Neon Indian

Tue 21st Dec, 2010 in Features

Neon Indian were hailed for having one of the best albums of 2009 and have been one of the “hottest” bands of 2010. The band is returning to Australia to take a bit of a break and provide the soundtrack to our New Years festivities.

Neon Indian is the brain-child of Alan Palomo, who took the time to talk to FasterLouder about returning to Australia, the recent release of Mind CTRL: Psychic Chasms Possessed, “chillwave”, upcoming releases and collaborations.

There’s been a bit of “genre-dropping” almost every time Neon Indian is mentioned, does that annoy you?
I think maybe there was a certain point in which it was a little intrusive to get comfortable with the idea of putting music out there and having it be completely “recontextualised” or made to be something else. I guess all it really takes is just a couple of small bands to lump together and consider a “genre”. To me it’s kind of interesting. I think now that I’ve written a lot of material for the next album, whatever it was about the sound considered as “chillwave” may not necessarily be there for the next one.

Music like that has been around since the early 60s, maybe even earlier than that – to me it seems a little silly to try to take this certain sound… or generally it seems to assume that the people making the music don’t have a musical reference base beyond [the last] six months.

What I find really odd is that you see a lot of chillwave bands that were being reviewed in comparison to other chillwave bands, and to me I was hearing a much richer set of influences. These things weren’t even touched upon – I think it made it kind of unfair for those that came a little bit later in that whole sort of thing.

It’s just a very interesting example [of] the way in which blog culture is evolving, the way in which we perceive music and trying to look at everything that’s categorised. Micro-genres that tend to leap and evolve and exhaust all their possibilities and then just completely implode and it’s not necessarily as fluid as it once was – experimenting with different things and it doesn’t necessarily matter what you want to label it or call it.

Maybe before, there were very formalised institutions of music that were happening, but now music has become more and more referential anyway – people are just trying to touch on everything and it seems a little flippant or short-lived to even try to categorise it.
If I were to describe my music – maybe I’d be a little bit too close to it to be able to see it objectively – but lo-fi psychedelic tape music is nothing new, at least as far as I’m concerned.

Do you think labels such as “chillwave” pigeonhole the music?
It doesn’t necessarily pigeonhole, I mean, I don’t think [people] kind of grand-scheme it to lump everyone into one category and sort of treat it from that mentality of quickly defining it, to quickly dismissing it.

Wasn’t it totally started by [alternative culture blog] Hipster Runoff anyway, which is just kind of like a joke blog? To me it kind of seems interesting that this is like a running gag that evolved into the definition of a sound.

Whatever it’s labelled, there seems to be something more honest about that sound.
It’s not necessarily being thrown at you in the lyrics, it’s more about the atmosphere. To me that kind of music or at least music that really sort of plays around with its context in terms of place and time has always been really fascinating because it starts to take on these really cinematic qualities. When you have music that just kind of sounds like it’s more like it’s scoring a situation or almost has like a weird film narrative quality to it, to me is kind of one of the reasons why I went into it. Film was what I studied in college so it’s really hard for me to see those as being mutually exclusive, they’re always kind of interrelated.