w/Electro Group, Science Victim
Sat Dec 6, Fun House, 9:30 pm, $5.
If musicians painted images with their instruments, the Intelligence's soundscapes would be set in a grainy, ash-gray world, among piles of scrap metal and busted machinery, with discarded computer parts blinking in cobwebbed corners and factories belching out toxins at irregular intervals.
It'd be a black-and-white wasteland of humanity, a post-apocalyptic industrial rev- olution, warmed only by the distant loops of a delayed, disembodied guitar riff. At the center of it all would be Lars Finberg, delivering deadpan lines like "Who gives a fuck if the world is a drag?" He'd be pounding bent garbage-can lids with one hand and programming distorted beats on his keyboard with the other, a one-man laboratory of intoxicating post-punk experimentation.
That's the video I'd direct for the Intelligence's debut full- length album, Boredom and Terror. The music is so jagged and cinematically poetic and dusted in clouds of lo-fi noise that listening to it at different times can conjure completely different visions. It's par for the course for Finberg, who's part of some of Seattle's most exciting musical forces, whether he's fucking around in the Dipers, delivering the beat frameworks for A Frames, or masterminding the Intelligence. All of his projects are demanding attention in and beyond the Northwest for creating a new direction in sound based on the fundamental elements of bands like the Fall and PiL; Finberg says the Intelligence also owes a heavy debt to groups like Country Teasers, Karate Party, and Vulvettes.
A Frames and the Intelligence started around "around 1999," according to Finberg (A Frames slightly earlier), when both acts released singles on Dragnet Records, the indie label he runs with A Frames members Erin Sullivan and Min Yee (the latter is also, in typical Seattle-band-incest fashion, the Intelligence's bassist). What interests me most about the Intelligence--aside from the obvious homage Finberg pays to the sound Sullivan brings to A Frames--is how the new record came together out of what Finberg claims was laziness and musical illusions.
Drinking cans of Oly and Sparks in his West Seattle home with his girlfriend, Intelligence guitarist Kimberly Morrison, Finberg describes the recording process for Boredom and Terror. "I just have fun getting weird sounds," he says. Aside from using a delay pedal to give much of the record its tin-can reverb, he says a lot of his inspiration came from what was available: "I don't know anything about gear, so I'd plug the delay pedal into the drum machine and do that for two minutes, and if that sounded good I'd plug in the bass [as well]." Whatever drumbeats didn't come from a machine were done on Finberg's five-year-old son's scaled-down drum set, giving them a unique sound as well. "[The kit] is so tiny," he says, "that you have to play it hunched over, so you play it softer. I put it through distortion, though, so it sounded bigger"--which results in a sound like golf balls smacking a metal roof.
Most of Boredom was tracked on Finberg's bed one winter as bad sitcoms flickered across the television screen. "I worked in this shitty steel mill and I'd come home and already have seen that episode of some show," he says of his typical recording session. "I'd bring the eight-track on the bed, and then I'd get the keyboard and realize that instead of playing the bass, I could get it [done on keyboards]. 'The World Is a Drag' uses keyboards [for the guitar and bass parts], all recorded during an episode of Friends."
Live, Finberg opens his demented solo symphonies to other humans, with Yee, Morrison, and drummer Matthew Ford rounding things out while he plays guitar and sings in his typical robotic style. Of course the transition from bedroom laboratory to club puts the band through something of a musical alteration--namely, the use of all live instruments instead of keyboard samples and drum machines. But that sinister post-punk vibe clings to their music with static electricity. "I think there's an element of trying to disguise the pop in there a little bit," says Finberg of the Intelligence sound, both recorded and with a full band. "Because the bands I like the best--well, there are tons of bands people would like more if they [sounded] a little more fucked-up."
