Victor Wong
Open Labs Exclusive Artist Interview
- by Carson Barker, Open Labs Staff Writer
Dismantle an antique chime clock and you'll see the soul of an Open Labs NeKo. Metal gears with tiny teeth controlling miniature hammers. The hammers pull back and strike little bells and bellows no larger than your pinkie. In between the hammers, gears, and bells are machinery with parts so small, that it strains the human eye to focus on them. All of these parts are controlled by a single clock -- turning various screws, hardware, and music instruments into a self-propelling, musical machine. During a pivotal moment in Victor Wong's childhood, he saw one of these clocks smashed into pieces, which may have been a spark that helped light the Open Labs fire.
"When I was seven years old, I lived with my uncle, and he made me practice violin for hours every night," said Wong. "He used to make me practice to this cuckoo clock in the dining room, and I kept moving the little hands so I would have to practice less and less. Sometime after that, I came home one day and the clock was in pieces, because he was wondering why it couldn't keep time straight. And it was never put back together."
I first met Victor Wong during my interview at Open Labs. After being introduced to the NeKo, I immediately started raving to Victor about the ingenious of the machine, and how there was nothing else out there like it.
"But before now, you've never heard of us, have you?" he replied. That was a sign to how the gears in Victor's brain turn: always looking through the present state and into the future.
The shattered clock that Victor witnessed as a child sent a ripple effect through the rest of the young musician's life. Though his violin skills were more than impressive (qualifying for the All City L.A. Orchestra both years that he played violin), the single instrument wasn't enough to satisfy his musical needs, so he moved on to percussion. Excelling at drums came just as naturally to Victor as the violin, and he quickly progressed through the ranks of formal and non-formal performance.
"I started playing drums when I was around 11," Wong said. "I played out in clubs when I was 13 and I played all through college. At first, it was all academic stuff, like a symphonic orchestra, jazz band, and marching band. Then it was late '80s early '90s, so it was all big hair metal, glam-band scene. Then all the top 40 music like Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. When I got into drums, you really had to know how to play. You had to practice eight hours a day if you could, and then you'd learn every single thing that Neal Peart did with Rush, and if you didn't get it perfectly, you'd try it again. It was a lot of technique and other things involved with being a musician and a drummer back in those days, and a lot of that has been lost."
After years of perfecting the instrument, Wong's passion for the drums began to fade and look for other outlets. In the process of searching, he realized that to find an instrument that could do everything he wanted, he would have to help conceptualize one. The next leg in Wong's musical career was when he and fellow musicians and Open Labs co-founders Craig Negoescu, Lary Cotten and Heinz Grether sat down and discussed their afflictions with music instruments, industry, and technology, and how they could solve them. Always ahead of the clock, Wong and the other founders didn't want to combine a few pieces of equipment, they wanted to combine them all.
"Craig was complaining about having to use all of these different pieces of equipment: computer, screen, and keyboard, and wanted to see them in one machine," said Wong. "The trend has been for music production and performance to move into the computer world, but that's not a very easy transition for most people because of the lack of technology. Our philosophy, which makes us stand out from everyone else, is that we took a musical instrument and gave it the power of a computer, instead of taking a computer and trying to force it to be a musical instrument."
Following the advent of Open Labs, Wong now has a violin, drum set, and any other instrument he could hope for all within the touch of a finger. The NeKo opened up a vast amount of opportunities for him, allowing him to compose music, and even professionally DJ in his spare time.
"Some of my music has been scored for independent films, one was called "All Nite" for the film Price to Pay. I composed them all on the NeKo, one is supposed to get picked up by a cable series. I figured that since we have the best instruments in the world to do stuff like that, I'd give it a shot. Those were the first times that I sat down and composed anything off of a NeKo. I composed six songs; three of them got picked up by two movies and a series. That's just how easy it is, even for a drummer like me."
Also counter-parting as DJ Veedub, Wong's live DJ sets have become a Friday and Saturday night staple around his current residence in Austin, Texas. His DJ alter-ego gained enough notoriety in the industry to get him inducted into the Core DJs, an exclusive club consisting of 400 of the most influential DJs in the world.
"The world has changed to where it's almost cooler to be a DJ than it is to be a musician. I've never DJ'd before, so I figured I'd try it to see if I like it or not. I had fun, I had a bunch of people on stage, so it wasn't just me. Drinking excessively helps."
Take a peak inside of Victor's office, and you won't see a clock hanging on any wall, and rarely will you see a watch around his wrist. When you're helping conceptualize instruments that are a decade into the future, time is not on your side.
"What we have is an all-in-one solution that is becoming the standard for music production, and bridges the gap between traditional instruments and computers," said Wong. "Ten years from now, we will be the standard for music, video performance, and production."
Equipment Used
Purchased NeKo LUX
Artists Links