Oregon Music News

“I’m currently sitting in the woods on a very steep cliff… just noticing some hunters that are walking around about 1,000 feet from me,” said Matt Sheehy over the phone on a gray Tuesday afternoon.  ”I spend a lot of time in the woods because I’m a forester, and it’s hard for me to put a finger on how exactly me spending this amount of time in nature affects the recording.  But what it comes down to is the sense of wonder that I get from looking up at the stars or hanging out at a planetarium or studying trees or looking at the eccentricities of plants–that’s one of my favorite types of feelings.  I try as hard as I can to recreate that [feeling] in the work I do in music and art.”

Sheehy’s latest musical endeavor, Lost Lander, reflects his amazement.  Crafting an auditory world of wonder, Lost Lander’s delicately elaborate tunes teeter on organic surrealism like the natural marvels that awe and inspire whether it’s the brilliance of aurora borealis, the intricate beauty of ice crystals, the perfect rings of Saturn, or even the glow of a lightning bug.

“It’s that feeling that you get when you discover that there’s a whole other universe that you didn’t even know about and how it makes you feel kinda small,” continues Sheehy.  ”Sean Flinn calls it ‘the big small,’ where you realize how big you are and how small you are at the exact same moment.  It’s trying to capture that.  I try to spend as much time as I can in that headspace.”

And thankfully, now you can too with the release of Lost Lander’s debut album DRRT.  The wondrousness that surrounds us all and influences Sheehy now has a somewhat tangible form and a release date: January 24th, 2012.

"And then I remembered that there's also an Alice in Chains record called Dirt and I didn't want to name it exactly the same, even though that is a pretty great record," Sheehy laughs. L to R: Lowensohn, Sheehy, Hughes, Fennell

The album’s title digs even deeper into depths of Sheehy’s artistic process.  Stylized as leetspeak-esque spelling of “dirt,” the name is both organic and technological at the same time, a theme relevant to record’s creation.  Teamed up with producer Brent Knopf (Ramona Falls, ex-Menomena), the duo recorded separately and together at the Oregon Coast and in the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula, amongst other locales, before inviting a bevy of Portland musicians to provide support.

“Usually we would go over to their houses or rehearsal studios” to record, explains Sheehy of working with players like Dana Janssen (Akron/Family) and Scott McGee (Y La Bamba, ex-Loch Lomond) on drums, Nick Jaina on bass, and with Sean Flinn (Y La Bamba) and Seth Olinsky (Akron/Family) providing some guitars.  Jenn Harrison played the French horn, Lucia Conrad performed all the strings, and Matt’s sister Holly Atryah provided any female vocals you hear on the record.

Each session with each player was different, but there was no shortage of material–Sheehy and Knopf recorded it all, take after take, allowing the organically improvisational sessions to evolve.

“The way that Brent works is very collage oriented so a lot of times in a single session there would be 90% more ideas than ever actually end up getting used,” says Sheehy.  ”And on some of the songs we had some pretty different versions than what ended up on the record.”

Part of the collaging process was to “go through and highlight our favorite moments and collage together that composition.  That was sort of the working method, and that was all Brent’s idea–that’s the way I think he’s developed over time with Menomena.”

Lost Lander's DRRT

Listening to Sheehy explain the process–much like the well-documented recording style of Menomena–seems like an absolute contrast to what is heard on the record.  Creating a collage of the best sounds is an inorganic, technologically pervasive way to record, while the epitome of organic might be considered a single live take of all players in one room, performing together.  Yet, Lost Lander’s product doesn’t belie the natural-sounding recording Knopf and Sheehy were able to produce.  Rather than a composite of segmented samples and electronic glitches, DRRT is a harmoniously flowing body of work.  Many, many distinct layers are at work here but each is so masterfully crafted, bound together like the ebb and flow of the tide, that the album becomes seamlessly organic.

While the process seems to be the opposite of the product, Sheehy maintains that many of the album’s performers were “never trying to stick a performance” but rather playing “fresh ideas” and “following their gut instincts,” ultimately calling it ”an inorganic way of combining very organic performances.”

“I love seeing contrast,” notes Sheehy.  ”The term dirt means opposite things at once.”

Dirt makes things dirty, whether that’s suggestive–as a sexual innuendo–or direct–physically unclean.  Listening to DRRT might impart an earthily organic experience while recording it was technologically complex.  But the name DRRT is “also a great contrast to the album art.  It’s space-oriented and has this name that’s very grounded.”

The “spacey theme,” intentionally and unintentionally, permeates the work of Lost Lander.  ”Although it’s not a space-oriented name, people seem to perceive it that way,” explains Sheehy.  (The origin actually comes from a dream Sheehy’s mother had about Wisconsin’s Lost Land Lake, where she spent much of her childhood.)  Yet, the band consciously continues this trend with the elaborate packaging of DRRT.

“We had a pretty ambitious plan for the packaging that took almost as much time to create as [it did] to record the record… maybe more actually,” admits Sheehy.  ”On the first thousand copies, I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to make more of these because they’re pretty expensive, the CD package is all made out of a custom die.  Basically it’s a CD sleeve that pulls out of a cover and pops open into a home planetarium.  It becomes this enclosed, all-white triangular box that when you put your flashlight in the bottom of it, and you’re in the dark, the box lights up and you can see all these shapes appear on the outside that are constellations.  There’s one constellation for each song.  Then there are little tiny holes in the packaging where the light seeps through and projects a star through that hole onto the ceiling.  So you end up with a ceiling covered with stars in the shape of these constellations that represent the songs.”

“It was a group effort [to create this],” continues Sheehy.  ”Dave Lowensohn, our bass player, had the original idea for the light box, and then during a brainstorming session with Brent [Knopf] and an animator named Stefan Nadelman, who actually did all the art for the album cover (and he also did the Ramona Falls “I Say Fever” video)… the three of us hung out together with the design that Dave had come up with and I realized it was projecting light on the walls so I sort of took the step of turning the light box into a planetarium.  Brent came up with some really great design solutions that made the current design possible.  Then Stefan came up with all of the graphic design elements, like how the images would pop out once it was lit up.”

Supported by a successful Kickstarter campaign, Lost Lander was able to realize their grandiose packaging dreams as well as self release the record on Glad I Did Recordings.

“It seemed to make the most sense organically to self release,” says Sheehy, and “work with people in the community but not necessarily go entirely underneath somebody else’s umbrella.”  With support from family, friends, and locals with expertise and infrastructure, Lost Lander has found a ”great team” that’s willing to extend a helping hand to book shows, publicize their release and upcoming tour, and help with distribution and licensing.

Still, DRRT has been a long time coming.  ”I finished the album a year ago this week,” realizes Sheehy.  ”I wanted to put together a band that really felt like a band because I wanted us to hit the ground sounding like a band.  And I didn’t want to rush that part of it.”

Performing at this summer’s PDX Pop Now! festival and MFNW, Lost Lander’s local shows have featured live guests like album players Sean Flinn, Brent Knopf and Dana Janssen.  But with four core members, Matt Sheehy (vocals/guitar, Ramona Falls), Patrick Hughes (drums, Mnemonic Sounds), Dave Lowensohn (bass, Ramona Falls), and Sarah Fennell (vocals/keys, What Hearts), Lost Lander will hit the road for their first-ever tour with Radiation City, which includes West Coast dates in Eugene at Sam Bond’s Garage on Sunday, December 4th, Cali (Sacramento, San Fran, San Diego, LA, Chico), and a final hometown gig at the Doug Fir in Portland on Saturday, December 10th.

So, if there’s no Brent Knopf… who will take over whistling duties like on the lead track “Cold Feet”?

Sheehy laughs, “Well… we’ve figured out a way to cover the whistles, let me just put it that way.”  Continuing to laugh he adds, “Currently we have a computer doing the whistles mostly because it’s hard to get whistles loud enough when you’re playing with a full band.  Brent does have a pretty incredible whistle though.  He’s hard to replace in pretty much everything he does.”

Sheehy is also very optimistic about his live band mates.  ”I feel so lucky to be playing with those guys.  We all have a really similar attitude towards the work that we’re doing,” he explains.  ”And I’m just so impressed with those guys as musicians” as the music is ”sounding better and better all the time.”

But the complicated recording process doesn’t necessarily translate easily to the stage.  ”It’s been a process of selecting the most important elements that really define the song and making sure that those get in there,” explains Sheehy.

To adapt the songs to the stage, Lost Lander uses “a computer program called Kontakt that has allowed us to go through [the songs] and splice out actual sounds from the album, like say a keyboard tone that we worked a long time on that would be impossible to replicate without bringing six synthesizers up on stage with us, and assign notes,” describes Sheehy.  ”Sarah has done a ton of work and designed a different keyboard for each song.  Sarah can essentially bring up a host of different of tones and sounds and instruments for each song.  She’s triggering prerecorded sounds that we extracted from the album.”

Sheehy didn’t necessarily consider how difficult it would be to recreate DRRT live.  ”I wasn’t thinking about it at all,” states Sheehy.  ”I look at playing live and recording as being two completely different things.  I approached the recording as just that–to make something sonically and worry about that other [live] stuff later.”  Although he was definitely aware of the work that would have to be done “because I had gone through the process of performing the Ramona Falls record, the first one, and I had seen Brent’s process for using Kontakt.”

Lost Lander’s future plans include their album release party at the Doug Fir on February 3rd followed by a tour plus a trip to Austin for SXSW.  There’s also a new video in the works for “Wonderful World” directed by the animating “genius” Stefan Nadelman (who also created Menomena’s “Evil Bee”).  And in the year since recording finished on DRRT, Sheehy has been recording ideas along the way that might turn into the next batch of Lost Lander material, although he anticipates that the whole process will be much more collaborative, involving the whole band.

Nothing tightens up a band like playing every night for a week straight, and by the time Lost Lander wraps up their tour in Portland, we’re sure their live set will be as seamlessly crisp as the album.

Full of wonder and adventure, DRRT feels like an open-ended dream.  Lost Lander is not necessarily seeking answers to the unknown but rather exploring what’s out there.  On a journey of discovery and growth, come take a stroll where your feet never touch the ground.

And see Lost Lander in Eugene at Sam Bond’s Garage on Sunday, December 4th as part of Selfest with Radiation City, Au, Appetite and Bright Archer. Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm, $10, 21+.  Or in Portland at the Doug Fir on Saturday, December 10th with Radiation City and Bright Archer.  Doors at 8pm, show at 9pm, $10, 21+.