Check out his website:
nicesnacks.com and his soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/craigbiggio
Your body of work is pretty sprawling, you've got music projects, zines, t shirts, maps. How would you describe yourself creatively?
Amateur artist, in the sense that we are all amateur artists. This may sound naive, but almost all the music I've made usually has some sort of theme along the lines of 'everyone can/should be in a band'. I guess I feel the same way about art or pretty much any creative outlet a person may have - at least as a counter to the constant 'your hobby is for professionals' message that gets hammered home 99% of the time we consume any type of art/music/craft/etc.
Let's talk about Tool Time. The lyrics are all inspired by the 90's family sitcom "Home Improvement" and the music is composed of samples of the 90's prog metal band TOOL. Do I have that right? How did this idea form? Is there a live performance aspect to the project?
Yes, the music by the band 'Tool Time' is entirely created from samples of the band 'Tool'. The original idea for the band was to be a power trio, where I (Al Boreland) play bass, Greg Prout (Tim Taylor) play guitar and some unknown person plays drums behind a white picket fence (Wilson). Since the internet makes all novelty ideas into real, true, fruitful and meaningful ideas, I eventually (2+ years later) recorded a few songs under this original vision, using the Tool source material in the place of instruments.
The subject matter of the music deals with Tool Time, Tim "the tool man" Taylor, Home Improvement, Tim Allen and all the boundaries between them.
I have played a few shows and one key aspect of the band is that I wear blue jeans on stage. This is notable considering my personal history of never ever wearing blue jeans in real life ever in my whole life.
Your website nicesnacks.com has a lot of different offerings, most of them sold out, but it serves as a good history of your work. There's a sweet map of all of the vendors of maps of the homes of celebrities in Beverly Hills, a cassette tape compilation of one note guitar solos, and a zine about St. John's, Newfoundland that highlights Pontiac Sunfires in different locations. How long have you been doing this, and what is the thread that ties all of these sundry ideas together, if any?
I started lumping music, t-shirts, internet stuff and zines together in 2008ish. Some of the t-shirts were about songs that my wildly unpopular San Diego based band at the time (the endless bummer) was performing. The zines were mainly a result of taking the unanimous and ubiquitous hobby of 'photography' slightly more seriously. In general, many of these projects are based on the popular push to classify everything, something that the digital sledgehammer of the internet/computing really allows us to do. I also really like the idea of large impossible tasks being broken down into trivial infinitesimal tasks, carried out over a long period of time. This is something that people do in science all the time, and seems like an appropriate and personal approach to art/craft/whatever in the hyper internet/computing era.
You recently put together a zine of photos of closed or otherwise prohibited destination in Cape Cod, called Vacation Paradise. Did go out with a camera with this idea in mind, or did it come together later?
The original idea was to photography all the ice cream stands of Cape Cod in the middle of winter. I spent a few days doing it, but was underwhelmed with the results. In the meantime, I had been collecting photos of the wastefully excessive empty and boarded up summer homes as well as the hostile and elitist private beach/no access signs. It was pretty obvious that even though these images weren't a strict visual collection like my previous zines, that they were a succinct summation of my relationship with this place, which was the original objective of photographing the ice cream places. (check it out here http://nicesnacks.com/shirts/zine_VP.html )
A lot of your work has a lot to do with location. Do you get inspired by places in different ways?
I think this is just because I like using photography as a tourist would, not as an artist or a studio? I definitely get inspired by place quite a bit, but have never really questioned if that is a common experience or not.
I've heard you have a very large record collection?
Sadly, yes.
Any future projects in mind? Will you be DJing anywhere soon?
I've been playing a bunch in the band 'coach longlegs' but the keyboardist is going to Russia for a year, which means I'm going to start a new band. I've been thinking about that almost everyday. I've been DJing once a month in Cambridge at a weird sit down bar called River Gods (next night is November 22nd). I've been slowly working on a project that involves me listening to radio stations from all over the world and listening to the 'best music' and 'top hits'. That's about it.
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