’s musically, there are pretty big age gap’s between all of us, so it’s really fun and interesting to hear what we come up with because Brandon comes from a jazz background, Tobi comes from a psych-kraut rock background and I grew up listening to a lot of post rock, then segued into making electronic music later in life so I have this electronic kind of background.
Turns out to be a really funny sounding mix at times, but I love playing with these guys!
Are you guys classically trained? If not, tell me about the self-taught process?
Brandon is the only one who is trained, he went to school for jazz drumming but as far as Tobi and I, we are both self taught. For my instance, I started playing guitar when I was about 9 because my older brother got a guitar and being the little brother I wanted to do what he was doing. Since then I started picking up other instruments and trying to imitate what my favorite musicians were doing on those instruments and that’s pretty much how it all happened.
Could you tell us about any upcoming events Isle may be hosting/attending/throwing? Any in Miami/Ft.Lauderdale?
We currently don’t have any shows planned at the moment, we have been working hard at finishing our first record, which is coming to a close as we speak.
The album should be out sometime around late summer/early fall, we plan on doing a few weeks in support of the album so Im sure we will be down in the south Florida area around then!
How can readers contact or learn more about you?
As of right now, we only have one single out titled “Bayview” which we put out on Bad Panda records. To keep up with future releases tune into our facebook page!
Thanks so much for chatting with me today! I can't wait to hear your EP! :) You guys can take a listen to their song Bayview below!
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