[FREE-FORM PSYCHEDELIA] The music of Paint and Copter has a decidedly amorphous quality, a slippery, formless sound akin to watching a splash of half and half warp into long white ribbons in a cup of black coffee. It’s that same nebulousness that allows guitarist Dave Tollefson to admit, with a straight face, “We’re a jam band.”
The tracks on the Portland trio’s latest album of ambient psychedelia, Damnatio Memoriae, were the result of long improvisation sessions between Tollefson and multi-instrumentalists Andy Brown and Jason Frank, edited down into song form after the fact. “The arrangement happens in the computer,” says Brown (a former member of Portland experimental pop acts Jessamine and Fontanelle), “but 80 percent of our recorded output is first takes.”
The strategy worked brilliantly on tracks like the dubbed-out “Determinacy” and the gorgeously trippy “Times New Roman.” In keeping with the free-form structure, Paint and Copter’s live performances often expand on the groundwork the trio laid down in Brown’s home studio. “It’s pretty jazzlike in that way,” says Brown. “You get the basic structure and you play around in it.”
P and C finds itself altering the songs as a reaction to both the space in which it is playing and the films that Frank creates for the band to play against (which can be anything from heavily distorted Vietnam War footage to homemade secret-agent movies). “These days, I’m sampling a lot of religious footage,” Frank says, “dispensationalist preachers who say the end times are coming.”
Onstage, the door of influence swings between the audio and visual inspirations. P&C finds as much inspiration in current events as it does in itsmusical interests, Brown says: “Half our band practice is spent with us going, ‘You hear about this?’ or, ‘You hear about that?’”
Tollefson agrees: “It’s always fun to see who can bring in the story that’s the most shocking,” noting the story most on their minds lately was the recent beheading of a man on a Greyhound bus by a fellow passenger. “I listened to the last practice we did after we talked about that,” remembers Brown, “and the jam was totally dark and evil sounding. We definitely react to what’s going on.”
