OFF: Music to Be Abducted By

[Karen Kusic]

http://64.106.149.201/databank/23/1149/article10943.asp

Music · Vol 23 · Issue 1149 · PUBLISHED 12/11/02
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/23/1149/article10943.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com

Space Invaders

If Thousands fill the cosmos with otherworldy sounds

by Rod Smith

If Thousands are driven by unseen forces. Call them whatever you like:
gods, goddesses, maybe even aliens. (After all, band founders Aaron
Molina and Christian
McShane are true UFO believers.) There's no doubt that something strange
fated the Duluth-based group's first excursions into drone sounds.

On a winter's day in the late '90s, a friend of McShane's went on a
hiking trip in Wisconsin's Douglas County Forest. During his long trek
through the aspens'
lengthening shadows, he found a keyboard, just sitting in the snow. Upon
returning home, the friend called McShane to tell him about it, and
McShane promptly
drove out to the forest, trudged deep into the woods, and rescued the
dead leaf- and bug-bedecked instrument--a Micromoog--from its frosty
prison. But what's
even more amazing than the fact that the keyboard was nestled like some
woolly beast in the forest is that McShane actually found it among the
area's 268,843
acres of trees.

"I took it home, cleaned it up, and it worked perfectly," he recalls. "I
was a guitarist at the time, though, so I just threw it in a closet. If
I had known it was worth,
like, $2,000, I probably would have sold it right away."

The Moog sat in McShane's closet for more than two years. Then, in
August of 2000, more than two years after the Douglas County Forest
experience, the
classically trained vocalist and guitarist joined up with punk-rock
bassist Molina. They decided to chuck their respective musical
backgrounds and take up
instruments that they, as their website puts it, "had no idea of how to
play." Molina opted for the more organic stuff--guitar, vocals, drums.
McShane chose
electronics: He dragged the keyboard out from its resting place.
Finally, the Moog was out of the woods and the closet, so to speak.

If Thousands' sound has expanded considerably since that magical Moog
moment, and the change came in part from the recent addition of Logan
Erickson. An
accomplished keyboardist, the 18-year-old prodigy is also a master
circuit bender who creatively rewires Speak & Spells and Casio SK-1
samplers to make noises
their creators never could have imagined--clicks, whirrs, hums,
crackles, bangs, and some of the strangest approximations of human
speech you'll ever hear.
Erickson climbed aboard too late to play on either of If Thousands'
forthcoming releases, Yellowstone (Chairkickers Music) and Lullabye
(Silber Media), but his
instruments are integral, but subtle, on both.

Given the near-identical instrumentation and back-to-back recording, If
Thousands' two albums are remarkably different. Both McShane and Molina
insist that
Lullabye is intended to be just what its title suggests: a
sleep-inducing device. But such use of the music works only at the
suggested super-low playback volume.
Turn Lullabye up and you'll hear a seething mass of improvised sound,
with guitars and electronics intertwined into hyperactive drones as warm
and dense as the
waters around a tropical archipelago.

The Alan Sparhawk-produced Yellowstone is quite another kettle of fish.
It's the work of a group that's extremely musical, far more so than most
experimentalists.
(Unlike many of their peers, If Thousands are not too snooty to delve
into, say, melodic slowcore on Yellowstone, or try their hand at
electronic beats, as they did at
a recent show.) The enigmatically titled "we sent h. l. r. e.," for
example, begins with a soft, rockish guitar and rhythmic Morse code
beeps. Slowly, McShane and
Molina add layers of crystalline electronics and glacial guitar,
creating a gently susurrant, finely textured sound bed for the sampled
voices that appear and vanish like
ghosts. The end result is vast and mysterious--the audio equivalent of
walking out into Duluth harbor on a January night, eyes fixed beyond the
full moon, waiting for
the saucers to appear.

If Thousands is an otherworldly band, to be sure. After all, there was a
time when they claimed to literally make "music to be abducted by"--and
their songs have
only gotten stranger since. If and when the green guys come to reclaim
their Moog, McShane and Molina will be ready.

Music · Vol 23 · Issue 1149 · PUBLISHED 12/11/02
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/23/1149/article10943.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com

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