What’s In A Name: The Magic of Cid & Fancy

At first glance, neither one of these guys seems like a musician or DJ. One is single, and a web developer, the other a father who lives in Port Angeles. But Tighe McGillvrey is a DJ and producer on the fast track to stardom, and Olof Järvegren is already a world renowned DJ and radio host. Separately, Tighe DJs as Futurewife, and is both the brains and brawn behind PYT records, and Olof is dj ShmeeJay. Together, they are Cid & Fancy.

“It’s okay,” Olof says, of the name.

“You don’t like it” questions Tighe.

No, Olof assures us, he loves it.

But where did it come from? The traditional band name creation process, with a bunch of stoned guys sitting around saying: Dude, dude. How about…?

“We had been wanting to really solidify a live act,” explains Tighe. “We actually put a name to it. It was Futurewife & dj ShmeeJay, which is a really long name to put on a bill.”

“Plus,” Olof adds, “it was a little bit different than what we are as individual acts.”

“And our sound is definitely… it’s half-way between both of us,” says Tighe. “So we really started throwing names back and forth. What I was thinking was: You have Tiger & Woods, you have Razor & Tape, and a bunch of those guys. I don’t think either person in the duo is either one. And certainly not for us. I’m not Cid or Fancy. That’s just kind of where it came from.”

So why Cid & Fancy, then?

“I think Cid,” explains Tighe, “in my mind, was because I’ve really, really been in to acid house lately. I’ve just been like: Hey, let’s put some acid in this one! And I have to get pulled back, so…”

“And I was a punk rocker,” Olof laughs, “in a different phase of my life. Mohawk and everything.”

“In Sweden,” adds Tighe.

I’d already been schooled by Tighe in an earlier interview about the robust Scandinavian disco scene. Does the Swedish punk rock scene compare?

“I don’t know if I was a part of the scene, per se,” Olof admits, “I had just a group of friends. There was really only, like, seven of us guys. And we all really had sort of our own little bands. We had a punk rocker, a guy who was way into hip hop, some Dungeons & Dragons nerd. We just sort of had our particular area we were into.”

It sounds like Olof is describing his teenage years through the lens of a Kevin Smith movie, as if the cast of Clerks worked at a Hot Topic, perhaps.

“Yeah,” confirms Olof. “When it came out of Tighe’s mouth, I thought: That really works, I like it.”

“People seem to respond well to it,” says Tighe. “We’ve put out one track so far, on a compilation in London, and it’s the only one that actually caught on through that whole thing. You get young producers, and it’s John Roth, or whatever. Or it’s something really dumb, like Astrophase, and then some numbers. I think something that triggers that memory, or something maybe you’re fond of, or something you really hate, just grabs you enough to make you listen to it.”

“And then the track was alright, I guess,” he adds, laughing.

So, Name: Great! Track: Alright.

The sound of their live act represents a departure from their individual sounds. Both DJs are heavily into disco, for instance. Especially Olof. The real difference, though, is less about the sound and more about the experience.

“This is definitely something that incorporates a lot of evolving textures, and sounds, and samples, and is less of a jackin’ dance party,” confirms Tighe. “It’s more melodic and beautiful most of the time, I think, because, if I got out and do Futurewife or my other projects, my mentality is: I gotta get these people dancing, they gotta be out of control. I want it to go wild. This, I want to really love this, and get lost in this thing that we’re doing.”

For Olof, the project is more about the process. While he did spend some time “noodling around with music” when he was younger, producing music has never really been his thing, and the name he’s made for himself is as a DJ. It’s a lonely sport, he admits.

“I like getting together to make stuff happen with somebody else,” he says. “Band practice, I call it.”

But he didn’t really come into his own until he started spinning other people’s music. Trying to create his own, he says, wasn’t a very successful endeavor.

“I loved what I was doing back then,” he tells me, “but then I went back to college, and had kids. I sort of put the music away for a couple of years. Coming back into it, I just found that playing already ready tracks was sounding way better than what I was doing.”

Tighe was intentional about starting the project, finding inspiration in the gigs he’d worked with Olof.

“I could create another DJ name,” he explains,” and I could go DJ somewhere else and do this in that capacity. But I wanted to do something that kind of amazed people, you know? I don’t know if I’m there yet, but we’re trying.”

Olof seems amazed, I point out, so: mission accomplished.

“I wanted to build a set, a live set,” he continues, “incorporating other musicians. For Pride, we’re going to have keyboard and some percussion accompaniment. I wanted to build this thing where, if you’re walking into the room, you’re like: Oh, that sounds good! Who’s this DJ? And you walk in, and it’s four guys, it’s five guys, it’s however many guys doing this on the fly. I want people to hear this electronic music, which they typically associate with DJing. Without seeing it, I don’t want them to know it’s a band.”

As with Olof, then, it’s as much about the process.

“Like jazz,” Tighe says, “like a lot of jazz performance, it’s not going to be the same every time.”

What it sounds like, then, is that Tighe and Olof, via Cid & Fancy, want to share their love of the process of musical creation with the audience by allowing the audience to participate in it. Maybe, then, they’re sort of an electronic version of a jam band, a disco Phish?

“I think I’d say more like Parliament,” adds Tighe, “like a funk jam band where there’s definitely a groove going, and you just build off grooves, and sometimes you get quirky.”

“I really want to bring it out, and put it in front of people,” confirms Olof, “and see how entertaining this is to other ears, too, because we like making it.”

It’s an important part of the process, because it allows them to get the interaction and the feedback from the crowd. How does that influence their live shows, then? Does the jam band influence turn a set into one long piece, or will there be different songs with discrete beginnings and endings?

“It’ll be one long set,” explains Olof. “We hope to be able to go out of the act before us, and then the act following us will take it from there where they want to take it.”

You’ll get a chance to hear the onstage magic of Cid & Fancy this Saturday, June 27 at Nark Magazine’s Pride at The Big Building, featuring the daring duo along with Sean Majors, Wesley Holmes, and Tim Sweeney. Check out Nark Magazine’s Pride Events page for more details.