Neon Indian is Alan Palomo, the Mexican-born, Texas-raised, 21-year-old synth-wizard who learned his production chops as part of Ghosthustler and honed them as VEGA. In October 2009 Neon Indian released his critically heralded debut album, Psychic Chasms, nearly anonymously and drew wild speculation for months. As Neon Indian, Palomo has made an art of leaving out the details and letting the world draw its own conclusions… which is very much the case with the lyrics to his the single, “Sleep Paralysist.”
Neon Indian formed from a batch of off-the-cuff recordings that weren’t quite right as VEGA songs. It turned into something much larger than the sum of its parts. The name itself was invented by Palomo’s former band-mate and high-school friend who, in a round-about way, was the inspiration behind the project's first track “Should Have Taken Acid With You” on Psychic Chasms. Not long after the music was released, Gorilla Vs. Bear blogged about it, Grizzly Bear tweeted their fan-dom, and Pitchfork sealed the deal when they bestowed “Deadbeat Summer,” and Psychic Chasms with their Best New Music honor. “The project really finds its groove,” wrote Pitchfork, “nailing perfectly the essence of woozily nostalgic synth pop.” Neon Indian was outted and all of a sudden what started as a careless outlet for ideas too offbeat to fit the VEGA mold, had gone and defined a genre.
Neon Indian’s sound is as Palomo describes it, “Childhood re-contextualized through a psychedelic, lo-fi filter. The idea of memory before you were old enough to have memories.” Psychic Chasms intentionally captures the sound of records stored in sunlight and played to the breaking point. The album is a melting pot of hazy, lo-fi, sun kissed, electro-pop sounds that come together to form a kaleidoscopic collection of esoteric and inspiring songs.
-----------
Neon Indian is the brainchild of Alan Palomo, who's 2009 debut record Psychic Chasms not only earned the 20 year-old a spot on numerous year-end lists, but assisted the forming of a genre that, though known by a few names now (hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chillwave), summoned a very unique and specific electro-mangled sound. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN all praised Palomo for his adventurous new sound, and he was tapped to perform at top festivals like South by Southwest, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch and also scored opening slots for bands ranging from Massive Attack and The Flaming Lips to Phoenix and Chromeo.
After nearly two years on the road off the success of his debut, Palomo returns this fall with his proper follow-up LP, Era Extraña. This time around, we see a darker shaded sound document that tosses somewhere between an 8-bit shoegaze record and peering through the fence of a teenage apocalypse drive-in flick.
Written and recorded last winter in an efficiency apartment in Helsinki, Finland during its short solstice days, Era Extraña was ice sculpted from arpeggiated synth-scapes and scribbled journal entries made during his stint there alone in constant solitude. "It's the closest you can get to feeling like you're at the edge of the earth," he says. "And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do."
The sample-happy stylings of his previous efforts have been traded in for acid-stained commodore 64 jams (See 'Polish Girl, 'Future Sick') and bit-pulped guitar sludge ballads (see 'Hex Girlfriend', 'The Blindside Kiss'). All throughout, the undulating moods of the record are guided by a haunted three-part instrumental titled Heart: Attack, Heart: Decay, and Heart: Release. Once completed, the layers were then thawed and reassembled by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT), who mixed the album and did additional production with Palomo at his upstate Tarbox Studios. The album sessions there were briefly taken on a scenic detour by a drop-in four-song EP collaboration with The Flaming Lips which was released earlier this year.
The album's Spanish title plays with the loose-hinges of the word extraña, which not only directly translates into 'strange', but also means to 'command the act of longing'. These themes of feeling an eerie absence in new strange times are explored throughout the album as a whole in his teenage ethos peppered lyrical musings in an end-days obsessed climate. Many of this is inspired by an ongoing love affair with the notion of what cyberpunk means in a year like 2011. The feeling can best be described in a recent interview where he noted, "We're now living in the era mysticized by a lot of future-geared 70s and 80s cinema, but it's definitely not quite how they imagined it."
-------------
An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo. Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, Dreampop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier than the sum of its parts. Forged after a hazy winter gathering in Texas, this initial batch of tracks were the result of field recordings, record samples, a collection of bizarre synth sounds. Soliciting the visual acrobatics of Video artist Alicia Scardetta, this project is setting out to be a multimedia maelstrom.
Orbiting around the themes of drug induced heartbreak, weary afternoons, and lost chances, this music provides a lush soundtrack to the deadbeat exploits of teenage ennui. Neon Indians bedroom ballads have already forged the upcoming Psychic Chasms, the debut full-length, set for release this fall.
https://twitter.com/neonindian
https://www.facebook.com/neonindian
show less
Neon Indian formed from a batch of off-the-cuff recordings that weren’t quite right as VEGA songs. It turned into something much larger than the sum of its parts. The name itself was invented by Palomo’s former band-mate and high-school friend who, in a round-about way, was the inspiration behind the project's first track “Should Have Taken Acid With You” on Psychic Chasms. Not long after the music was released, Gorilla Vs. Bear blogged about it, Grizzly Bear tweeted their fan-dom, and Pitchfork sealed the deal when they bestowed “Deadbeat Summer,” and Psychic Chasms with their Best New Music honor. “The project really finds its groove,” wrote Pitchfork, “nailing perfectly the essence of woozily nostalgic synth pop.” Neon Indian was outted and all of a sudden what started as a careless outlet for ideas too offbeat to fit the VEGA mold, had gone and defined a genre.
Neon Indian’s sound is as Palomo describes it, “Childhood re-contextualized through a psychedelic, lo-fi filter. The idea of memory before you were old enough to have memories.” Psychic Chasms intentionally captures the sound of records stored in sunlight and played to the breaking point. The album is a melting pot of hazy, lo-fi, sun kissed, electro-pop sounds that come together to form a kaleidoscopic collection of esoteric and inspiring songs.
-----------
Neon Indian is the brainchild of Alan Palomo, who's 2009 debut record Psychic Chasms not only earned the 20 year-old a spot on numerous year-end lists, but assisted the forming of a genre that, though known by a few names now (hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chillwave), summoned a very unique and specific electro-mangled sound. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN all praised Palomo for his adventurous new sound, and he was tapped to perform at top festivals like South by Southwest, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch and also scored opening slots for bands ranging from Massive Attack and The Flaming Lips to Phoenix and Chromeo.
After nearly two years on the road off the success of his debut, Palomo returns this fall with his proper follow-up LP, Era Extraña. This time around, we see a darker shaded sound document that tosses somewhere between an 8-bit shoegaze record and peering through the fence of a teenage apocalypse drive-in flick.
Written and recorded last winter in an efficiency apartment in Helsinki, Finland during its short solstice days, Era Extraña was ice sculpted from arpeggiated synth-scapes and scribbled journal entries made during his stint there alone in constant solitude. "It's the closest you can get to feeling like you're at the edge of the earth," he says. "And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do."
The sample-happy stylings of his previous efforts have been traded in for acid-stained commodore 64 jams (See 'Polish Girl, 'Future Sick') and bit-pulped guitar sludge ballads (see 'Hex Girlfriend', 'The Blindside Kiss'). All throughout, the undulating moods of the record are guided by a haunted three-part instrumental titled Heart: Attack, Heart: Decay, and Heart: Release. Once completed, the layers were then thawed and reassembled by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT), who mixed the album and did additional production with Palomo at his upstate Tarbox Studios. The album sessions there were briefly taken on a scenic detour by a drop-in four-song EP collaboration with The Flaming Lips which was released earlier this year.
The album's Spanish title plays with the loose-hinges of the word extraña, which not only directly translates into 'strange', but also means to 'command the act of longing'. These themes of feeling an eerie absence in new strange times are explored throughout the album as a whole in his teenage ethos peppered lyrical musings in an end-days obsessed climate. Many of this is inspired by an ongoing love affair with the notion of what cyberpunk means in a year like 2011. The feeling can best be described in a recent interview where he noted, "We're now living in the era mysticized by a lot of future-geared 70s and 80s cinema, but it's definitely not quite how they imagined it."
-------------
An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo. Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, Dreampop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier than the sum of its parts. Forged after a hazy winter gathering in Texas, this initial batch of tracks were the result of field recordings, record samples, a collection of bizarre synth sounds. Soliciting the visual acrobatics of Video artist Alicia Scardetta, this project is setting out to be a multimedia maelstrom.
Orbiting around the themes of drug induced heartbreak, weary afternoons, and lost chances, this music provides a lush soundtrack to the deadbeat exploits of teenage ennui. Neon Indians bedroom ballads have already forged the upcoming Psychic Chasms, the debut full-length, set for release this fall.
https://twitter.com/neonindian
https://www.facebook.com/neonindian
Neon Indian is Alan Palomo, the Mexican-born, Texas-raised, 21-year-old synth-wizard who learned his production chops as part of Ghosthustler and honed them as VEGA. In October 2009 Neon Indian released his critically heralded debut album, Psychic Chasms, nearly anonymously and drew wild speculation for months. As Neon Indian, Palomo has made an art of leaving out the details and letting the world draw its own conclusions… which is very much the case with the lyrics to his the single, “Sleep Paralysist.”
Neon Indian formed from a batch of off-the-cuff recordings that weren’t quite right as VEGA songs. It turned into something much larger than the sum of its parts. The name itself was invented by Palomo’s former band-mate and high-school friend who, in a round-about way, was the inspiration behind the project's first track “Should Have Taken Acid With You” on Psychic Chasms. Not long after the music was released, Gorilla Vs. Bear blogged about it, Grizzly Bear tweeted their fan-dom, and Pitchfork sealed the deal when they bestowed “Deadbeat Summer,” and Psychic Chasms with their Best New Music honor. “The project really finds its groove,” wrote Pitchfork, “nailing perfectly the essence of woozily nostalgic synth pop.” Neon Indian was outted and all of a sudden what started as a careless outlet for ideas too offbeat to fit the VEGA mold, had gone and defined a genre.
Neon Indian’s sound is as Palomo describes it, “Childhood re-contextualized through a psychedelic, lo-fi filter. The idea of memory before you were old enough to have memories.” Psychic Chasms intentionally captures the sound of records stored in sunlight and played to the breaking point. The album is a melting pot of hazy, lo-fi, sun kissed, electro-pop sounds that come together to form a kaleidoscopic collection of esoteric and inspiring songs.
-----------
Neon Indian is the brainchild of Alan Palomo, who's 2009 debut record Psychic Chasms not only earned the 20 year-old a spot on numerous year-end lists, but assisted the forming of a genre that, though known by a few names now (hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chillwave), summoned a very unique and specific electro-mangled sound. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN all praised Palomo for his adventurous new sound, and he was tapped to perform at top festivals like South by Southwest, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch and also scored opening slots for bands ranging from Massive Attack and The Flaming Lips to Phoenix and Chromeo.
After nearly two years on the road off the success of his debut, Palomo returns this fall with his proper follow-up LP, Era Extraña. This time around, we see a darker shaded sound document that tosses somewhere between an 8-bit shoegaze record and peering through the fence of a teenage apocalypse drive-in flick.
Written and recorded last winter in an efficiency apartment in Helsinki, Finland during its short solstice days, Era Extraña was ice sculpted from arpeggiated synth-scapes and scribbled journal entries made during his stint there alone in constant solitude. "It's the closest you can get to feeling like you're at the edge of the earth," he says. "And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do."
The sample-happy stylings of his previous efforts have been traded in for acid-stained commodore 64 jams (See 'Polish Girl, 'Future Sick') and bit-pulped guitar sludge ballads (see 'Hex Girlfriend', 'The Blindside Kiss'). All throughout, the undulating moods of the record are guided by a haunted three-part instrumental titled Heart: Attack, Heart: Decay, and Heart: Release. Once completed, the layers were then thawed and reassembled by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT), who mixed the album and did additional production with Palomo at his upstate Tarbox Studios. The album sessions there were briefly taken on a scenic detour by a drop-in four-song EP collaboration with The Flaming Lips which was released earlier this year.
The album's Spanish title plays with the loose-hinges of the word extraña, which not only directly translates into 'strange', but also means to 'command the act of longing'. These themes of feeling an eerie absence in new strange times are explored throughout the album as a whole in his teenage ethos peppered lyrical musings in an end-days obsessed climate. Many of this is inspired by an ongoing love affair with the notion of what cyberpunk means in a year like 2011. The feeling can best be described in a recent interview where he noted, "We're now living in the era mysticized by a lot of future-geared 70s and 80s cinema, but it's definitely not quite how they imagined it."
-------------
An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo. Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, Dreampop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier than the sum of its parts. Forged after a hazy winter gathering in Texas, this initial batch of tracks were the result of field recordings, record samples, a collection of bizarre synth sounds. Soliciting the visual acrobatics of Video artist Alicia Scardetta, this project is setting out to be a multimedia maelstrom.
Orbiting around the themes of drug induced heartbreak, weary afternoons, and lost chances, this music provides a lush soundtrack to the deadbeat exploits of teenage ennui. Neon Indians bedroom ballads have already forged the upcoming Psychic Chasms, the debut full-length, set for release this fall.
https://twitter.com/neonindian
https://www.facebook.com/neonindian
read more
Neon Indian formed from a batch of off-the-cuff recordings that weren’t quite right as VEGA songs. It turned into something much larger than the sum of its parts. The name itself was invented by Palomo’s former band-mate and high-school friend who, in a round-about way, was the inspiration behind the project's first track “Should Have Taken Acid With You” on Psychic Chasms. Not long after the music was released, Gorilla Vs. Bear blogged about it, Grizzly Bear tweeted their fan-dom, and Pitchfork sealed the deal when they bestowed “Deadbeat Summer,” and Psychic Chasms with their Best New Music honor. “The project really finds its groove,” wrote Pitchfork, “nailing perfectly the essence of woozily nostalgic synth pop.” Neon Indian was outted and all of a sudden what started as a careless outlet for ideas too offbeat to fit the VEGA mold, had gone and defined a genre.
Neon Indian’s sound is as Palomo describes it, “Childhood re-contextualized through a psychedelic, lo-fi filter. The idea of memory before you were old enough to have memories.” Psychic Chasms intentionally captures the sound of records stored in sunlight and played to the breaking point. The album is a melting pot of hazy, lo-fi, sun kissed, electro-pop sounds that come together to form a kaleidoscopic collection of esoteric and inspiring songs.
-----------
Neon Indian is the brainchild of Alan Palomo, who's 2009 debut record Psychic Chasms not only earned the 20 year-old a spot on numerous year-end lists, but assisted the forming of a genre that, though known by a few names now (hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chillwave), summoned a very unique and specific electro-mangled sound. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN all praised Palomo for his adventurous new sound, and he was tapped to perform at top festivals like South by Southwest, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch and also scored opening slots for bands ranging from Massive Attack and The Flaming Lips to Phoenix and Chromeo.
After nearly two years on the road off the success of his debut, Palomo returns this fall with his proper follow-up LP, Era Extraña. This time around, we see a darker shaded sound document that tosses somewhere between an 8-bit shoegaze record and peering through the fence of a teenage apocalypse drive-in flick.
Written and recorded last winter in an efficiency apartment in Helsinki, Finland during its short solstice days, Era Extraña was ice sculpted from arpeggiated synth-scapes and scribbled journal entries made during his stint there alone in constant solitude. "It's the closest you can get to feeling like you're at the edge of the earth," he says. "And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do."
The sample-happy stylings of his previous efforts have been traded in for acid-stained commodore 64 jams (See 'Polish Girl, 'Future Sick') and bit-pulped guitar sludge ballads (see 'Hex Girlfriend', 'The Blindside Kiss'). All throughout, the undulating moods of the record are guided by a haunted three-part instrumental titled Heart: Attack, Heart: Decay, and Heart: Release. Once completed, the layers were then thawed and reassembled by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT), who mixed the album and did additional production with Palomo at his upstate Tarbox Studios. The album sessions there were briefly taken on a scenic detour by a drop-in four-song EP collaboration with The Flaming Lips which was released earlier this year.
The album's Spanish title plays with the loose-hinges of the word extraña, which not only directly translates into 'strange', but also means to 'command the act of longing'. These themes of feeling an eerie absence in new strange times are explored throughout the album as a whole in his teenage ethos peppered lyrical musings in an end-days obsessed climate. Many of this is inspired by an ongoing love affair with the notion of what cyberpunk means in a year like 2011. The feeling can best be described in a recent interview where he noted, "We're now living in the era mysticized by a lot of future-geared 70s and 80s cinema, but it's definitely not quite how they imagined it."
-------------
An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo. Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, Dreampop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier than the sum of its parts. Forged after a hazy winter gathering in Texas, this initial batch of tracks were the result of field recordings, record samples, a collection of bizarre synth sounds. Soliciting the visual acrobatics of Video artist Alicia Scardetta, this project is setting out to be a multimedia maelstrom.
Orbiting around the themes of drug induced heartbreak, weary afternoons, and lost chances, this music provides a lush soundtrack to the deadbeat exploits of teenage ennui. Neon Indians bedroom ballads have already forged the upcoming Psychic Chasms, the debut full-length, set for release this fall.
https://twitter.com/neonindian
https://www.facebook.com/neonindian
show less
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1270 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA 94109
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