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01 Mar 10 // Music

Neon Indian: Cinematic Sounds

By Tom Vale Photos By Ben Ritter Issue Mar 2010 Neighborhood Downtown

Alan Palomo has been lurking around the edges of the electronic scene for a few years, earning fans with his work in both VEGA and Ghosthustler. Around the country, people in the know recognized his talent, but it wasn’t until he put the name Neon Indian on some of his more personal, playful, futuristic disco workouts that he began to attract big-league attention. Neon Indian is now getting love from all quarters, including an impressive, out-of-almost-nowhere #13 ranking for “Deadbeat Summer” on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2009. We spoke with Alan just before his big move to New York City.

How did you come up with that name?
It’s the one project that I’ve been involved in where I can’t take credit for coining the name. It was right around the time I started Ghosthustler, and in kind of mock retaliation my friend from high school, Alicia, was like, ’Well, if you’re going to have a band called Ghosthustler then I’m going to have my own band called…fuckin’ Neon Indian.’ But she didn’t play anything. So the Myspace page just sat there blank for a few years, and it was just comical. And then I started writing this collection of songs, and given that the subject matter of the music seems to hearken back to that specific period of my life, it would make sense to name it after a make-believe band conceived by a high school friend.

Was your path into music always clear to you?
Growing up, I always observed music very passively. My dad’s been a musician his whole life, and my brother started when he was pretty young. They’re both very technically skilled, which I am not (laughs). I’d watch and practice—my Dad did teach me how to sing—he’d play, like, Frank Sinatra and have me sing along, but it was all pretty informal. I don’t think I got serious with music until the beginning of college. And before that I’d picked up a guitar, and played a few open mic nights, or had my old Casio in my closet and tried to run that through some distortion pedals—and, oddly enough, make something kind of like what Neon Indian is doing now. But back then it was just
a weird experiment that never went anywhere. Even in college I studied film, and [I] think film has always been my first, intuitive passion. Eventually I’d like to get back into that, but music seems like a fun and interesting deviation.

Does film feed into what you’re doing musically?
Definitely. I don’t see film and music as being mutually exclusive—it’s hard to divorce the two, I can’t work on music without seeing some kind of narrative or cinematic quality to it. It just comes from growing up and constantly exercis- ing those thoughts where you’re trying to visualize things, and the music might be loosely based on some image or film I saw. In fact, even when I was working on Psychic Chasms, one of the things I did to keep from going stir crazy in Austin was go to I Luv Video a lot, and rent a bunch of random films, and try to take little bits and pieces from what I watched just to try and get in that writing state of mind. I remember watching Stroszek, that Werner Herzog movie—most depressing thing I’ve ever seen. But the end of it did make me want to pick up the synth and start noodling around, try to work on something. It’s a little bleak. It’s supposedly what Ian Curtis watched right before he offed himself.

There was another movie I saw by Agnès Varda called Vagabond—it was kind of like Midnight Cowboy without the story. This girl wandering from city to city, and living off the kindness that people show her—it’s a very bizarre movie, but it kind of articulates the landscape of suburban areas of France. Now that I look back on it, there’s definitely a pattern of films that I was selecting. But yeah, film is a big influence in anything I do, not just in music.

Do you work steadily or does it come in waves?
It definitely comes in waves, although these days I’ve had to learn to be thinking about it all the time, whether working on a remix or thinking about the next release. Creativity comes in surges. I had a month where the EP really took off, and I was able to make some headway with that, and that whole album was maybe three and a half weeks collectively. I was pretty immersed. It just happens, but you do have to kind of trick yourself into being in that state of mind—again, it ties back to watching a lot of films and trying to find influence.

Were you surprised by how quickly the attention on Neon Indian ramped up?
I found it incredibly shocking—I put a lot of work into VEGA for a while, and it sort of required really polished production, and it seemed like a studio type project. And I felt kind of burned out on it. And Neon Indian was just kind of a creative exercise, reacting against that. I wanted to just write as much material as I could, and I realized I was writing like a song a night, that it was just coming out very naturally. And since I didn’t have any template or expectations or guidelines for [Neon Indian], I could put in whatever I could never find the right context for in VEGA, or Ghosthustler for that matter. I could finally just toy with sounds, without being concerned about the end game. [It was] more about the process, and I did it really more for myself; I realized that I had something after “Should Have Taken Acid With You”. And it felt gratifying to be able to work with that sort of template. So it definitely did come as a shock, because it’s something that just came as a surge of creativity, and then when I had it done, by then there was a small label that wanted to pick it up, and I left for a month to go to Australia. And while I was gone I would see these emails pop up, just random stuff that was happening in terms of promotion—[like] getting that Twitter from Grizzly Bear. That entire month was when NI started to take off, started to get play on XMU, that was when I realized that upon my return I would have my hands pretty full.

Tell us about the Grizzly Bear thing.
I’ve always trusted Chris’ [Taylor, of Grizzly Bear] opinion, he seems to be pretty sharp in terms of the aesthetic that he’s into. So I sent him Neon Indian stuff, he started posting it, and from there I guess Ed Droste starting sending it to Gorilla vs Bear, and started Twittering about it, and started Twittering about VEGA, and shortly after that I was on Pitchfork getting Best New Song for “Deadbeat Summer”. I was seeing all this happen through email. It was just from [one] person to the next, next thing you know you’ve got this really ridiculous whirlwind happen- ing, and the next thing you’re thinking about is the best way to maintain the energy and be able to deliver.

And now you’re making the move to New York?
Officially moving up there, trying to figure out a place, doing all the other formalities that accompany a move to a new city. I tried to spend more time there in the past six months, but it seemed kind of pointless to try to move while on tour. I think the most I got to see New York was maybe two weeks out of six months that we were on the road. Now that I’m going to have a little more time to write the VEGA record, it just makes sense to try a change of scenery, a new environment.

It just makes more sense with [considering] the people I’ve been working with, people I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with, the VEGA record is being recording up in Brooklyn…So I don’t know how permanent the move will be, but I want to at least give it a shot and see what I think of it. The year’s going to have so much touring in it anyway, you know, that yeah, I’ll be living in New York, but…it’ll be kind of a sporadic thing that I’ll actually be able to spend any time with.

Do you see Neon Indian as a band moving forward, or is the crew just something you put together for recording and touring?
I actually see VEGA as being more of a band project—Neon Indian is the most immediate extension of what I like to do musically. It’s just whatever I’m feeling at the time. And whatever happens
with Neon Indian next will just happen naturally.

www.myspace.com/neonindian