Eureka Times-Standard

The architecture of dream Adelaide to charm Arcata on first stop of national tour

Thursday, February 24, 2005 -

Meghan Vogel

The Times-Standard

A never-ending, streaming shot of city life during in the early 20th century moves across stage. Tides of people flow through the streets. As the camera slows and focuses, the image's aural equivalent, titled "Games Without Ends," erupts in shimmery bubbles of electronic sound.

A hypnotic loop of people, places, faces. The decades-old 16mm film is grainy, scratched, crackling. The colors are soft, pastel, nostalgic. Children throwing rocks through blighted inner-city windows turn beautiful against the backdrop of lullabies projected from the band on stage. A looped shot of a building on fire repeats again and again and again. The lovely drone of delicious sound moves the viewer to once again find beauty, this time in flames.

Adelaide: A treat for the eyes, ears, heart and cerebral cortex.

An avalanche of sound and visuals

Adelaide was once described as a "group of archeologists" in their quest to find early 16mm footage. The artists' performances are an alchemist's blend of ethereal electronics, live instrumentation and film projections.

"We've all been captivated by a combination of sound and image," said Ethan Rose. "That's what brought us all together. We're held together by a concrete vision of what we want to do with music."

Rose plays guitars, Rhodes and "electronics" for the band. Ryan Jeffery, an integral cog of Adelaide despite not playing a musical instrument, works the projectors.

"We started out with found footage, going to garage sales and digging through to find films that we thought were visually interesting," Rose said. "Ryan would splice those in loops and run those, but in the last six months he's started to shoot more original film, and we're growing from that -- using a mixture of found footage and original stuff."

Jeffery will often shoot footage to go along with the band's sound, Rose said, and he also rehearses with Adelaide so the band to capture the perfect melting of sound and image.

"There's a lot more potential to do more with original footage -- hinting at narratives that already exist in the music," Rose said. "When the films are taken and applied to a live show, narratives are open-ended and leave a lot to the audience. We just try to bring in these elements of narrative and hint at hidden stories or ideas."

Formed in the summer of 2003, Adelaide is embarking on its first national tour, which starts in Arcata on Friday. Last summer, the Portland, Ore.,-based band toured as far east as Chicago's Texas Ballroom. Rose said the band has been invited to play at many micro cinemas, or art house theaters.

"There's been lots of crossover for us in the art world," he said. "We've played at galleries and festivals and traditional music venues. A lot of micro cinemas -- small movie houses where they show experimental films -- stuff that wouldn't have an audience in mainstream cinema. There's a lot of micro cinema events in Portland, and we try to go to as many as those as we can make it to."

Jeffery, an experimental filmmaker, is currently working on a grant-funded art project. Before diving into the world of film, Jeffery studied painting and drawing, which Rose said leads him to put "a lot of thought about composition and color" into Adelaide.

Rose called the band "big fans of Bill Viola," the post-modern video performance artist with a romantic edge.

"He started that whole thing," Rose said of Viola. "Piecing together images that are so simple and graceful, but they get at basic thoughts and feelings and can really ignite you."

Intoxicating space

While Rose said the music of Adelaide is a top priority, the band is also concerned with an overall general aesthetic. When performing live, one of the most enjoyable things for the band is to watch a zoned-out audience awash in waves of image and sound.

"People get really drawn in, especially with the film aspect," he said. "We're either interlocking the film and music so that they're complimenting each other, or there's a contrast going on with intense music and slow, pastoral film."

Crystalline electronic sounds drip and minimal instruments softly drone, and everything shivers warm and comforting like morning sun soaking into your spine. The lilting, rhythmic melodies transport you to a land of floating multi-colored lights. This is celestial ear and eye candy straight from Olympus itself. This is the sound of British space junkies Sprititualized if they went through a 12-step program to actually find a Higher Power. This is the sound of the Merry Pranksters, the originators of the aural/visual combo, if they had filled their heads with E instead of LSD.

"We wanted to take these mediums and put them in a live performance to create an intoxicating space, an atmosphere that fills the room," Rose said. "A rich tapestry of beautiful melody and a visual counterpart -- things that are appealing to both of those senses."

Earthy, organic, individual

Adelaide draws from a wide variety of both visual and musical artistic influences. Rose and and Adam Porterfield, who plays guitars and autoharp, first bonded over their love of similar music: "Boards of Canada, Aphex Twins, anything from the Warp Catalogue; we're all big fans of Low, everything on the Arts and Crafts label and Constellation, a lot of instrumental things, Broken Social Science, Tortoise. We love a lot of simple music. We're big fans of simplicity and directness. We all live together so there's plenty exposure to music."

Rose said he came from a childhood filled with folk music.

"There was always this earthy organic and personally individual music playing around the house," he said. "It was heart-warming and pleasant."

Rose said he was drawn to electronic music for the same reasons -- music created electronically lends itself to individualism because "the palette is so large." Many of Adelaide's concepts are drawn from the members' "electronic beginnings" -- IDM (intelligent dance music) and British and European techno. Rose, for instance, grew up in Chicago and was into the early '90s rave scene.

"That whole experience showed me that film could be used in alternative ways," he said.

While pursuing his musical interests at the famously liberal Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Rose met up with Jeffery, who was studying visual arts.

"We found that our interests crossed over, and we decided to pursue that," Rose said.

Adelaide are fans of contemporary surrealist filmmakers such as the Brothers Quay.

"We like mood-oriented films -- films where attention to color and composition is apparent," Rose said. "Ryan is a big Kubrick fan. Everything in his films is all very pointed."

And just like a Kubrick film, Adelaide's songs are acutely executed.

"We're very song oriented," Rose said. "There's not a lot of improvisation. We're very rehearsed. Our songwriting as a band is influenced by having the layout of a song very strong."

Adelaide's debut self-titled album, released last year, displays the band's attention to detail. Every minutely rhythmic blip, beat, beep, bell or buzz has been handcrafted to arrive at a certain time in a certain place to create a certain atmosphere.

Let it happen

Adelaide's six-week national tour will take the outfit on a whirlwind tour through the likes of California, Texas, Baton Rouge, Mississippi, Chicago, Michigan, Montreal, Maine, New York, Boston, Kansas City and Oklahoma. The band has shared the stage with Karate, the Roots of Orchis and The Minders. A special treat was when they played with Canadians Do Make Say Think.

"It was great," Rose said of the Do Make Say Think show. "A really good match up. They're really great guys."

Adelaide's core members are Rose, Porterfield and Jeffery. The group recently added a drummer and bassist. The band's usual drummer, Mike Bauch, is now attending architecture school, so David Casey will be playing drums on the tour. Adelaide seems to have a knack for losing members to other realms of study. Bassist Bob Muscarella just took off for India and a tiger reserve to study fruit bats.

"That's what he wanted to do," Rose said. "He was excited to go, and we're excited for him."

Rose said the band is looking forward to Humboldt County.

"I think it's going to be really fun," he said. "People at the Placebo seem really great -- serious DIY, and we love anything DIY. That grass-roots aesthetic is really big with us."

Part of that aesthetic is genre crossing to "find strength in happy accidents."

"There's areas of things just happening on the visual end -- there's the balance and control of the piece, of compositionally switching film loops," Rose said. "There's a change of where it hits each time with the music, and it's always going to be a little different. And you just let it happen."

Let Adelaide happen to you Friday at 7 p.m. at the Placebo, 1611 Peninsula Dr., Manila. For more information, visit www.adelaidesound.com or www.theplacebo.org