Mason Proper’s Jon Visger: thecheappop.com interview

By Jon Chattman

Jonathan Visger and his band Mason Proper’s main goal is quite simple: make music that they would actually listen to and respect. Guess that leaves out trying to sound like Nickelback, huh? “There is more than enough music out there without us throwing anything on the pile that we don’t believe in,” he said in an interview last week.

Visger fronts the Michigan band, who sound like TV on the Radio and maybe Weezer but not really at all, and are currently on the road with Cloud Cult. The band, which pulled their name from as Visger pointed out “a very, very obscure reference to Freemasonry,” consists of bassist Zac Fineberg, Matt Thomson (keyboards/guitar), guitarist Brian Konicek and drummer Garrett Jones. They met in high school together in Alpena – a place I can barely spell never mind actually have been to.Proper recently released their second album entitled Olly Oxen Free,  a follow-up to their 2007 debut album There is a Moth in Your Chest and four-song Shorthand EP. I asked Visger about just about everything last week.

How’d you guys come together?

Four of us were in high school together in Alpena, Michigan – way up north. Not so far north that it becomes the upper peninsula, but almost. We were all in different bands and when everyone was
graduating and all the bands were breaking up, those of us that still wanted to play music pulled together to form one band. Like the One Ring. (Not really that much like the One Ring).

Gotcha, Frodo. So everyone wants to label everything. How would you best describe your sound?

Eerie pop music with a dark sense of humor and a taste for odd “found sound” snippets.

Snippets is a fun word. Why Olly Oxen Free as a title for your album?

We named it Olly Oxen Free because, for us, it evokes a sense of nostalgia, while at the same time causing curiosity as to its origins. Everyone’s familiar with the phrase, but nobody really knows what it means. It’s our second full-length album.

Good point. How has the Internet helped your careers?

It’s one more avenue through which people can stumble across the band I suppose. All is secondary to the mighty word of mouth though. It is nice that when people hear that word of mouth, they have an easy
way to find the actual music within a few minutes on the Internet. Probably seconds, depending on their Internet skills.

Has Rainbow Brite inspired anybody?

A couple babies, maybe.

She has a good rappaport with babies. Did you always know you wanted to get into the music business?

I thought I wanted to be in the video game industry until I went to college and realized that I naturally avoided all my computer science work and instead started three bands. I left after one semester and
started pulling together Mason Proper.

What are your hopes and aspirations as a band? If given a choice would you rather follow the success of Wham, Rick Astley or U2?

If Rick Astley is collecting performance royalties for all the plays he gets from people Rickrolling each other all day on the Internet, then I’ll take that. Otherwise… U2 is still making albums they (presumably) like after many many years of doing it, which is more along the lines of what we’re probably going for. Key goal for everything is only ever making music that we truly enjoy. There is more than enough music out there without us throwing anything on the pile that we don’t believe in.