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Neon Indian: VEGA, Stalkers And Meeting Jim Jarmusch

We meet up with Alan Palomo.

Posted 22nd September 2010, 11:47am in Interviews, by Linda Martin


Alan Palomo is the brains behind Neon Indian, who are finally putting out their debut album ‘Psychic Chasms’ in Europe this week. We meet up with him to talk about Neon Indian’s next album, his other band VEGA, meeting Jim Jarmusch and being mistaken for Andrew VanWyngarden.

Your album ‘Psychic Chasms’ has just seen it’s European release. It includes the track ‘Sleep Paralysist’ which wasn’t on the original release. Why have you chosen to include it on the European release?
Well, ‘Sleep Paralysist’ was actually a collaboration between me and Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear. They basically just facilitated the opportunity for us to work together. I already had this demo of ‘Sleep Paralysist’ that could possibly have been featured on the record. But you know, just for the sake of it, see what happens, put us in a room, put a bunch of recording equipment around us. We actually recorded it in the church where they do a lot of their practising and where Chris Taylor does a lot of his recording so it’s kind of interesting. All those sort of ethereal reverbs in the song are because of the environment in which it was recorded.

Was that the church they used in the clip for ‘Two Weeks’?
That’s actually a different church. And it’s funny because that was the first thing I asked them when we walked in: “Is that the...?” “No.” Maybe it was, maybe they just didn’t want to tell me. Yeah, it kind of was this eerie, kind of suitable for those kind of recordings.

Earlier this year you did a Neon Indian show at CAMP and if I remember correctly, you promised to be recording a VEGA album right about now. But here you are touring Europe. What happened to the VEGA album?
I guess we just kind of keep getting offers. It’s just the way in which the VEGA record is being set up and you know, I still can’t say who the producers are just yet. We just have to find the right time to work on it. So it’s kind of been the thing, they’ve been getting ready to put out the new record and I’m already writing the next Neon Indian record as well. It’s still gonna happen. I think I’m already halfway through it as far as the writing goes. It’s just also the thing that we realised that we needed to put out the record over here ourselves, be able to present people with a live show. I think that eventually we just started thinking over what was the most immediate thing, which was the VEGA record. But once November hits and touring finally ends – ‘cause we’ve been touring of the same record since last September, and I think the whole band is kind of a little sleepless and kind of permafried because of the delirium of constantly being on the road and changing time zones. I think that once November hits we’re going to hibernate. I’m actually going to go to Helsinki to record the next Neon Indian record. So I’ve been getting things ready for that. Once that period hits I’m gonna immerge myself in both records and hopefully put them out in a six month period. Which is a little ambitious I know. I think I like to pretend that world really is ending in 2012, and that I have one year to put two of the best records I could possibly attempt to create, at least in this point in my life. It’s kind of fun to play off of that, the motivation of the impending apocalypse.

With two bands to write songs for, how does your song writing process work? Do you know which band you’re writing a song for when you start out?
I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at compartmentalising those different sides of my brain. I guess I have various schizophrenic musical impulses, like one day I’m writing something that doesn’t sound like anything I was writing the day before. I think in that sense it helps the sounds from going stale for me. Like when I realising that I’m labouring too much over one project it’s nice to break away from it and write a different kind of song. The projects feed of each other in a way. Sometimes you end up with this weird, mutated song which is usually what the remixes sound like. The way I work on the songs is also kind of rare. With VEGA I usually know specifically what the outcome of the song is going to be before I write it. Like I have this very fine idea or aesthetic that I try to tap into. And with Neon Indian the whole point is to not know, the point is to sit down with a new electrical gadget and try to create a song out of that. I never had any formal music training. It’s kind of ironic because my brother and my dad have been musicians their whole lives. So there’s always been this intimidation of approaching music from this more technical background. But I think half the charm of Neon Indian is that it is very intuitive. That it’s a thing that’s still very abstract in my head, and it comes out one way and it’s a little bit different from what I planned or just completely different entirely. It’s more of that discovery process with Neon Indian as opposed to listening to a Chaka Kahn song and “oh, that’s a VEGA song right there!”. Something like that.

With your Dad and brother being musicians, have you ever considered doing something together?
Ehm, yeah. It’s funny, my Dad used to always pitch that to my brother and I growing up. But it always sounded really cheesy, like the Partridge family. I think now I’d be way more into collaborating. But we all have really different musical sensibilities, that’s kind of interesting. My brother is a very technically oriented musician and we bond over various new bands. We always like what the other’s listening to, but we just come from different places. I don’t know, maybe he could help out in a weird way. I know my Dad and my brother are further with the notion of contributing songs for the VEGA album, which I was completely down for. We’ll see if they come up with any interesting demos for me to work off.

You’ve been playing a lot of festivals and gigs over the past year. Do you prefer one of the two or do they both have their own charm?
I think they definitely have their own charms. I think that the more intimate venue is a little better suited for meandering aimlessly at the venue afterwards and end up smoking weed in someone’s car. Which feels like a more normal experience as opposed to playing at a festival and playing a more hyped up show. All the formalities just make it surreal and it gets pretty easy to get caught up in that. Like there’s this room where you sit in and you wait before you perform and blah blah blah. Whereas most of the shows we’ve played since we’ve got here have been like, we’re in somebody’s bar and the green room is the bar. I guess we just kind of hang out there before and after. Yeah, it has it’s own charm. It’s very easy to get caught up in the bigger and more theatrical performing and you forget that you’re just tweaking knobs and singing songs, so I try to always keep that in mind.

Do you feel there’s a difference in touring in Europe or America?
Yeah, at least right now. I’d definitely say that we’ve got a much larger fan base in the US. Obviously because the record was never released over here. It was just floating around on the internet, and I wanted people to have a tangible thing. Until I have a record in my hand or until I have seen them perform live I will just have this abstract idea in my hand of what the band is or what they are. So much of the actual judgement process happens and all those thing that happen in the physical world as opposed to what happens on a Myspace page or on a blog. And yeah, I think that it’s weird, it’s like a jump back to when the record first came out in October, when it came out in the US. It’s a very different vibe now, whereas in the US we do it as a co-headline tour with Prefuse 73. Here it’s like, we play a bar there to illuminate crowds. But it’s good, I like that variety. It’s a very fresh interesting start to just completely put things together in a DIY style over here. Getting to put together the record and the packaging and put it out on my own imprint was kind of like a dream come true, to have that complete aesthetic control. And to be able to deliver something to people that’s fully formed and actualised. Whereas in the US it all came up sort of like a clusterfuck, so to speak, in lack of a better term. It was an exciting time, but it was also delirious and kind of strangely convoluted at the same time. It all had a learning curve to it, whereas here now I feel more confident, just being like “Hey! Here’s the record and here’s our show!”

Besides being the brains behind Neon Indian and VEGA, you’re also a film student. Do you get to work that experience in your videos and live performances?
Yeah. We have visuals that accompany our live shows and it was based on a series of collaborative conversations between me and this guy Lars Larsen from Texas, who builds video synthesizers. We just created this really crazy one hour complication of what would be the visual representation of the album. It’s perfect to accompany it. To me much of what Neon Indian references on is a lot of these childhood references through a psychedelic lo-fi filter, so to call it. It’s interesting to see the visual representation. It’s in that weird, nostalgic way where you have this memory before memory or something. I’m really obsessed with the idea of a memory deteriorating in the same way that a record or a tape does: the more you listen to it, the more it degrades. And certain details change and it’s not quite what it was when it initially happened. It was very good to find someone who knew exactly what I was thinking of. The idea for the next record is to make some kind of short film and almost put that out before the record to showcase some of the music of it. Over time I’d like to get more of a multimedia project, so yeah, I want to get back to film school. I’m kind of on a permanent hiatus from all the things that have happened in music. I can never really see them as mutually exclusive. It’s this thing where one feeds of the other, it’s weird. And most of the time I have a visual idea of the album before the music come to mind, if that makes sense. I have an idea of what the settings would be and what the visuals would be, and than it’s almost like I’m trying to score it.

I read on your Twitter that earlier this month Jim Jarmusch walked into the studio where you were recording?
Oh my God, yeah! Absolutely. It actually sucks, ‘cause I took a picture on my iPhone and I lost it. Man, where were we? Oh, it was in Copenhagen. I’m really bummed out about that ‘cause he really had some very interesting words after the show where he said, “hey, you should keep making films.” It was a really strange, surreal moment from someone who I take quite a bit of influence from to kind of say things in such a way that made it sound like a very peer-oriented community. Which is why I got into art, to interact with other people and have this strange collaboration that happens by virtue of just being around someone. And it’s really cool if something happens like that. And I didn’t even know he made music. They played it on the show and it was pretty phenomenal. Definitely reminded me of something like Sleeper or something really droney and dark, which is totally up my ally as well.

With Neon Indian being more of an accident and VEGA an intentional band, if you don’t mind me calling them that, how do you feel about the fame Neon Indian’s gathered and VEGA moving more to the background?
It’s been this weird happenstance in the sense that maybe if I hadn’t have had that dream where I took acid with Alicia, about which I’m still to this day wondering how she feels that I’m constantly mentioning that we were planning on taking acid. From writing the song, sitting on the song trying to rewrite it, it almost became a VEGA song. I kept trying to rewrite it in the studio and just completely gave up on the idea of cleaning it up. All the emotions just kept on disappearing every time I tried to rewrite the melodies or putting it more in the context of a dance song. I think it was the initial spark that made me so infatuated which I wanted to preserve and if anything write more songs like that. It was weird, one day I sat down and ‘6669’ happened, and then the next day ‘Local Joke’ happened and the day after that ‘Deadbeat Summer’ happened. It became this tumbling snowball of ideas and it became the moment where I could implement all this crazy shit where I could never find the context for with VEGA. And I finally had the perfect template. Because it was the template, I was trying to find the context. It’s completely changed the way in which I make music now, which is nice. The fact that it was such an accident is weird. Especially now that school’s starting up again I have this feeling of “What if I was entering the last year of college right now?”. At this very moment – well at this very moment I’d still be asleep ‘cause it’s very early in the US – I’d be buying books and seeing all the same characters coming back to the local bars and haunts. It’s very weird, there’s this like parallel life that I’ve kind of fallen into. Music in itself is just a complete creative deviation for me. I was very much into film, and I still am, it’s just an interesting other medium by which I can create these ideas. Maybe this can help facilitate a return to film at some point. Maybe not any time soon, I’ve become so infatuated with the whole process behind Neon Indian and VEGA. It’s definitely pretty surreal and completely bizarre.

You played SXSW earlier this year, and I read some reports of a huge billboard bearing your face on it. How did you feel about that?
That was part of the Green Label sound, ehm, single... You know, what was so funny about that is that I’ve lived for Austin for a year. And I was almost completely rejected by that place in a very strange way ‘cause I don’t have transportation. All I was really doing was going to class. The first six to eight months I wasn’t really hanging out with anybody. I do have friends there, but it was this thing where everybody was already in their own rhythm, and you end up feeling a bit like a fifth wheel. When you go out you’re kind of like a casual acquaintance. It was very odd, if it hadn’t been for the circumstances I would never have felt crazy enough to even want to try something like Neon Indian. But it was very funny to be in that one position and then disappear at some point, ‘cause as soon as I had finished the record I left. I went to Australia for a month and I helped my friend Ben from Miami Horror record his record, which is finally surfacing now. As soon as I got back to the US I did a short tour with VEGA, and then I just fell into a Neon Indian Tour and then I just moved to New York. So to come back nearly a year later and having billboards around felt like the product of some really bizarre self-satisfying dream. I first heard that the billboards were up from a friend of mine who works on one of the main streets in Austin. He stepped out to get a cigarette, he looks up and just sees this billboard and calls me: “Yeah, so every time I have a break I have to look at your mug.” It was really funny. That was a really incredible week. It was really interesting, it was what I always thought SXSW would be like. Almost like a summer camp for bands, everyone that you’ve met on the road is suddenly flying under the roof of one venue all in the same week.

I read a story that you had a stalker for a while, who was convinced you were actually Andrew van Wyngaarden from MGMT.
Yeah, she still texts me. It’s really fucking creepy. We played a show with Chromeo in Montreal, and I hadn’t heard from her in months. And I thought, “Oh great, she must have lost my number.” Maybe back when Neon Indian was anonymous and when I very much wanted to keep it anonymous, because I didn’t want the music to be judged through it’s connection with VEGA or anything else, I wanted it to be a stand-alone project. Maybe then it could have been completely justified, but now there’s so much press to prove that I’m Alan not Andrew and to have videos, pictures and content. I was in San Francisco, I get a text from a number I don’t know and then a few weeks later that same number. And once I’m in Montreal I’m just like “who is this?”. And then once again it’s like, “Hi Andrew, it’s Maren. Blah blah blah.” The whole situation is incredibly messy and a little terrifying at this point. I would almost want to put her on the list for a Neon Indian show so that she could come and be faced with the reality of it. But I guess in another way maybe I’m keeping her at bay from the real MGMT, which I’m hoping one day they’ll thank me for.

One final question: what’s the last record you bought?
Well, I bought a whole stack of records when I was in Copenhagen. I got Sonic Youth’s ‘Evol’. I obviously never learned to play the guitar very well, the last time I consistently played the guitar was in high school on open mic nights. Everybody had an acoustic guitar in high school. I think on the next record I want to tap into some of that very sarcastic style of songwriting that you can hear in Eric’s Trip, or like Daydream Nation or the ‘Living End’ by the Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s very weird, it’s like this very sarcastic narcissism. It creates such a weird context, a series of layers for the song as far as like emotionally what you’re supposed to feel about it. I got that one, I got this Alexander Robotnick single, I can’t find any of his stuff in the US. And this compilation of new wave from Milano. I’ve heard of any of the bands, but I guess we’ll see how good it is.
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