Neon Indian :: Deadbeat SummerSo here's my first interview (of anyone, ever) with Alan Palomo of VEGA and Neon Indian. I gotta be honest I was surprised by the sincerity and depth/scope of his responses.
SP: Growing up, did you have early exposure to music performance?
AP: I did. Mostly in the same way that people reminisce about the bands their parents listened to during childhood. My father’s been a musician most his whole life and constantly exposed my brother and I to his influences. Lots of Beatles, Caetano Veloso, Doobie Brothers etc. By the time we were born he already had a brief stint as a pop star in Mexico during the late seventies/early eighties and written the bulk of his original material. Though I was around it constantly, I think I absorbed most it passively. My brother was always more musical. I didn’t really show any interest in making music till the end of highschool when my dad and I found a dusty old Oberheim Synth in a pawn shop. Things changed quite a bit shortly after.
SP: What bands push your nostalgia button?
AP: The Clientele’s Suburban Light will always be my ultimate nostalgia album. Something in the songwriting and natural reverb has always allowed me to picture the chilly, humid studio they must have recorded the demos in and how close to the pub it must have been to have that ‘fresh from emotional grind’ feel to it. But I tend to go through phases with nostalgic bands. I’ll trick myself into thinking each genre has its place of origin that its meant to evoke in terms of memory or imagery whether experienced or borrowed. I remember obsessing over Question Mark and the Mysterians, The Clean, or anything with equal amounts of eerie reverb and proto-punk organ sounds because of the Jarmusch-esque imagery it would evoke. I’ll get kinda stuck in that with stuff like “Deadbeat Summer”. As far as anything electronic though, any single from New Order. Easily.
SP: Did it feel weird to be featured on ABC world news? Did they approach you about it?
AP: Very. I was humbled at the opportunity to do it but was really curious to see if the average ABC news-goer would go for it. The most unusual part was trying to explain the ins and outs of a microcosmic music genre/scene in a matter of sentences to such a varied audience. I couldn’t help imagining a bunch of moms mumbling ‘dream-wave?’ to themselves as we filmed the answers. The way it came about was my roommate at the time had introduced me to a friend of his who worked as a camera op as well as a college correspondent at the local Austin station. She had always been very supportive of the VEGA project and when SXSW came around their national network wanted to find a national and a local act to follow around throughout the whole experience. She pitched the idea and they enjoyed the songs enough to go film them live. I don’t think I realized how available the video was going to be till she sent me a link weeks later. I was definitely stoked with the final product. She did an excellent job.
SP: What sort of 'life changing' circumstances caused you to leave Ghosthustler? Do you still feel like you made the right decision, and how, in your opinion, have you grown as an artist?
AP: I was feeling pretty lost around the time of the Ghosthustler demise. That spring semester I completely blew off school and the few times I went to class I basically sat with my laptop and answered emails from the band page. It was becoming a pattern since we started. The momentum just didn’t seem worth negating other responsibilities in my life as a little over a year after its conception we were still scuffling with ideas in hopes of finding some finite aesthetic to run with. Working on music with my band-mates became a needless power grab for direction and the fun factor just decayed slowly over time. Having no foreseeable releases in the future and giving in to the musical limbo just didn’t seem auspicious given the attention and at some point it just seemed right to bail. After a few awkward shows at SXSW I decided if I was going to veer into a hazy musical tangent, I was at least going to do it under my own circumstances. Not say I didn’t have serious anxiety over it upon leaving but I never really doubted that at the very least I’d be happier working by myself. My move to Austin essentially isolated me to the confines of my room where I was free to toil away with sounds and balance my life. In retrospect, I probably should have done it sooner.
SP: When you begin a project do you have specific intentions for the final product?
AP: Depends on the project. VEGA has always been very meticulous from the start given its more production heavy sound. The summer in which I laid the foundation for it I chose a very specific set of influences by which to start writing from. As I’ve ranted about before, I became heavily infatuated with the modular synth sweeps of Todd Rundgren, Robert Wyatt, ELO, and Space. Synthpop still had its place in my ipod but it seems the late seventies had more to offer in terms of variations on the cosmic space sound without being so tightly compressed into the kicks and snares of the linndrum Italo craze. Though this initial ep was mainly dance tracks, it leaves open the possibility to step out of the dance floor a bit on the album. Neon Indian however is the complete invert. Many of the songs off Psychic Chasms started off as creative exercises to take a break from the tedious production habits of Well Known Pleasures. I didn’t really go into it further than using a certain tools and sounds to make the songs. My intentions as far as that’s concerned is to purge certain musical and emotional impulses. It wasn’t until finishing the EP that I dived into the aesthetic of Neon Indian head first and wrote as much material as possible. It probably kept me sane.
SP: Neon Indian is considerably less dance oriented (from what I've heard so far) than Vega, is this an indicator of a broader change in your life? Or merely another facet of music to explore?
AP: It’s tough to say at this point. I don’t think either project is any less honest or less representative of where I’m at though Neon Indian probably just does it with more transparency because its guidelines seem less restricted. It all ties back to growth. I feel like I still have much to learn in the way of complete unadulterated expression because I’m still very much so learning about the medium I’m choosing to work through. Obviously, what happens in my life dictates the subject matter but I could never see myself writing music as just Alan because these projects eventually become meditations on a concept and evolve through the attempted variations over time. They generally stick to one thing and see it through until becoming something else entirely. Neon Indian just so happens to suit me at the moment because that one thing it does is essentially explore sounds. Since the template to work under is pretty broad, the songs sharply veer into themselves and the only thing stringing them together is my vocals and the particular recording style or instruments I use.
SP: What's your take on the mass flooding of lo-fi acts coming out recently? Is it gimmicky or not? (or does it depend on the band)
AP: Definitely depends. I’d be lying if claimed it to be a gimmick-free genre. But at the very least it IS a genre, which means its has enough dimension to be based on some really excellent music. The production qualities of lo-fi totally gives lee way for some lazy songwriting/recording but it’s easy to tell those apart. Trends and bandwagons are pretty unavoidable in the days of blog. When I listen to someone like Ariel Pink or Times New Viking, the amount of effort is completely incomparable to some dude who wrote his first track ever using distortion plug-ins from garageband and sent it to all his favorite blogs. Half the time, when I hear something like that, its generally obvious where the gimmick lies. It’s the notion that it’s just easier to make/get noticed. Hiding discrepancies in reverbs and distortions is a pretty old trick that even I’m guilty of from time to time, but it should never be only thing the song/artist has going for it. That’s just plain missing the boat. One would think the goal would be to write a good enough song that the quality of its conception becomes irrelevant.
SP:And on that note, what do you think about the hype based popularization musical artists? Has it always been this way?
AP: Hype has become quite the currency in music and I’d say it seems to have more clout now than it ever did. My only concern it that its causes genres to proliferate too quickly, begin self referencing themselves at an exponentially faster rate, then implode like a supernova, leaving behind a residue of hundreds of shitty mp3s. It was a shame seeing that happen to the electro genre. We literally watched it grow under a microscope and become the single most burnt out sound of the decade in under two years. Had this happened before the Internet, we would have seen it grow organically and evolve over time without becoming oversaturated. It wouldn’t have seemed like a such a clusterfuck to exhaust all possible variations in an attempt to retain relevance if only for a few weeks more. But then again, that was sort of the proto-genre for this new system. It’s tough to say if that would happen with the next series of trends.
SP: And lastly drugs and music. Always, sometimes, or never?
AP: Always, but only sometimes if not never.
Thanks again Alan. Super Awesome.
-Stewart
