We had a quick chat with Neon Indian's Alan Palomo ahead of his performance this Sunday at SF Weekly's All Shook Down Music Festival. (Which, coincidentally, is the day after Palomo's 22nd birthday.) Palomo told us why Neon Indian's live show is like a Neon Indian cover band, which Scandinavian city the next Neon Indian album may be recorded in, and why you shouldn't consider Palomo an introvert, even if his music is made in the bedroom.
How do you describe the Neon Indian sound -- and do you squirm at being thrown under the chillwave umbrella?
That's always been kind of a tough thing to define. I know that plenty of Internet entities and publications have taken every liberty to do that for me. It always just kind of seemed like psychedelic electronic tape music. I didn't necessarily think of it as being something new. The Internet has a really nasty habit of wanting to put things under a microscope and write as if things are just now happening.
No word yet on whether Neon Indian's Alan Palomo will add the giant spider from this funky new stop-motion video for "6669 (I Don't Know if You Know)" to his live show for Sunday's performance at the All Shook Down Festival. But while we sort that out, enjoy, here, the creation myth of said spider, and note that Palomo is still putting out videos for an (admittedly great) album (Psychic Chasms) that came out last year. That's a marvel, not a complaint -- watching the iron spider enter the world to the metallic bleeps of this tidy, groove-driven NI track is all pleasure. Unless, of course, you're an arachnophobe. But even if eight-legged, ten-eyed, giant black crawly things generally give you the wrong kind of goosebumps, you have to admit that this fake one is sort of cute. Buy him a beer Sunday and we bet he won't bite.
We can't wait to see Janelle Monae perform at our All Shook Down Music Festival later this month, but in the mean time she's given us something to tide us over: a revamped and remixed version of her video for "Tightrope," featuring Lupe Fiasco and B.o.B.
Less theatrical than the original "Tightrope" video with Big Boi -- it was filmed on a minimalistic soundstage in black and white -- this version scales back the chorus so as not to overshadow Lupe and B.o.B.'s lyrics, and lets us appreciate a hip-hop remix that focuses on vocals instead of instrumentals. Given Monae's singing talent, it's impressive she can also keep up with the two rappers' flow.
