Best New Band 2006

Our voters pick this town's greatest new musical talents. And we pick apart their back stories.

BY MARK BAUMGARTEN, MICHAEL BYRNE & CASEY JARMAN | mbaumgarten at wweek.comCopy
No band is an island. Every time a group of musicians, DJ or solo artist takes the stage for the first time they bring with them more than their own talents and ambition. They also bring along a lifetime of influence, from great records to musical mentors. And, in turn, those bands influence anyone who hears them to buy a concert ticket, send fan mail or, if the band has made a real impact, vote for them in WW's Third Annual Best New Band Poll.

This year, we asked 82 of this city's music insiders to tell us the top five local bands that have made an impact on them for the first time in the past year. Those voters came back with a total of 230 bands they felt were worthy of recognition. Equipped with a spreadsheet and a pot of coffee, we tallied up the votes and wondered aloud whether more people went to band practice than went to church in this town.

When the dust settled we had before us 2006's Top 10 List of Portland's Best New Bands (see "Top Ten New Bands, "below ). What we saw was a fine collection of groups that span genres from electronic to folk. (We also noticed that hip-hop and jazz were sorely missing from the group). Then we looked closer, and noticed that the top three bands on our list all had backgrounds that spoke to larger trends in the Portland music scene. The third-place band, Swan Island, is as informed by the Riot Grrrl movement that defined this area throughout the '90s as it is a backlash against it (see "Fantasy Island, below"). Our second-place band, Tractor Operator, is just one of a number of musical acts that have come to Portland from Eugene in the last two years, bringing a different kind of sad sound to the city (see "Eugene-niks, below"). And then there's our official Best New Band, Copy, a one-man electronic dance act who has been lifted up by Portland's growing electronic music scene, bringing blips and bleeps to crowds that would normally bristle at the thought of binary code (see "The Chosen One, below").

The essays that follow the Top 10 list dig into those stories, offering a little insight into the diverse influences that make our city's music scene tick. They also serve as reminders that music is about a whole lot more than that band on stage: It's also about the community of people holding that stage up. —Mark Baumgarten

Top Ten Best New Bands
1. Copy 51 points
Who: Marius Libman
What: Electro-pop
Sounds like: Aphex Twin on anti-psychotics
Visit: www.mobiusbeard.com
Voter quote: "Like the themes to Nintendo games you never played transmuted into baroque (and bangin') dancefloor epics." —Brent Bell, PDX Pop Now! board member and Crystal Ballroom bartender
Listen to "Afro Oven" from Copy's full length debut, Mobius Beard, at www.wweek.com/media/7538-1.mp3.
Listen to "Plagiarhythm," a Copy track that appeared on the Pure Tone Audiotonomy Vol. 3 compilation, at www.wweek.com/media/7538-2.mp3.

Copy This, Sucka
Copy Returns Old School IDM Beats to PDX
[Portland Mercury]
BY CHAS BOWIE

ONE OF THE REASONS I gravitated towards electronic music in the '90s was that it introduced me to crazy sounds I'd never heard before. From Mr. Oizo's stretchy balloon-fart sonic waves to sinister voice modulations and deconstructive anti-rhythms, IDM completely expanded the range of noises emanating from my speakers. Over the past several years, electronic composers have taken to more organic approaches of layering live instruments and samples over beats. While I have zero beef with this approach, it was wildly refreshing to get my hands on Mobius Beard, the forthcoming CD by Copy, a young Portland laptop wizard.

Mobius Beard's beats and rhythms are tight, like pre-Richard D. James Aphex Twin, which give the tracks a structured urgency. "Backward" works like a spine-popping "Axel F. Theme" with squeaky pitch shifts, layered handclaps, and a Kraftwerk-inspired bassline, while "Afro Oven" reminds me of a Miami Sound Machine song remixed by UNKLE.

Marius Libman, who records and performs as Copy, came to his current sound through a wide variety of influences. After spending most of his youth in front of a Nintendo, listening to these "crazy, squelchy analog synthesizer sounds," he played bass in various punk bands. His attentions turned to fusion jazz, but when Aphex Twin's Richard D. James CD dropped, he realized how badass electronica could be. His brother helped him get started making beats on his mom's PC, and Marius was hooked. A few years after it was released, he discovered Dr. Dre's The Chronic 2001. "That CD pushed me into more of a pop sensibility. Before that, I was in this Squarepusher mindset of showing off how crazy and complex you could get on the computer, but after listening to The Chronic, I became more interested in making good songs first, and showing off my skills second."

Select, Cut...
A regular Joe by day, Marius Libman will make you work by night.
BY MARK BAUMGARTEN of the Willamette Week

Marius Libman, like 99.9 percent of the world, is a worker bee. And, like many Portland worker bees, Libman serves a handful of masters: The bearded 25-year-old works as a barista at downtown's Coffee Plant, books and bartends at fashionable Northeast hipster club Dunes, washes dishes at fashionable Southeast hipster club Holocene, and manages to find time to keep the eastside Ozone 3 record stock in order. (To read about another Ozone employee, see page 33.)

But after Libman gets home to his Southeast apartment, sheds the shirt soaked with the smell of your cigs-beans-beer-bullshit, and sits down at his PC, he is a worker bee no longer. Here, as Portland's electro artist Copy, Libman commands a library of sound to create complex compositions that allow him to lord over another space, the one between the stage edge and the back wall. There, his dense and melodic electro beat-frenzies have been ordering Portlanders to dance, much to Libman's surprise.
"People will come up to me and say, 'I can't believe you got everyone dancing," says Libman. "And I'll say, 'Neither can I.'"

Libman, who moved to Portland from Kirkland, Wash., five years ago, claims to have no idea how he's doing it, but he is, boasting a debut LP, Mobius Beard, that can be played from front to back without a single miss rearing its head.
I asked the beatsmith to run me through his creative process.

To many, the process Libman has honed since moving to Portland is no big deal. Audio-editing software, like the somewhat outdated Acid program Libman uses, is ubiquitous, and the setup is relatively simple. The overhead for creating digital compositions—which requires a computer, turntable and records—is a hell of a lot more manageable than being in a band, which requires instruments, a practice space, a van, and an ability to deal with other musicians' ideas and unsavory habits. On the other hand, attending a band practice is a hell of a lot more exciting than watching Libman at work in his home/studio.
Sitting at his computer, Libman pulls up the file for a song called "See You Around Maybe" and walks me through the song's 16 tracks. Three are break beats from live drum-kit sounds—"two from late-'70s disco tracks, and I nabbed a kick-drum sound from an early-'80s synth-pop song"—while another five are rhythm tracks pulled from digital recording of garage sounds, which are basically random clacks, scrapes and clicks. On top of that, Libman has written eight separate melodic tracks on his MIDI keyboard, which emits a squelch that gives the song a texture of an 8-bit video-game soundtrack. It is all painstaking and, to me, boring work, but when Libman loops his tracks, lines them up and then pushes the beats-per-minute into the red, he can coerce a crowd to dance as though their vibrating bodies were serving some necessary utilitarian purpose. Making honey, perhaps.