Don’t Let the Internet Fool You, Orchid Have Just Begun

Usually a band's first out-of-state show is opening for a lesser known band and playing the role of background music to a handful of people who embarrassingly showed up before their friends did; but this is not the case with San Francisco's Orchid, who recently played their one 2,000 miles from home at the Planet Caravan Festival in Asheville, N.C. "I'm blown away," guitarist Mark Thomas Baker told Noisecreep. "We're our own little thing in the bay area, but because of the online world you can gain fans all over the place without having to play there.

"The internet makes us seem that we're a bigger than we really are," Baker commented. "We're not really that old of a band. I really feel like we really just got going." When the band was first approached via e-mail to play the stoner-rock festival the band quickly wondered how they had been discovered, only to find out a friend was in need of thanking.

"A friend of ours back in San Francisco works for Current TV, and he put an infomercial together of the bumper music they play between their programs." One of the songs features was the song 'Behind the Wall.' "And next thing you know, you're getting a couple extra hundred plays on the MySpace site," Baker explains. "It was only a 30-second snippet of a seven-minute song, but apparently that was enough to make AC entertainment book us."

Recently Orchid announced that they have inked a deal with German label The Church Within Records, and have an EP being released at the end of the year to be followed by a full-length. And though just recently signed, the band has been working on their own to record for both of these releases for some time now. "We've been recording for well over a year now on this debut album," Baker said. "It's very layered and multi-facetted. We spend a lot of time to make sure we get everything we want to hear in our music. A lot of times you end up over dubbing something off the cuff in the studio -- just a little part -- and it becomes something you feel that you have to fit in."

Spending over a full calendar's length on a record is something that fits into Orchid's concept of being a self-defined "hippy metal band." Baker said, "It's really an intentional thing to go for this '70s thing, writing, recording, visual, that's our bag baby."