Polar Opposites

The Antarcticans rip up our maps and chart their own sonic landscapes.
by Evan George

The Antarcticans do not play rock and roll; they play electric paradoxes, their amp signals circling audiences like brain-warping puzzles. Little about them is as it seems.

To hear them tell it, the Antarcticans originated out of nothing-a blank slate, just like the barren tundra of the continent they’re named after. But in fact, the band’s start couldn’t be more concrete-stemming from a lie, some fan mail and a big idea.

Five years ago, an underage movie theater attendant from Pasadena named David Jasso bought an Acid Mothers Temple record that blew his mind. It was the kind of musical experience that knocks open doors for a lot of teenagers starved for inspiration. In this case, the door got the shit karate-chopped out of it.

“I immediately emailed them and said, ‘I have this band and next time you play L.A., I would like to open for you,’ but I didn’t have a band,” says Jasso. “I was just saying that so that if he gave us the OK, I would get together the band and make it happen.”

The correspondence spurred not only a long lasting e-mail relationship between Jasso and AMT guru/guitarist Kawabata, but all the incentive Jasso and his coworkers at the movie theater needed to put a band together. Guy Valdez, a slouchy, older manager there, showed Jasso a studio he and then-drummer Dave Backhaus had assembled in a loft space above the theaters and they started playing together. When they weren’t buttering old people’s popcorn, the guys were writing intricate, instrumental noise-assault music, calling themselves the Antarcticans. And sure enough, when Acid Mothers Temple came through town in 2002, they got to open for them. “We wrote our whole first album for that show,” says Jasso.

It’s not so much ironic as it is absolutely fitting, then, that Jasso and Valdez are explaining the band’s odd origins while hurriedly silk-screening hundreds of album covers they need by morning, when they will leave for a month-long U.S. tour, opening for-who else?-Acid Mothers Temple.

Contrary to what you might think, however, the Antarcticans aren’t some American carbon copy of Osaka’s infamous psych circus. Jasso’s the first to acknowledge the glaring differences between them and the acid mothers who birthed them.

“We’re certainly not a psychedelic band,” he says. “That whole term is like, so vague. We’re certainly not all about mind altering drugs and being irresponsible. I think the music tries to be more…responsible and about something.”

Over the last four years the band (Jasso and Valdez on guitar, Brenden Willard on bass, Mike Morgan on drums and Backhaus recently returning as a percussionist) has become an enigma in the L.A. music scene as innocuously as they climbed onto the bill for their recent national tour (one that any “psych rock” band would gladly kill their weed dealer for).They’ve accomplished this by taking their craft more seriously than most, and eschewing the vanity in which most L.A. bands ensconce themselves. And yet, they’re everywhere-winning much-sought-after gigs based on friendship, not PR machinery.

The name “the Antarcticans” itself is deceiving: It seems so literal, so straightforward and obvious, until you realize that there’s no such thing as an ‘Antarctican.’ (thanks to an inhospitable climate). It’s no coincidence, then, that the band’s sonic landscapes are almost entirely devoid of human traces. There’s no human voice, so icy guitars, and the occasional Theremin outburst dictate harmony leads.

“Antarctica was a great place to start, a blank place to begin a concept for your band,” says Jasso. “For one: it separates you from America. We didn’t want to be an American rock band. Rock and roll,” he continues, “if it’s just about destruction and getting fucked up, that’s so boring. Why does it need to continue?”

In a city like Los Angeles, known more for its opportunities to play the “aspiring rockstar” part than its meaningful adventures in sound, the Antarcticans are true explorers. And whether it’s on stage at a big bill Hollywood show or in the closet at a Pomona all-ages art gallery, the band experiments with music that-put quite simply-no one else is playing.

Their latest album entitled Teach Children: Fear All Teachings of Eternity/The Doom of Self and Nature-released this month on their own imprint The New Black-is what the Japanese might call a Zen koan. Here in the US, we call it “a mindfuck.”

From the opening moments of “A.D. Slaveship Cross,” where the band mimics the sounds of a creaking ghost ship crossing the sea, afloat on nothing but guitar feedback, delay and distorted bass, the album is entirely other-worldly, and still somehow rooted in its suburban movie complex beginnings.

Long periods of sparse instrumentation and concentrated ambience remind you that these dudes are film buffs who’ve created a way to write their own soundtracks, ones that wait until the right moment to spiral up, swell in volume and explode into fits of sonic rage-like classical compositions fueled by hate-played not by violins, but electric guitars scratched at with screwdrivers. You can almost imagine the band taking a break from tearing tickets to March of the Penguins and throwing all their pent up thoughts into a long, dark dirge about forced labor.

Because in one of the most contradictory ways, the Antarcticans consider themselves a band of ideas, not just music. And beyond mining new sounds, what may be more impressive is their discovery of new ways to write.

“We write the words before we write the music,” says Jasso with not a blink of irony.

Hearing the leader of a completely instrumental band utter this sentence is, at first, akin to struggling with one of those Buddhist brain-busters. “All of our songs are based on stories, or based on some sort of morality or something, but the stories are written to create a composition-to be able to play a 30-minute song.” In other words, to provide some structure to their onslaught, Valdez and Jasso come up with morality tales and pen the movements around them. The two tales within Teach Children encapsulate one major, current obsession: that once humans have destroyed Earth, there is no heaven to look forward to. It’s a teaching that Jasso says they had to put at the core of the past years’ songwriting.

“If you haven’t made an anti-war record in this new millennium as an artist you’re irresponsible,” says Jasso.

Without singing anything, the Antarcticans believe they’re saying quite a lot. LAA

The Antarcticans play May 6 at the Knitting Factory.