Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brandon Pittman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Brandon , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your project?
Powdered Wig Machine, which is now a band, started as a webseries 5 years ago wherein I would mix elements of sketch comedy with offbeat cinema that I had seen to make an interview show that was a tug of war between fantasy and reality. I wrote the vast majority of the music for the show and collaborated with dozens of local artists to make each episode. When Mauro de la Tierra and myself created the Patricia character around the time of our 9th episode, I was getting asked by our fans and the art community to do more with her. I had been wanting to play music from the show live so I decided to take the character and use her as my onstage persona. As my commitment to the live performances continued, the webseries wasn’t exciting me as much so it’s currently in hiatus. However, we still plan to make music videos for songs going forward.
Over the last 2 years, the live lineup settled with The Wizard on bass and Daniel Raigoza on drums. Over the course of 2023, we made our first record, “It’s What I’ve Always Wanted” which we released back in October of this year. The music I would describe as psychedelic punk that takes detours into jazz clubs, country bars, and metal bars.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve spent many years in the music and art scenes of San Antonio and San Marcos. I had bands when I was in my early 20s but I never felt confident enough to be the leader then. When my last band broke up, I started going to more visual and performance art shows around town and promoting local events. Around the time that I came up with the idea for the PWM webseries, I also joined The Black Sheep art collective which was like a carnival that put on variety shows with gallows humor. The members of the group had a profound influence on expanding my confidence to execute wild ideas within the frame of my webseries. From there, the webseries mutated into the band that it currently is which I’m very happy to front.
One of the things I’m most proud of is human sized, monstrous doll named Toby that I created with visual artists Mauro de la Tierra and Loot Achris in 2021. Loot Achris stitched the doll together, Mauro painted him, and I figured out how to involve many different artists in town for the project. For the project and over the course of a year, the 3 of us picked a total of 45 San Antonio, San Marcos, Austin, and New Orleans artists in different mediums that “fostered” Toby for one week each. In that week, the artist was asked to take pictures and videos with Toby and if the feeling struck them, to create something in their medium that was Toby inspired. In most of what was given back to us, we got an interesting view of their processes as artists. In May of 2022, we were given a month to exhibit the pictures and work at Presa House Gallery.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I hosted an event a few years back in drag. The event itself was an experiment to work with people I hadn’t worked with before but one where it was held too late in the evening and was not well attended so no money was made. I remember getting into my car before softly crying to myself and taking the wig off to put into the passenger seat and thinking to myself, “What in the world am I doing with myself?” Then I put the key into the ignition and got onto the highway with my makeup running. You have to try to follow your ideas to their necessary conclusions but understand that things can be chaotic and you have to have your head about you. Keep your expectations low and hope for the best. I’ve had many wonderful shows since where I’ve dressed crazier and out more of my heart into it.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I have such a love/hate relationship with social media but what I did to build the audience I have is #1, just keep trying to show the best photos, music, videos, and make the most interesting merchandise that I can for people to consume. After that (in reference to Instagram), I would say continuing to add people that have 10+ mutual friends once a month but who also follow more than follow them. The app gives you these options to see who’s related to your followers so use it! When someone has featured us on their profile, I’ll go and add most of the people that liked the post that I don’t already follow.
I gave up with TikTok because trying to keep up with it was not only playing into a hyper-reality that I couldn’t keep up with but they shadow banned one of my silly videos where one of my characters was pretending to cut a dead body (obviously fake) up in a bathtub but the timer on my phone went off so I looked to the camera and said, “Guess I gotta start my cooking show”.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/powderedwigmachine?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/powderedwigmachine
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@PowderedWigMachineGonnaGetYou?si=NKZ-0wy90XGhnV8s
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6dqxRx01UTDYTU5JKRVkAw?si=qpy1hDX7TrCim4NuBOgL3Q Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/powdered-wig-machine/1693539766
Image Credits
@ashleygoodmedia @trevorlstokes @alejandrasolcasas @jojodancerphotos @vxcphotography13 @pooch.emw