Bring the Neon War Home

Pete: I threw a few events in Portland, intending to highlight the breadth and quality of Portland’s not super trad indie scene. The first Tropix was an awkward mish-mash of bands, as was it’s intent, featuring something like 12 bands in one day. For some reason a few folks from decent labels made the trek to Portland for this thing and a few acts got offers to release albums following this mess that featured people taking baths, Friends Forever bringing out the cops and us dropping all of the days’ profits from the ceiling while Glass Candy played. YS opened and we ended up with an offer from Narnack to record an album and gave us a very meager budget to record. GREAT. HOW DO WE DO THIS? Our first “proper” studio album, we recorded at a real studio with a few sketches for songs, “Police Eternity”, “Neon War” were all things we had “written” and hashed out live a bit.. We improvised most of the other tracks once we were set up, but because our gear was so wired together, we couldn’t really record a lot of stuff discretely or really do overdubs in a way that made sense. This was the first of our attempts at working in a studio that basically involved routing, splitting, wiring things up for over a full day and then spending a day tracking and THAT WAS IT. There is a reason why I moved away from multi track recordings and basically it was because it just never worked. When we finished the tracking for this album we were… confused as far as what to do so we enlisted a few folks to help us mix and edit the multitrack recordings. Jamie Stewart took a lot of liberties, but made our tracks much more musical. We had been very collaborative in our playing and this was the start of that extending into our studio work. The album was supposed to be ready for our first US tour but it came out a few months later. We saw it for sale in stores before we got copies and the guy who had been our contact at the label had left. It still managed to get out there, and led to some other opportunities. Gabriel: There are a lot of untold stories about underground music in the Bush years, but one of them is that there existed a kind of East Coast/West Coast beef. Some of this was hand-me-downs from punk, where the West Coast was “artsy” and the East Coast was somehow more “street”. It’s not hard to hear/see the differences between NYHC and SST, between Agnostic Front and the Dead Kennedys, and even though this kind of east-west divide wasn’t always a thing (eg. Olympia-DC), it still played out. Part of that was that it cost a lot of gas money to make it across the country and so a lot underground bands on the East Coast were happy to play up and down with only occasional trips out to Chicago, where as any trip along the West coast was a serious financial decision. The thing is we were committed to a working band, “get in the van” approach, so we made yearly trips up and down the coast (a minimum of 5 days and 2000 miles) as well as yearly trips across the country (a minimum of 4 weeks and up to 10,000 miles). And this was before Myspace was even a thing. Given simple geography, it wasn’t surprising that there was a nexus of noise rock, no wave and art punk that was thriving in the triangle between Providence, Chicago and Baltimore. New York was a media hub, which meant that anything passing through there got amplified, and labels based out of there had serious reach. By comparison, vibrant scenes in L.A., Denver, Arizona, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Portland flew way under the radar. (Needless to say, Iowa City, St. Louis, Columbus, Missoula and other fly-over scenes had to struggle even harder to break through). Narnak was one of the only East Coast labels that seemed to get that there was something happening out here, though Load, Troubleman, Skin Graft and a few others also eventually looked West. Even though it seemed anathema for a noise band to “sign” to a hipster label we weren’t interested in being exclusive - we wanted to play to anyone willing to listen and putting out a record in NYC seemed like a way to open up things, which it did, even while we continued to release tons of music on DIY noise labels from our side of things. In the end, the album did what we want it to do - it got out there, it got listened to, and for while we were a lot of people’s “first noise record.” The process taught us to think about releases as serving different purposes, having different requirements, being different objects. This was a “pop” noise record that unabashedly had higher production values and incorporated musical and rhythmic elements that drew directly on our listening and dancing to records by the Bug and tracks produced by Neptunes. There are also moments of spirited experimentation that I’m still fond of, especially on the tracks produced by Jamie Stewart, which make the most of the beautiful wood warehouse recording room at Type Foundry. Neon War was also an attempt to make something less ephemeral than a cdr, an “album” in the most traditional sense, and in some way a statement. At the time I thought that this is what an American punk record responding to the horror and spectacle of the war against Iraq should sound like.

Recently debuting with a CDR under the name D. Yellow Swans, this Portland-based outré-noise ensemble's debut for Narnack Records applies discipline, finally, to the noise-rock aesthetic.