Today we reported that the String Cheese Incident will headline the first Electric Forest festival this summer. Next week, the group will kick off its 2011 Winter Carnival. So we’ve decided to present this archival feature on the group from the February 2000 issue of Relix (Vol. 27 No. 1).

The Colorado-based String Cheese Incident has emerged in the new millennium as one of the best improvisational bands around, and one of the most successful independent acts. And it has only just begun! SCI has achieved this status through a vigorous grassroots approach and continual touring, not to mention a determined sense of purpose and direction. Formed in 1993 with roots mostly in bluegrass, the band has evolved into both a formidable musical force with an expansive and panoramic world beat vision as well as becoming a savvy business outfit.

Like many other “jam” or “groove” bands, SCI has chosen to take control of its own destiny due to ambivalent attitudes of major record companies, and it has done remarkably well. At one point in time, bands could not survive without the support of a major record label, but recording techniques and CD technology coupled with Internet exposure have made it much more viable for bands to put out their own music. SCI has exploited this process. It has not only released four well-received and critically acclaimed albums, but has a thriving business unit that takes care of travel, gigs and its recorded output as well.

The band currently tours throughout the U.S. at a rate of about 160 gigs a year, which is toned down from earlier years. String Cheese’s philosophy is quality, not quantity. The band has now gotten to the point where it can play mostly mid-size theaters with capacities of between one and two thousand. Musically, it has also grown considerably since its first mid-‘90s album, Born On The Wrong Planet. This is best exemplified on SCI’s superb new live album Carnival 99. Its mix of rock, jazz, blues, folk, Latin, reggae, and just about everything else is positively invigorating. When you couple that attitude with a daring sense of musical exploration, you can get an idea of why SCI is one of the most exciting bands on the scene. One of the most pleasing and admirable aspects of the SCI ethic is that the performance, or as the group calls it, “the incident,” is what it is all about. Like the Grateful Dead with whom it shares a spiritual affinity, SCI claims to keep its fans satisfied by supplying them with a continually evolving show, which averages about three hours in length.

What follows is a conversation with SCI bassist Keith Moseley and mandolin/violinist Michael Kang prior to the group’s appearance at the Somerville Theater in Somerville, MA.

Are you still going full swing with your own SCI Fidelity Label?

Moseley: Yes, the Keller Williams album, Breathe, is the first non-String Cheese release on the SCI Fidelity label.

Kang: We are starting to do a lot more with the label. I get to do a recording with Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, Paul McCandless, and some of the Leftover Salmon. We are starting to expand the record label. The goal behind it is that we want to be able to have the flexibility to do what we want as artists creatively. So it gives any one of us in the band the avenue to experiment with musical ideas and just take it from there.

A lot of bands that have had their own labels tend to go off on excessive tangents. Do you have limits as to what will be released?

Moseley: It’s set up in that the band is all shareholders in the record company. The band owns half of it, and the management owns half. So every project kind of needs to get approved. It has to be something that we think will at least break even financially. We want, like Mike said, to let everyone do their deal, solo projects or whatever. We want that to be able to happen, but we don’t have unlimited resources. We need to be able to recoup on whatever we do.

What was the reason for going ahead with your own label? Was it mostly because the major industry is such a mess and not really interested in music that has a shelf life of more than a day or two?

Kang: That had a lot to do with it. For a while we weren’t shopping ourselves around, but there were a lot of majors interested in us. We started looking at the numbers and talking to other bands. There were a couple of things that just warned us away from it. We started looking at the deals these bands were getting from the record companies to potentially have to sell a few hundred thousand albums. We didn’t really want to put that pressure on ourselves, and we also had the resources available to just put out our own albums anyway. We have sold probably 50,000 albums in the last year, and that is a huge success to us. If we had done that on a major label, they probably would have been pretty bummed.

Moseley: We maintain complete artistic control. We can do whatever we like. We decide how and when we tour to support the album. We decide how we want to market the album. How we want to spend our advertising dollars. We are not spending anyone else’s money but our own, so I think we have a lot invested in it. We get a lot back in return. We are making a much higher percentage on each album that we sell, but it’s our money we put out there―not the record company’s.

What are the negatives?

Moseley: You don’t get the huge advertising budgets. You don’t get the airplay, which for the most part, seems dependent upon being on a major label. Those are kind of big things.

Kang: We are kind of control freaks. We book ourselves: we’re our own travel agency. We do everything by ourselves. The negative thing is we are basically on an island by ourselves. The thing that we have realized is that we are not waiting for someone to hand us something. We basically want to create whatever opportunities we can for ourselves. We are not in any rush to try and make something happen that is not natural.

One of the problems with a major label is that the music gets a short shelf life.

Moseley: Right. If it doesn’t happen, you are dropped like a hot potato. I think more bands would do their own label if they had the resources. We have been fortunate enough to have made some money from hard touring over the years. We have distribution now through Ryko. We have also been able to hire the right people to run it.

Kang: It’s a dedicated staff. For the first year, we didn’t do too much. We had distribution. We had our records in stores. We don’t feel like there is much of a need for us to be on MTV. We get a lot of public radio play.

What has been the biggest factor in spreading the word about SCI?

Kang: Most of it has been word of mouth and the Internet. I think that the Internet has really boosted our fan base. We’ve got about a million hits now on the Internet. We do still have a very grassroots type of approach. But what we try and do is make it easy and good for our fans.

Moseley: The Web does have sound bytes. We keep it updated with different live sound bytes, new photos. We have a full chat page, a discussion group. People are trading live tapes all the time. It was the trading tapes that got the whole chat page off the ground.

Have you noticed the fan base getting bigger and more evenly spread the more you tour?

Kang: Yes, every tour there’s a few hundred more people in towns that we go through. We just finished up the Summer Session tour with moe. and Galactic, and we did some shows with Phil Lesh. A lot of people have been traveling all over the country to see some of the shows. It seems that everywhere we go, there are more and more people traveling to see us.

Moseley: A lot of times people show up to see the band for the first time, and they were familiar with the material from tapes they’ve gotten from their friends.

Are you continually listening to different music?

Moseley: Yes. When we went to Jamaica, we tried to soak up as much reggae as we could. Every year we go to the Jazz Festival in New Orleans, and we try and check out as many bands as we can and soak up all that. When we go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, we try and take in all the bluegrass we can. We are sort of like a sponge in a lot of ways. We go and see other bands and try and soak up other influences. Learn what they are doing and get to the roots of how they make their music and then figure it out and then be able to have that in our arsenal of things that we can do. We appreciate a lot of different styles. So we spend some time trying to figure it out. You know, how does this Latin-jazz work, how does this reggae work and what part do I need to play? How does everyone need to sound like we know what we are doing if we play this kind of music?

Kang: It’s just like life―it’s such a vast world, especially now within the world music scene. It’s so easy to get involved in a lot of different types of music, and all of it is great. It’s amazing how much music is available and how much seeps into other people’s music. Even in popular American music, how much of a world influence there is and you don’t even notice it. It’s there.

Tell us about the new album.

Moseley: It’s a live two-CD set with a lot of covers and some songs from our first album.

Kang: We already feel like we have outgrown that album. The band is always changing.

Moseley: We are always forging ahead with so much new material and trying out new things all the time. The album is definitely a snapshot of exactly where the band was at that place in time. Fans are continually asking for more live material from us. They want more live CDs. There’s a lot of good music on this.

You don’t mind putting out more live CDs in the future?

Kang: No. That’s what we have set ourselves up to do. We are multi-tracking all the shows now.

Moseley: We have a multi-track recording of every show of this tour. We are archiving all this stuff and hope to release a good bit of it as long as it is good, and there are people that want to buy it. We have talked about the possibility of maybe releasing an album for every tour. Maybe we could release two or three shows of every tour. Potentially, we could put out a lot of live music.

Again, that’s a clear benefit of having your own label. A major label probably wouldn’t go for those kinds of releases.

Moseley: Yes. But because we are in control, we can decide to do it and maybe we will just pick a special show of the tour and release that show in its entirety. We wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money by trying to advertise it. We could just make it available to our fans via the Internet or just sell it at live shows or however we want. Again, that’s the freedom of having our own label.

Over the years, you have plays with a lot of interesting people. Is this something you will continue to do? And is there anyone special that you would like to play with?

Kang: There are so many. We have gotten so much out of listening to people for the last 20 years or whatever, our whole musical listening career. Playing with Phil (Lesh) was an incredible experience. The list is so long. One of the things we do with the Carnival every year in Colorado is play with other people. This year we had Warren (Haynes), Babatunde Olatunj, Tim O’Brien and Jerry Douglas, and we just try and mix up the musical stew and get a bunch of different people that we consider our heroes and get some communication going. This year, we are doing three nights at The Fillmore in Denver. Los Lobos is going to be there for one night. It’s something that we get so much out of. You get to exchange ideas. We have played with each other for six years straight so when we go with different people and sock up different ideas, we come back to the band and we get so much more out of it.

Moseley: To hear these other sit-ins with their take on our tunes is great. To have Warren Haynes sit in and play something on “Texas” that none of us had ever thought of playing, or to hear Phil Lesh play “Round The Wheel” and his take on the tune is completely different. We sit around and laugh. We are just giddy about the fact that we get to play with all these people. It’s amazing. Like Mike says, we have listened to all these people for years and years, and now we are getting to play with them. It’s a treat. It’s pretty special.

Is it difficult for you to continue to play different shows each night due to the fact that you tour so much?

Kang: It’s something that challenges us. It’s one thing we have been working on a lot the last few shows. With the increased Internet awareness, fans, I think, expect more from bands, and it’s tough. There’s a lot of bands like Phish where I think it raises the ante of what is commonly accepted now. You have to be able to do things differently to be able to surprise your fans. The pressure is twofold. It can be good, and sometimes it’s a pain in the arse. It’s good because it makes you press yourself to become a better musician and a better band. So that aspect is good. But there is pressure. Ultimately, it’s a good thing. We try and work on something new at sound check every day.

What is the most important aspect of the String Cheese Incident these days?

Kang: As we’re going on, we are less willing to compromise on the level and depth of the kind of experience we want to be able to give people. The more that we do things, the more we want to do it ourselves.

Moseley: We just want to put on better and better shows. With this tour, we have a semi on the road, an incredible PA system, a fantastic light show. We are taking that to the venues everywhere we go because it is better than anything anyone else has got at the venues. It’s been a goal of the band since the very beginning to continue to reinvest the money we make into the show and come back each time around and be able to blow people’s minds with the fantastic sound and lights―three hours of audio-visual experience. We want them to leave the place saying, “That theater never looked or sounded so good. We can’t believe what a great show it was.” And I think it is working.

Kang: We feel like we are still just beginning. Give us about another five years, and then you will really hear something!