photo by Pooneh Ghana

With some projects, time away can make for a renewed creativity. Listening to Alan Palomo’s latest Neon Indian album, he has seriously benefitted from fresh eyes.

Neon Indian, a synthpop project composed, produced and fronted by Palomo, initially hit popularity in 2009 with the release of Psychic Chasms. The album’s fuzzy psychedelia and loop-happy take on pop made for an instantly charming introduction to the project, but also caused it to get lumped in with artists like Toro Y Moi and Washed Out in the contrived Chillwave genre. Their second album, 2011’s Era Extrana, tightened things up, focusing on songcraft and arrangement and adding a layer of glam to the sound. However, the album’s dreamy sensibilities meant that the band still faced something of a publicity problem, often defined more in the press by their loose connections to an ill-defined sound than by the progression of their own work.

After an extended hiatus, Neon Indian returned late last year with arguably their best album yet, VEGA INTL. Night School. Shedding the spacey aesthetic of his earlier work, Palomo has crafted a maximal synthpop record far more ably suited to dancefloors than NI’s previous albums. The synth lines has gotten darker and more bombastic while the rhythm has a driving edge that was largely absent on Chasms and Era. While VEGA wears its disco and new wave influences on its sleeve, it manages to feel vital rather than drifting too far into impression; much more a retrofuturistic take on the sounds of old than the post-disco rehash that many of the band’s contemporaries have been releasing of late. Anchored by Palomo’s strong vocals, more decisive and cutting (not to mention mixed louder) here than ever before, the album offers a playful and rewarding journey into an ostentatious reimagining of the New York City nightlife.

Neon Indian are hitting the Paradise Rock club tonight and we chatted with Palomo before the show. He told us about filmic influence and aspirations, his feelings on David Bowie’s passing and why we shouldn’t necessarily expect a fourth NI album.

Allston Pudding: Despite the overall danciness, the lyrics and sonics of VEGA INTL. struck me as having a slightly darker tone than a lot of your previous work; almost cinematic I’d say. Where did you draw inspiration from?

Alan Palomo: It’s good that you mentioned cinema, because more so than bands, specifically, I was definitely drawing a lot more from films. It’s been kind of a common thread through the history of Neon Indian. I remember around the time of Psychic Chasms there was a collection of movies in particular that really spoke to me; that were thematically about the same kind of lovable fuckups. There was always some kind of indeterminate factor that’s keeping them from finding some sort of stability. Like My Own Private Idaho and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Stroszek.

This time around I was more interested in how a lot of filmmakers seem to mythologize New York in their own particular way. You see it a lot in the movies of Abel Ferrera, like Ms. 45 and Fear City, and you see it in a lot of the more obscure Scorcese movies, like After Hours and King of Comedy. I kind of just wanted to make my own grotesque, cartoonish reimagining of what I envisioned my time in New York to be. So it’s partly anecdotal. Obviously a lot of it is sort of mythologized and played up thematically for the record. I think that was really what was informing it.

Musically, I’d gone back to DJing after a really long stint without it. It’s funny, because I remember before I even had the band I would DJ every Wednesday in my college town in [Denton, TX], and I remember it being a particularly informative experience, because I was voraciously collecting records and had to have a new repertoire every week. I hadn’t really come back to that between those first two albums. I was kind of just writing music based off of the same sort of influence set. I felt the need to come back. The thing that was the initial impetus for even getting into electronic music for me was DJing.

So there was a lot of Italo [Disco] stuff, a lot of Balearic music that I’d been playing in the last couple of years that eventually started to penetrate the DNA of what this album eventually came to be.

Allston Pudding: This was initially intended to be a Vega record [Palomo’s producer-centric side project]. Did the writing process shift at all when you decided it would be a Neon Indian release?

Alan Palomo: Well I think it wasn’t so much about one or the other. I think ultimately I realized that it didn’t warrant two separate projects anymore. The aesthetic and M.O. of Neon Indian was moving into that territory anyways, and I just started finding it creatively stifling to be splitting hairs about the production and trying to decide if this was in fact a Neon Indian album or a Vega album. After awhile I just decided that Neon Indian could be all of those things. Eventually I let it mutate into that and saw Vega being cannibalized by its brother.

Allston Pudding: I really liked the “Hey that’s the name of the record!” line in “Smut”- it was a really fun wink to the listener. Do you think self-awareness is important in projects like this?

Alan Palomo: When you’re a few albums in you realize “oh, I have a discography”; waking up and being 27 and knowing there’s a body of work now that you can either allude back to or utilize in the wheelhouse of whatever particular project you’re working on… I definitely don’t like to come back to certain sounds because I feel if it’s already been done there’s no reason to be redundant. I think it’s always fun to play with the idea of what listening to a record even is, especially when it doesn’t seem particularly informed by a lot of contemporary musical narratives.

If anything, I thought it was great to see the editorial M.O. of chillwave just die. During this downtime of very slowly chipping away at a record but mainly focusing on film-related projects or DJing, it sort of freed me up to be on my own little island and it became a whole lot easier with the idea of even being a musician. I felt like I had to take the process of making music very serious, but certainly not myself. At all.

Incorporating the comedy is sort of what brought the love back. The second record was definitely made under strenuous circumstances and I realized after that that I would never make another record again unless it was fun; unless it was something that I was making out of pure joy. I had to start incorporating that into VEGA INTL. Night School.

Allston Pudding: On the subject of chillwave, obviously that tag has kind of died out, but six years down the line does it still bother you having been assigned that genre by many?

Alan Palomo: It doesn’t bother me, having been assigned it. I mean, shoegaze is a pretty stupid genre name too, but it doesn’t take away from how much I love a lot of those records.

I think it kind of comes back to that idea of not taking yourself very seriously. If people still talks about it in terms of chillwave, then there was no real aesthetic criteria for what chillwave was if you could just continue to call it whatever it is now. What I find really strange is, I don’t know much about vaporwave but that seems to be the new blanket term for a lot of different factions of electronic music. It’s definitely been used to describe my records. It’s like “if it was chillwave then and it’s vaporwave now, then who gives a shit?” (laughs) Just make music because you like it.

Allston Pudding: You directed your first music video last year for “Slumlord”. Given that you’re also the writer of the song, so you inherently have that big connection to the material, did you feel like you took a different approach to things than a hired director might have?

Alan Palomo: I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of really fantastic directors in the past who have done a really great job reimagining the musical aesthetics of the record to say something visual with it. Even in those projects I’ve been heavily involved in the aesthetics and creating guidelines by which we can work that complement the record make sure the visuals don’t exist outside of it.

This time around it was cool to have some platforms to directly translate those idea to an audience. To be like, “this is what I’m seeing in my head all the time: this little fucked-up, weird Troma movie.” I can finally have it in tandem with the album if it helps enrich the experience of what the record should mean to you, or at least do a better job of expressing what it means to me.

Allston Pudding: I read in Spin that you’ve written a sci-fi/horror script. Without spoiling too much, can you give us any details?

Alan Palomo: All I can say is that it takes place in fringe Los Angeles in 1988. That’s pretty much about it! (laughs)

I feel like anything else would ultimately be giving the elevator pitch, which is definitely not something I would want to do unless I actually plan on making this thing.

Allston Pudding: Well I hope to see it one day!

Alan Palomo: (Laughs) Me too!

Allston Pudding: You’ve been using that great Kinect motion tracking rig to incorporate your performance into Neon Indian’s live visuals. Now that you’ve had a good chunk of touring time with it, how is the band settling in with the new technology?

Alan Palomo: It’s been great. It hasn’t been able to be prominently featured in every show, but it definitely has played a big part in some of the bigger shows when we’ve been able to put a little bit more production in it.

It’s pretty seamless. It stays out of our way and yet has heightened so much of the experience of watching us play. It’s something that I had an absolute joy in putting together with the Kinect people. It’s kind of wild, because I feel like when we’ve had a visual component there’s always been some sort of symbiotic relationship, whether we were feeding Midi information to a lighting rig we’d built or feeding controls from our synthesizers into a video synthesizer that was spitting out visuals in tandem with that. But we were never able to algorithmically feed us as performers into the equation of what the projections are doing. It was something that never even really occurred to us until we started playing with the Kinect. It’s been pretty rad to see it come to fruition.

Allston Pudding: When you’re performing with the rig, are you conscious of how your movements might translate to the visuals? Or do you kind of do what you do and let what happens happen?

Alan Palomo: I think we just do as we do. It’s not something that we are actively tweaking and participating in, at least in terms of the band. The people who run the software and take the data and interpret it into whatever palette is going on for that particular song- that’s definitely something that’s happening with them. All we can really contribute is being performers, which is something we would do whether the rig was there or not!

Allston Pudding: David Bowie’s passing the other week monumentally affected a lot of people in the music scene. Given that this is a concept you explored on your collaboration with The Flaming Lips, “Is David Bowie Dying”, I’m curious about your feelings on it.

Alan Palomo: Well honestly, it was devastating news. I literally cannot think of another artist in my life whose catalogue I’ve been exploring since I was a teenager, yet still find new content to unearth. When I was still finishing the record, it was Scary Monsters and last year it was Station To Station and Young Americans and before that it was Lodger. I keep coming back to Bowie. So to know that Blackstar was his final work is a very sad thing to hear, because I feel like with his prolific nature… I remember there was some quote that I’d read where he was talking about how if he were to pass, the saddest thing would be that he wouldn’t be able to work on another record. I feel like it really galvanizes anyone who has an interest in art, let alone music, to try to be as prolific as you can and always be working on something. I think that’s something he blessed the world with. It’s incredibly sad news.

That song originally came to be when I worked with the Lips in Upstate New York in Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Studio. He [Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne] had taken away some anecdote from some awards show he was at that David Bowie was also supposed to be at. He had asked why he wasn’t there, and there had been some allusions made to his health and him not being in the best shape or that something had happened. It got him wondering. I remember, we had a conversation about it, both being pretty die hard Bowie fans. The song kind of materialized from that.

It’s incredibly surreal and sad that he has passed. I remember I stopped by the stoop on Lafayette St. and just saw a line around the block. Seeing people from all age groups were there to show their support is pretty wild.

Allston Pudding: It’s only been out for a few months, but have you given any thought on what you’d like to explore on the follow-up to VEGA INTL.?

Alan Palomo: Not necessarily. When I wrote VEGA INTL., there was no immediate intent. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the last Neon Indian record, but I don’t have any foreseeable plans. If the project were to continue, it would have to undergo some aesthetic overhauls to remain interesting to me.

That’s always been the nature with every Neon Indian record, in that there’s some degree of change from the last one, but I’m more excited right now to be doing a couple of film score projects that have been developing of late. If I were to come back to it then it would certainly be a different Neon Indian for sure. That’s even assuming that I operate with that title.

I don’t know! It’s the beginning of the year. We did a four month long campaign in which we did some pretty extensive touring, so just now getting back, maybe a couple weeks ago, I feel like I’m in that soul-searching spell of what to do next. We’ll see!

Neon Indian is hitting the Paradise Rock Club tonight, 1/28, with opener Computer Magic. The show is sold out.