THE SENSUALISTS

The Sensualists:
Not Just Twee Deep
-Mike Velez
Portland's Sensualists are a natural for the inaugural issue of IndiePop, although they are wary enough of any such label. Rightfully so; their self-titled debut is one of the better records released in a year of great ones. In 1999, while Olivia Tremor Control and Wilco discovered their copies of the Beach Boys Smile beneath their beds and Stereolab made it to the Miles Davis (c.1972) section of the record store, The Sensualists have likewise combined pop and sound experiments by plundering the past while looking forward. The Sensualists (Audio Dregs, distributed by Darla) is an assured debut.
The group comprises keyboardists Philip Cooper and Anna Fidler, who are augmented by human metronome Roy Kettler and bassist/turntablist Asa Metric. What is most striking, particularly live, is how organic their sound is. They manage to throw together unlikely elements from 60's soulpop to triphop soundscapes to create an upbeat sound that is danceable yet hard to pin down. They don't so much break the beats as stretch them like taffy, as if to will the party to last all night.
Audio Dregs label owner Eric Mast recalled seeing them the first time, playing a houseparty. "I didn't think of them as lo-fi or anything" recalls Mast. " I didn't even think of them as a pop band right away. I think [now] that I may have saw them as sort of dance-pop, but definitely with more of an experimental edge."
"When we play art openings or more subdued private parties… people are sitting down and listening to the music almost like its an art piece" -Cooper I suppose that if I had to write something in the blank after FILE UNDER: it might well be "post-triphop," but even that seems confining. Sitting in a comfy SE coffeehouse alongside Anna and Roy, Philip ponders the idea. "Before we ever had anything written about us, we wondered what people would write about us," says Cooper. "What did we call ourselves when we sent in all our stuff for NXNW? Indie-pop?"
"It was 'pop-rock'," answers Anna.
"Oh, pop-rock, right".
"We went through all the categories…"
"'Electronica'?
"No!'"
" 'DJ'?"
"No!'"
Since their beginnings in a SE Portland basement two years ago as a collaboration between Fidler and Cooper's meandering keyboards, the Sensualists have picked up Roy Kettler (a friend of Cooper's) on drums and this year, Metric has come on board. The only constant has been the Sensualist Approach to Music.
"We made tapes- that's all we did, make tapes," says Cooper, remembering. "Roy came over, and he was like 'you need some drumming?'
'So we would turn on the drum machine, or take a loop from the keyboard, and the song would sort of shape itself. Whatever mood we're in, it develops the song. And then with Anna starting to make lyrics to the songs, automatically we started to hear specific parts. We couldn't keep going playing grooves forever."
This fascination with grooves is evident in the bands live set. Pulsating shapes and soothing colors are projected onto a reflective turntable behind the band (an invention that Cooper calls his "Centro-scope") Even as the band explores a particularly lulling pocket of inner space, it pays to focus closer on what the individual musicians are playing. Fidler plays the more melodic phrasing and sings while Cooper provides a sonorous drone that anchors the overall sound. Metric's basslines are spare and economical, while Kettler plays Roland style drum patterns with unerring accuracy. It all meshes seamlessly. They could doubtless play a song like "Dips and Peaks" for well nigh a set.
Have they ever improvised?
"We have, yeah!" says Fidler, "I don't as much, but we have songs that are meant to be improvised."
"I think that we have a good balance of each of us having our parts; like I play more of a rhythm-type keyboards part," continues Cooper, "Anna does solos and things…."
"And Roy's the super endurance drummer", responds Fidler. "It's very busy. There's never a moment where one of us can sit back and take a breath, have a glass of wine…."

"We've had people ask if we're from Portland so many times…"
- Fiddler
A literary critic once termed it the "shock of the familiar"- the commonplace yanked out of it's customary perch and seen anew in an entirely different context. To an extent, that describes the Sensualists sound, culled as it is from a clutch of battered instruments hot-wired by the band members to spec. Korg keyboards and Hammond organs are lovingly fucked with to create the drones and tones that shape the songs. The tech is strictly old school. At one point in the interview, Cooper raves about a Sixties vintage Moog espied in a Vancouver pawnshop. "But there are no synthesizers," says Cooper adamantly. "We really want nothing to do with ambient, knob turning kind of music. Synthesizers don't really have that timbre, that resonance that old circuitry has."
Later…
Philip: Like the Farfisa that we use has been used in a lot of Sixties and Seventies music…
Anna: Yeah!
Philip: Oldies…
Anna: I like Oldies…
Philip: [jokingly] You could call us oldies! Electronica-slash-Oldies.
The Sensualists debut is cohesive, managing to balance spectral pop ("Spacial Bodies", "Ginger") with remixed and reformulated sound constructions ("Le Korg") deftly. Surprisingly, it was written over a year's time. According to Mast, " A lot of that stuff, like that intro ("We are Sensual") was just Asa remixing the stuff they had. Almost all of that stuff on the album is recorded at their home studio." Unlike other basement productions, there is an utter lack of faux-authentic stupid production tricks like tape hiss. Co-producer Metric gets a full and nicely balanced sound that belies its surroundings while still sounding almost lush. You may not get the visuals of the live show, but with headphones, you can think up your own. A nice trick.
The band's propensity for visuals is rooted in its beginnings as a soundtracking collective for Cooper's homemade art films. To Cooper, there is a specific link between the two; "Films and keyboards, there's a beautiful resonance to them both that you can never get with a guitar- a magical sound that you can sort of sit and play for hours."
"The film show is going to be expanded upon soon," says Fidler, " because we are going to be getting this video projector that we have use of now. We might even do animation work with the Mumbleboy. I think that would go really well; we are not the sort of band that is preoccupied with jumping up and down on stage. We're too occupied with playing our instruments, it seems. A lot of people like to see musicians jump around in a live show; there always has to be something going. And I think that our film show or video show would add to that."
"It's all part of it. All of our instruments are thrift store finds, all of my projectors, the turntables I use to project off of." Cooper muses. "All of this strange equipment. They can have a strange application to music that you have to figure out."
At any rate, the band are in the process of lining up opportunities to do just that. A remix record is in the works, and while their dream choice of Lee Scratch Perry is unlikely, kindred spirit Tomoyuku Tanaka of the Fantastic Plastic Machine has been tapped, as well remix artists in Germany and Chicago, in addition to the ubiquitous Mast wearing his "E*Rock" cap.
Meanwhile, the album is doing well in college radio (#6 on a station in California, notes Fidler) and they have already started amassing material for the follow-up.
And they plan to tour, specifically in California. As the interview is winding up, I enthuse about the thrift store finds I've encountered in the Golden State.
Cooper answers me with a knowing smile.
"It's so exciting looking at old junk. The new stuff seems to get more and more boring. It doesn't have any quirks to it"

More information about the Sensualists, including an excerpt of the animated film featuring the band, can be found at www.audiodregs.com.

PREVIEW/PROFILE
Some Assembly Required
Portland's Sensualists deploy a hodgepodge of salvaged keyboards, retooled organs, old-fashioned drums and turntables to build their atmospheric electro-lullabies.
BY ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

Free A sound grows in Brooklyn. It grows, that is, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland, in a rambling, comfortably lived-in house, down in the basement. That's where the Sensualists--Anna Fidler, Philip Cooper, Roy Kettler and Asa Metric--keep the Gadgets. The Sensualists' practice space is strangely neat and well organized by the standard of band lairs, which is to say it's still a riot of amps, cords and stray drumsticks. This standard-issue clutter fades into the background, though, beside the group's arsenal of weird keyboards, retrofitted noise contraptions and meticulously placed processor pedals. Sitting silent and unmanned, the Gadgets are pregnant with promise, all chrome-colored plastic and early '60s space-race élan. They're artifacts from the never-realized Jetsons future we were all cheated out of when our best and brightest switched from cool rocket ships to stupid computers. Salvaged from yard sales, thrift stores and your grandma's musty rec room, the Gadgets live again in the Sensualists' roly-poly pop.

Meet the Gadgets: There's the Fun Machine, a keyboard that more than lives up to its name with echoing laser-battle sounds; the ConnElectricband, a similarly zany keyboard; the single Technics turntable Metric scratches on; the Farfisa organ, a classic rock and soul accoutrement; and, most impressive of all, the Bass Machine, the remains of a blown Hammond organ Cooper rescued from New Orleans and rebuilt inside the body of an old Victrola radio, the source of imposing low-end chords recalling the Bach fugue Captain Nemo rocked in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Now, meet the Sensualists: On a perfectly muggy August evening, Cooper, Fidler and Metric drink Gato Negro on the porch and talk about how they came to play some of Portland's most beguiling homemade non-rock. (Kettler, who keeps the band grounded in some version of reality on a sparse drum kit, has decamped for a New York vacation.) It seems the band, which celebrates the release of its self-titled debut album on local boy Eric Mast's Audio Dregs Records this week, springs from a shared affair with strange sounds and weird movies.

"We started here, up in the attic with a four-track, just me and Anna," Cooper says. "We were recording music for films I was making."

"I played the title role in Swamp Thing," Fidler says. "I had to dive into Oaks Bottom in scuba gear and a sort of reptilian mask."

"And then you killed a small child at the end," Cooper adds.

A somewhat sinister birth for a basically ebullient band, to be sure. The arrival of Kettler on drums inspired them to play live, and the addition of Metric, a transplant from that other Brooklyn, on bass and single steel wheel completed the push beyond the homebody-wizards-with-a-4-track stage.

"We started out playing film shows, gallery openings, stuff like that," Cooper says of the band's growth into a jumpy live act. "We're just now starting to get into the rock club thing."

The Sensualists' live show, often augmented by movies projected onto mirrors mounted on a spinning old turntable, is pretty spry for a band that refuses to pick up a guitar. Fidler and Cooper's keyboards drive forward on a backbeat fusion of Kettler's live drums and beats built by Metric. It's enough to inspire actual dancing in a scene that has the detached head-bob down to a science.

The new disc captures some of that energy--"By the law of psychic sound," Fidler chants at one point, "the keyboard knows how to get down!"--but mainly allows the Sensualists to find their softer side. With ample analog electric keys lapping against each other, the Sensualists stir a warm bath of millennial lullaby in between the more athletic numbers. Live and recorded, the band plays around in the junkyard of 20th-century musical inventions, turning everything from the time-tested drum kit to the so-now turntable to its own ends.

Of course, Portland is pretty much a city built on rock and roll, but the Sensualists say they're finding more and more fellow travelers as Rose City fans discover life beyond the six-string. In fact, the rootsy leanings of the old-line local scene helps the band by providing a steady stream of discarded hardware--the source of all Gadgets.

"When I moved out here, at first I was actually really disappointed by what was going on," Cooper says. "This was a few years ago, and it seemed like there was roots rock, experimental noise and not a lot in between. So I just started picking up these cheap old instruments where I could--there are a lot out there. I'd been dreaming of playing the Moog since I was 12, so when I actually came across one here, it suddenly seemed like a natural thing to do."

So who's in control, man or Gadget?

"Each new instrument seems to define a song or two," Fidler says. "When the Fun Machine came along, all of a sudden there were some Fun Machine songs, but now we're basically in a human-working-with-machine mode."

"Although," Cooper adds, "the machines did used to be a lot more powerful. We're slowly gaining control."

Willamette Week | originally published September 8, 1999

When I first walk up to the Sensualists' communal home, I'm greeted by a friendly bulldog mix named Sid. Sid was named after punk icon Sid Vicious when only a pup because he'd distinguished himself as the most aggressive of his litter. As he grew older, though, Sid settled into a happy dog groove, becoming a mascot to the Portland popsters with whom he now lives.

Truthfully, there couldn't be a better symbol than this chipper canine for the Sensualists, who have no trouble admitting that their music is definitely about fun and who believe it's impossible to make a sad beat.

The band began as a spurt of creativity for keyboardists Phillip Cooper and Anna Fidler a little over a year ago when the pair began playing around with a variety of vintage keyboards and drum machines. "We just started playing long, repetitive riffs," Phillip says of the early days. "We were listening to a lot of Neu! and Can, and we were more into making experiments."

With the addition of Roy Kettler on all things percussive and Asa Metric on turntables, samples and bass, the band became more song-oriented, and Fidler moved to the foreground as the group's vocalist. "I became interested in the pop aesthetic," she mentions. "I started listening to KNRK all the time, and I got interested in popular structures of songs, of bringing the mainstream into the experimental."

The result of this alchemy can be experienced at the band's many sold-out live shows (their record release saw people being turned away before the opening act was even on) or on their self-titled debut CD, released by local label Audio Dregs. The Sensualists is 12 tracks of goofy keyboards and bubbling drumbeats that coalesce into a record that sounds like a complete piece of work, with musical themes and spacey sounds coursing through the entire disc. Of course molding the songs into a cohesive album was no easy task. "The album was recorded in five different ways," Cooper says. "Mastering smoothed everything together. Some songs were remixed into segues and loops, and some songs were combined. It ended up being the best parts of our first year."

On The Sensualists, Fidler's singing works in tandem with the music, blending in as another layer of the overall sound. Her sweet, candied voice skillfully delivers lyrics that border on the onomatopoeic by sounding exactly like how they make the listener feel. "The words bring an aesthetic to the music that is cartoony," she explains, "or like a kaleidoscope." The final result is a feel-good record made by people who have decided their primary goal is to feel good. "We like to eat delicious things," Fidler says. "We like to get facials, and to go to the ocean."

As Metric points out, "We were sensualists before we were the Sensualists."

And with that, I pat Sid on the head one last time, take in a good, deep breath of night air, and return to my life, knowing that sunshiny pop is safe in the mixing boards of the Sensualists, a band unafraid to bring the sensation of sensations back to our stereos.

The Sensualists play EJ's in Portland 11/21 with Isotope 217/Jet Black Crayon.


	The Sensualists: Not Just Twee Deep -Mike Velez Portland's Sensualists are a natural for the inaugural issue of IndiePop, although they are wary enough of any such label. Rightfully so; their self-titled debut is one of the better records released in a year of great ones. In 1999, while Olivia Tremor Control and Wilco discovered their copies of the Beach Boys Smile beneath their beds and Stereolab made it to the Miles Davis (c.1972) section of the record store, The Sensualists have likewise combined pop and sound experiments by plundering the past while looking forward. The Sensualists (Audio Dregs, distributed by Darla) is an assured debut. The group comprises keyboardists Philip Cooper and Anna Fidler, who are augmented by human metronome Roy Kettler and bassist/turntablist Asa Metric. What is most striking, particularly live, is how organic their sound is. They manage to throw together unlikely elements from 60's soulpop to triphop soundscapes to create an upbeat sound that is danceable yet hard to pin down. They don't so much break the beats as stretch them like taffy, as if to will the party to last all night. Audio Dregs label owner Eric Mast recalled seeing them the first time, playing a houseparty. "I didn't think of them as lo-fi or anything" recalls Mast. " I didn't even think of them as a pop band right away. I think [now] that I may have saw them as sort of dance-pop, but definitely with more of an experimental edge." "When we play art openings or more subdued private parties… people are sitting down and listening to the music almost like its an art piece" -Cooper I suppose that if I had to write something in the blank after FILE UNDER: it might well be "post-triphop," but even that seems confining. Sitting in a comfy SE coffeehouse alongside Anna and Roy, Philip ponders the idea. "Before we ever had anything written about us, we wondered what people would write about us," says Cooper. "What did we call ourselves when we sent in all our stuff for NXNW? Indie-pop?" "It was 'pop-rock'," answers Anna. "Oh, pop-rock, right". "We went through all the categories…" "'Electronica'? "No!'" " 'DJ'?" "No!'" Since their beginnings in a SE Portland basement two years ago as a collaboration between Fidler and Cooper's meandering keyboards, the Sensualists have picked up Roy Kettler (a friend of Cooper's) on drums and this year, Metric has come on board. The only constant has been the Sensualist Approach to Music. "We made tapes- that's all we did, make tapes," says Cooper, remembering. "Roy came over, and he was like 'you need some drumming?' 'So we would turn on the drum machine, or take a loop from the keyboard, and the song would sort of shape itself. Whatever mood we're in, it develops the song. And then with Anna starting to make lyrics to the songs, automatically we started to hear specific parts. We couldn't keep going playing grooves forever." This fascination with grooves is evident in the bands live set. Pulsating shapes and soothing colors are projected onto a reflective turntable behind the band (an invention that Cooper calls his "Centro-scope") Even as the band explores a particularly lulling pocket of inner space, it pays to focus closer on what the individual musicians are playing. Fidler plays the more melodic phrasing and sings while Cooper provides a sonorous drone that anchors the overall sound. Metric's basslines are spare and economical, while Kettler plays Roland style drum patterns with unerring accuracy. It all meshes seamlessly. They could doubtless play a song like "Dips and Peaks" for well nigh a set. Have they ever improvised? "We have, yeah!" says Fidler, "I don't as much, but we have songs that are meant to be improvised." "I think that we have a good balance of each of us having our parts; like I play more of a rhythm-type keyboards part," continues Cooper, "Anna does solos and things…." "And Roy's the super endurance drummer", responds Fidler. "It's very busy. There's never a moment where one of us can sit back and take a breath, have a glass of wine…." "We've had people ask if we're from Portland so many times…" - Fiddler A literary critic once termed it the "shock of the familiar"- the commonplace yanked out of it's customary perch and seen anew in an entirely different context. To an extent, that describes the Sensualists sound, culled as it is from a clutch of battered instruments hot-wired by the band members to spec. Korg keyboards and Hammond organs are lovingly fucked with to create the drones and tones that shape the songs. The tech is strictly old school. At one point in the interview, Cooper raves about a Sixties vintage Moog espied in a Vancouver pawnshop. "But there are no synthesizers," says Cooper adamantly. "We really want nothing to do with ambient, knob turning kind of music. Synthesizers don't really have that timbre, that resonance that old circuitry has." Later… Philip: Like the Farfisa that we use has been used in a lot of Sixties and Seventies music… Anna: Yeah! Philip: Oldies… Anna: I like Oldies… Philip: [jokingly] You could call us oldies! Electronica-slash-Oldies. The Sensualists debut is cohesive, managing to balance spectral pop ("Spacial Bodies", "Ginger") with remixed and reformulated sound constructions ("Le Korg") deftly. Surprisingly, it was written over a year's time. According to Mast, " A lot of that stuff, like that intro ("We are Sensual") was just Asa remixing the stuff they had. Almost all of that stuff on the album is recorded at their home studio." Unlike other basement productions, there is an utter lack of faux-authentic stupid production tricks like tape hiss. Co-producer Metric gets a full and nicely balanced sound that belies its surroundings while still sounding almost lush. You may not get the visuals of the live show, but with headphones, you can think up your own. A nice trick. The band's propensity for visuals is rooted in its beginnings as a soundtracking collective for Cooper's homemade art films. To Cooper, there is a specific link between the two; "Films and keyboards, there's a beautiful resonance to them both that you can never get with a guitar- a magical sound that you can sort of sit and play for hours." "The film show is going to be expanded upon soon," says Fidler, " because we are going to be getting this video projector that we have use of now. We might even do animation work with the Mumbleboy. I think that would go really well; we are not the sort of band that is preoccupied with jumping up and down on stage. We're too occupied with playing our instruments, it seems. A lot of people like to see musicians jump around in a live show; there always has to be something going. And I think that our film show or video show would add to that." "It's all part of it. All of our instruments are thrift store finds, all of my projectors, the turntables I use to project off of." Cooper muses. "All of this strange equipment. They can have a strange application to music that you have to figure out." At any rate, the band are in the process of lining up opportunities to do just that. A remix record is in the works, and while their dream choice of Lee Scratch Perry is unlikely, kindred spirit Tomoyuku Tanaka of the Fantastic Plastic Machine has been tapped, as well remix artists in Germany and Chicago, in addition to the ubiquitous Mast wearing his "ERock" cap. Meanwhile, the album is doing well in college radio (#6 on a station in California, notes Fidler) and they have already started amassing material for the follow-up. And they plan to tour, specifically in California. As the interview is winding up, I enthuse about the thrift store finds I've encountered in the Golden State. Cooper answers me with a knowing smile. "It's so exciting looking at old junk. The new stuff seems to get more and more boring. It doesn't have any quirks to it" More information about the Sensualists, including an excerpt of the animated film featuring the band, can be found at www.audiodregs.com. PREVIEW/PROFILE Some Assembly Required Portland's Sensualists deploy a hodgepodge of salvaged keyboards, retooled organs, old-fashioned drums and turntables to build their atmospheric electro-lullabies. BY ZACH DUNDAS zdundas@wweek.com Free A sound grows in Brooklyn. It grows, that is, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland, in a rambling, comfortably lived-in house, down in the basement. That's where the Sensualists--Anna Fidler, Philip Cooper, Roy Kettler and Asa Metric--keep the Gadgets. The Sensualists' practice space is strangely neat and well organized by the standard of band lairs, which is to say it's still a riot of amps, cords and stray drumsticks. This standard-issue clutter fades into the background, though, beside the group's arsenal of weird keyboards, retrofitted noise contraptions and meticulously placed processor pedals. Sitting silent and unmanned, the Gadgets are pregnant with promise, all chrome-colored plastic and early '60s space-race élan. They're artifacts from the never-realized Jetsons* future we were all cheated out of when our best and brightest switched from cool rocket ships to stupid computers. Salvaged from yard sales, thrift stores and your grandma's musty rec room, the Gadgets live again in the Sensualists' roly-poly pop. Meet the Gadgets: There's the Fun Machine, a keyboard that more than lives up to its name with echoing laser-battle sounds; the ConnElectricband, a similarly zany keyboard; the single Technics turntable Metric scratches on; the Farfisa organ, a classic rock and soul accoutrement; and, most impressive of all, the Bass Machine, the remains of a blown Hammond organ Cooper rescued from New Orleans and rebuilt inside the body of an old Victrola radio, the source of imposing low-end chords recalling the Bach fugue Captain Nemo rocked in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Now, meet the Sensualists: On a perfectly muggy August evening, Cooper, Fidler and Metric drink Gato Negro on the porch and talk about how they came to play some of Portland's most beguiling homemade non-rock. (Kettler, who keeps the band grounded in some version of reality on a sparse drum kit, has decamped for a New York vacation.) It seems the band, which celebrates the release of its self-titled debut album on local boy Eric Mast's Audio Dregs Records this week, springs from a shared affair with strange sounds and weird movies. "We started here, up in the attic with a four-track, just me and Anna," Cooper says. "We were recording music for films I was making." "I played the title role in Swamp Thing," Fidler says. "I had to dive into Oaks Bottom in scuba gear and a sort of reptilian mask." "And then you killed a small child at the end," Cooper adds. A somewhat sinister birth for a basically ebullient band, to be sure. The arrival of Kettler on drums inspired them to play live, and the addition of Metric, a transplant from that other Brooklyn, on bass and single steel wheel completed the push beyond the homebody-wizards-with-a-4-track stage. "We started out playing film shows, gallery openings, stuff like that," Cooper says of the band's growth into a jumpy live act. "We're just now starting to get into the rock club thing." The Sensualists' live show, often augmented by movies projected onto mirrors mounted on a spinning old turntable, is pretty spry for a band that refuses to pick up a guitar. Fidler and Cooper's keyboards drive forward on a backbeat fusion of Kettler's live drums and beats built by Metric. It's enough to inspire actual dancing in a scene that has the detached head-bob down to a science. The new disc captures some of that energy--"By the law of psychic sound," Fidler chants at one point, "the keyboard knows how to get down!"--but mainly allows the Sensualists to find their softer side. With ample analog electric keys lapping against each other, the Sensualists stir a warm bath of millennial lullaby in between the more athletic numbers. Live and recorded, the band plays around in the junkyard of 20th-century musical inventions, turning everything from the time-tested drum kit to the so-now turntable to its own ends. Of course, Portland is pretty much a city built on rock and roll, but the Sensualists say they're finding more and more fellow travelers as Rose City fans discover life beyond the six-string. In fact, the rootsy leanings of the old-line local scene helps the band by providing a steady stream of discarded hardware--the source of all Gadgets. "When I moved out here, at first I was actually really disappointed by what was going on," Cooper says. "This was a few years ago, and it seemed like there was roots rock, experimental noise and not a lot in between. So I just started picking up these cheap old instruments where I could--there are a lot out there. I'd been dreaming of playing the Moog since I was 12, so when I actually came across one here, it suddenly seemed like a natural thing to do." So who's in control, man or Gadget? "Each new instrument seems to define a song or two," Fidler says. "When the Fun Machine came along, all of a sudden there were some Fun Machine songs, but now we're basically in a human-working-with-machine mode." "Although," Cooper adds, "the machines did used to be a lot more powerful. We're slowly gaining control." Willamette Week \| originally published September 8, 1999 No. 314 Novemeber 17-December 1, 1999 © Rocket Magazine, 1999 NXNW: The Sensualists By Jamie S. Rich When I first walk up to the Sensualists' communal home, I'm greeted by a friendly bulldog mix named Sid. Sid was named after punk icon Sid Vicious when only a pup because he'd distinguished himself as the most aggressive of his litter. As he grew older, though, Sid settled into a happy dog groove, becoming a mascot to the Portland popsters with whom he now lives. Truthfully, there couldn't be a better symbol than this chipper canine for the Sensualists, who have no trouble admitting that their music is definitely about fun and who believe it's impossible to make a sad beat. The band began as a spurt of creativity for keyboardists Phillip Cooper and Anna Fidler a little over a year ago when the pair began playing around with a variety of vintage keyboards and drum machines. "We just started playing long, repetitive riffs," Phillip says of the early days. "We were listening to a lot of Neu! and Can, and we were more into making experiments." With the addition of Roy Kettler on all things percussive and Asa Metric on turntables, samples and bass, the band became more song-oriented, and Fidler moved to the foreground as the group's vocalist. "I became interested in the pop aesthetic," she mentions. "I started listening to KNRK all the time, and I got interested in popular structures of songs, of bringing the mainstream into the experimental." The result of this alchemy can be experienced at the band's many sold-out live shows (their record release saw people being turned away before the opening act was even on) or on their self-titled debut CD, released by local label Audio Dregs. The Sensualists is 12 tracks of goofy keyboards and bubbling drumbeats that coalesce into a record that sounds like a complete piece of work, with musical themes and spacey sounds coursing through the entire disc. Of course molding the songs into a cohesive album was no easy task. "The album was recorded in five different ways," Cooper says. "Mastering smoothed everything together. Some songs were remixed into segues and loops, and some songs were combined. It ended up being the best parts of our first year." On The Sensualists, Fidler's singing works in tandem with the music, blending in as another layer of the overall sound. Her sweet, candied voice skillfully delivers lyrics that border on the onomatopoeic by sounding exactly like how they make the listener feel. "The words bring an aesthetic to the music that is cartoony," she explains, "or like a kaleidoscope." The final result is a feel-good record made by people who have decided their primary goal is to feel good. "We like to eat delicious things," Fidler says. "We like to get facials, and to go to the ocean." As Metric points out, "We were sensualists before we were the Sensualists." And with that, I pat Sid on the head one last time, take in a good, deep breath of night air, and return to my life, knowing that sunshiny pop is safe in the mixing boards of the Sensualists, a band unafraid to bring the sensation of sensations back to our stereos. The Sensualists play EJ's in Portland 11/21 with Isotope 217/Jet Black Crayon.


thesensualists.com (official Sensualists site)