NEON INDIAN

A chance visit to a Texas pawnshop ignited one teenager's passion for synthesizers. Introducing Neon Indian, a man determined to give the sound of the Seventies a whole new lease of life

Words by Kim Taylor Bennett

MEET 22-YEAR-OLD Neon Indian, AKA Alan Palomo. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, his family moved to Texas when he was six. Some years later his dad took him to a pawnshop where young Palomo stumbled across the Oberheim OB-X, a rare Seventies synthesizer. Plugging it in and playing the first note he was instantly hooked. "It definitely spawned this pursuit of all the synth-oriented songs of my childhood that were always on the tip of my tongue, without quite realising what they were," he says. True to his word, Palomo's songs are warmly familiar - all skewed synth lines and gauzy reverb. Sepia-tinted pop, if you will. All of which perfectly encapsulates his quest for something that's hovering just out of reach.

A&W The Seventies was such a fertile decade for music, particularly because of the invention of the synth and the subsequent birth of electronic music. Would you agree?

Neon Indian Absolutely, the difference between a Seventies and Eighties electronic music aesthetic is by the time you get to the Eighties synths are a lot more reliable and then it starts to get really formulaic. In the Seventies, for people to be able to incorporate those elements into their music was an incredibly strenuous process. It's fleeting and ephemeral and there's a sense of sonic instability. I've heard so many late Seventies recordings or disco tunes where you can hear the oscillator going out of tune, but it gives the music real insular qualities and creates this narrative of what's going on in the studio.

A&W Are there any artists from that era that you particularly identify with?

NI Todd Rundgren. He perfectly balances the line between being able to write a great three-and-half minute pop song and 35-minute synthesizer epics. That time and place really pushed people to meet both those extremes. I do consider what I do to be pop music, but obviously filtered through all the weird fucked up impulses I get playing around with equipment.

A&W Looking back on your debut 'Psychic Chasms' do you see certain lyrical themes emerging?

NI I started the project as a creative exercise to write as many songs as possible, and I had to get the entire album done in a month so it was a real frenzy of ideas. It was centred around these little moments in relationships where you're introduced to all the wrong combinations of feelings. There's a sort of nostalgia that comes with wanting to have the same simple perceptions you used to have about friendships and relationships. You meet people and they fall more to the backdrop of your life and then you have some dream about them that makes you think about them all over again. It was a chance to get a lot of those demons out. It's funny because the music seems kind of effervescent and really laid back but if you were to read the lyrics, they're a little hostile. For me, the songs I like the most are the ones that stir a sensation of ambivalence. Sad-happy, if you like.

A&W In music, that is surely the best feeling...

NI Absolutely, and those are the feelings I try to evoke. If people get that sensation then that's great, but if they want to jump up and down drunkenly at a festival, I can't help that either! There's a South American word for it: saudaude. It's a feeling of nostalgia with the hope that whatever it is that you used to have will return; having an expectation that it'll come back eventually.

A&W If 'Psychic Chasms' was the soundtrack to a movie what kind of movie would it be?

NI Wow. That's a fantastic question! I've never had to answer that. I had this film concept once where somebody misses a connecting flight so they're stuck in this small city for the night, maybe sometime in the late Seventies. So, they decide to start exploring and eventually meet somebody who introduces them to the more subterranean qualities of this town. It would be like landing in someone's purgatory. I like the idea that purgatory is the kind of place you could visit, like a Dante character. Going to a college town is totally like that. I know a lot of people who live in college towns who aren't at school, they've just been there for 10 years and it feels like their life never really started. I've always been really interested in characters like that. It would probably be directed by Gus Van Sant or Harmony Korine.