Neon Indian is the work of Alan Palomo, a 23-year-old previously based in Austin, now living in Brooklyn. With the debut Neon Indian LP, 2009's Psychic Chasms, Palomo was one of the founding fathers of chillwave, a blog-born micro-genre that used archaic electronic sounds and degraded-tape tone to summon nostalgia for summers past. The sudden rise of the project forced Palomo to invent a Neon Indian live-show on-the-fly, and the band soon grew to be a staple of outdoor festival bills.

2011 found the release of the second Neon Indian album, Era Extraña, a bigger, more forceful set than its predecessor. Palomo began work on the album in the middle of a Helsinki winter, and mixed it with Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev producer Dave Fridmann.

Interview: 7 September 2011

How's life on the road treating you?
"Well, I'm definitely a creature of habit, and I definitely prefer studio time over being on the road. But you find ways to work. In an ideal world, any musician could have a Lil' Wayne-type bus with a studio in it, where you never have to stop working on stuff, but, sadly, I just make rough sketches of things on my laptop. But, I think I've grown to like the road a lot more. At first it was this disorienting, topsy-turvy thing, but once you get into a rhythm where you have enough confidence in the music that you perform, it's a good feeling to bring a different life into the songs. When it's interpreted by four other musicians, it introduces ideas into songs that were never really thought of when you were writing them.

That can feel pretty refreshing."

Was it difficult inventing the liveshow in the public eye?
"Yeah. It was totally carved out on the road. And it took a while. I remember the first 20 shows were pretty brutal. It was one of those things like: 'this show better get good, we have 40 more dates lined up!' So we just had to take every chance we could get to jam on the songs, to the point where we could change them in interesting ways. The pressure started disappearing, and in its place came this overwhelming desire to make incohesive psychedelic babble."

Did your experiences playing live influence [Era Extraña]?
"I think in some ways the songwriting was a bit motivated by how I would want it to be played live. For Psychic Chasms, or any project I’d done before, there was never any expectations to really ever perform it live. So I was never before put in that position where I wouldn’t want to write something because I wouldn’t know how to execute it live. But, this time around, it was an influence; not so much something that limited me, but a feeling that lead to longer, more soundscape-driven songs. That was something that was undeniably in my mind: ‘what would I want to be playing every night for eight months?’ And the album evolved from there."

Did you give any thought of making a 'band' record?
"I still wanted to do it myself. Which I did in terms of all the writing and the production. This was the first time I went to a studio and mixed it with someone, this being Dave Fridmann. For me, that was definitely a dream come true. I remember the first mix-CD I ever got, from a friend when I used to work in this movie theatre, the first song on it was the opening track ["Holes"] from Deserter's Songs, that Mercury Rev record. So, when I was re-mic-ing things, using room reverb, knowing that these were the same walls that had bounced around a lot of the sound from my favourite records, that was a pretty surreal feeling. It was cool to have someone who could speak my language, and if I needed a specific kind of room or EQ or tiny little thing that would be perceived as minutia by anyone else, they'd know exactly what I was talking about. It was rad. It was a fun time."

Did this come before or after your collaboration with the Flaming Lips?
"It all sort of happened at the same time. I started talking to Dave independently of the Flaming Lips. I met the Lips when Wayne [Coyne] came up to a show in Portland, and we just sort of hung out a little bit. He was like 'hey, man, we should do something!' We didn't know exactly what it was going to be; maybe we'd play some shows together, maybe we'd make some music. We just kept in contact, and by the time I was in the studio with Fridmann, the Lips had a couple of extra days lined up to record there that were overlapping, then Wayne said 'why don’t we show up a couple of days early, we'll fuck around in the studio and see what happens?' And, sure enough, the songs we made all came out of that period."

What did you want to do with your second album?
"I wanted to use these synths! These instruments and effects that I'd wanted to use since high-school. I think, overall, I wrote the record on a Voyager 8 and an MS-20 and a modified Commodore 64. The Voyager 8 is in the New Order video for 'Perfect Kiss,' and I was always totally blown away by what that thing looks like. It's this bizarre, kaleidoscope interface with these knobs, and it's really physical to use, a strange kind of challenge. A lot of the first weeks, when I was in Helsinki working on the record, were spent just learning how to use all this stuff."

What came out of that first process of discovery?
"It was really rad to mess around with chiptunes, but try and write shoegaze music with it. To try and chase these weird mish-mashed aesthetics in my head, and see how I could replicate them in a studio environment. It was more of a labor-of-love in terms of having a production rite-of-passage. Finishing the record was a real kick in the head: 'wow, I decided to do this, and it actually happened!' I realized that really fine-tuning a more hi-fi-sounding record —even though I know it’s not really a hi-fi record— was something that I could do. I look back on it, and I see how easy it was the put this warped tape sheen on everything, then just be content with it. Because there was already a narrative, a story innate in doing that. This time, it felt more like building something from the ground up. That took a lot more patience. But I feel like I learnt quite a bit about how I want to write from hereon out."

Have you been a synth-builder yourself, from way back, or is this something you're newly exploring now?
"I didn't really become that guy until this record. Before, I was always sort of in this state where I was always letting instruments surprise me; whereas, this time around, I wanted to surprise it. It became this process where I was trying to really know how I was reaching these sounds; what was the chain of actions that combined to create this bizarre blip or filter sweep. It was never something that I'd done technically; previously it'd been this fun or intuitive thing, and if I liked how it sound I'd record it. This time, I wanted to develop these ideas I was having, and that required a little bit more control, and more of an understanding of what these things do. Which was fun. This record made a gear geek out of me, and I couldn't be happier about it."

Did that sense of control change the actual compositional process?
"The [songs on the] first [album] came from creating these microloops; building up these samples that start out as one bar, then turn into four bars, then turn into 16, then turn into 32, then the next thing you know you've got a three-and-a-half-minute song. This time around, it wasn't nearly as circular. There was always a sense of forward propulsion, because I was never tied to playback; there was never this one sample that I was building things off of. Once I had a sound I liked, I'd just record a part and try and keep that momentum up. Because the more tedious aspects of production do have the capacity to take the wind out of your sails, so you always have to navigate through that as quickly as you can before you start feeling burnt on the song, before you forget that initial spark that made you even want to write it in the first place. There was a lot of planning and planning and planning to put me in a position where a song could just 'come out.'"

So, two years after the Summer of Chillwave, how do you feel about being made part of this mythical 'movement'?
"I have mixed feelings. On one hand, if it exposes someone to a couple of other bands they might like, then I guess I can't ever be really upset about that. But, it was a total fabrication of the internet at the same time. It's not like any of us knew each other or hung out. I didn't know Chaz [Bundick of Toro y Moi] or Ernest [Greene of Washed Out] or any of those dudes until we were written about in the same sentences. People just lumped us together like a play-date. It felt really weird: 'Hey, you guys should be friends! Collaborate!' But, it was something; and it did happen because we could have similar interesting musical conversations. What's interesting to me is that all these new sophomore albums by so-called 'chillwave' artists is really only reiterating the notion that everybody come from polarizing backgrounds to begin with. Nobody's second record really sounds like one another, and that's a really awesome thing."