Juno

w/Aveo, Asahi

Fri Jan 31, Vera Project, 8 pm, $7 with $1 club card.

w/These Arms Are Snakes, Automaton

Sat Feb 1, Graceland, 9 pm, $8.

"Here's a little secret about me," Arlie Carstens says, smiling and leaning across a tower of uniformly folded T-shirts. "I don't know how to shop."

He laughs and looks back at the shirts.

"Okay," he continues, tugging at the collar of a Minor Threat T-shirt he's wearing, a shirt he's owned since age 14. "What size am I wearing now?"

I examine the tag. It's a large. (Or it was a large, a decade and a half ago.)

"Okay, so I need a large."

I could be interviewing Carstens, frontman and one-third of the guitar section in Juno (along with guitarists Jason Guyer and Gabe Carter, with Greg Ferguson playing drums--the band doesn't have a permanent bass player), someplace more accommodating for an interview, but there's too much to be done. The band leaves in less than 10 hours, embarking on its 2003 Japan Tour, and prior to the 4:00 a.m. departure time, Carstens still has a long to-do list ahead of him, including picking up a few extra T-shirts.

"So is the break officially over for Juno?" I ask.

He shrugs. "I think so. It's like this," he says. "We toured for about seven months last year--three times through the states and twice through Europe--and put a second record out (A Future Lived in Past Tense). Then DeSoto made the decision to fold and we were exhausted from all that touring so we decided to take a break."

Once the hiatus was announced, the rumors began to fly. Drawing in an ever-growing cultish following for their onslaught of emotional post-rock--incorporating layers of heavy drums, bass, and sometimes three guitar parts--people wondered what this vague "hiatus" was all about.

But Juno never did break up--no matter what you may have heard from your sister's boyfriend's cousin. "That's the thing that's kind of screwy," Carstens says with a laugh. "When you say you're going to take a hiatus, that doesn't mean that everybody in the band scatters to the four points of the earth. It means the band is not going to play shows, the band is not going to go into a recording studio. It's just a public break."

But now, 10 months later, the public break is over, bringing us to the day before Juno's two-week Japan tour.

"Now our plan is to come back from Japan, write and record an EP for late spring or summer, then record a full-length thereafter," he explains.

They also have plans to finalize a deal with a new record label since technically, with DeSoto gone, their music is homeless. "For the past year we've been in talks with a couple of different labels and we've pretty well decided that we're going to go ahead and work with Tiger Style in New York City," says Carstens.

As a big Juno fan, hearing this news couldn't make me happier. I've been anxiously awaiting their return, and my anxiety is in good company. "I probably get hit with five or six e-mails a week, sometimes more, from people all over the U.S. and Europe saying, 'I hope you guys didn't break up. I really enjoy your records but I heard this rumor...,'" says Carstens. "It's nice to have people get in touch with us and say that they like our music and hope that we continue to be a band. It shows that what you've done up to that point maybe was worth doing and might just be worth continuing to do."

There's a pause as the conversation begins to turn more into a heart-to-heart. Then Carstens exclaims, "Hey, we're supposed to be lying about stuff!"

He's referring to a phone conversation we'd had earlier, where we'd agreed it'd be the most fun to just lie about everything.

"Fuck it, let's lie!" he says.

For the next few minutes we exchange ideas of different stories we could make up involving Juno and bunny suits and whatnot.

"No, wait, I can't say that! That's terrible! I'm only gonna make fun of my bandmates. That's terrible!" Carstens says, changing his mind.

"So what have we been doing for the past [10] months?" he asks himself, repeating my question. He starts in with more stories, some true, some false, and then he interrupts himself and laughs, "This is rough. I don't know what to tell you."