Portland trio Reporter make space-based dance music. It's a darkly tinted synth, guitar, and bass futuro-electrique, and it's weightless. This is music your space station's sound system can crank. Singer/bassist Alberta Poon, drummer Michael McKinnon, and guitarist Daniel Grazzini have been together for seven years. Their previous post-punk-ish incarnation was called Wet Confetti. Reporter see the three staying together, but making a conscious shift toward dance music. This past August, Reporter released an album titled Time Incredible on Portland art-house/nightclub label Holocene Music. Immediate comparisons to Blonde Redhead arise, but Reporter are more dedicated to abstractness and the weird. Poon sings with airy vocals as a space-station siren, drawing listeners into her asteroid rocks, but instead of wrecking them, she floats them through an airlock with droplets of spilled cognac and a team of thigh-high-boot-wearing protogalactic mermaid go-go dancers.

Using a combination of live instruments, samples, and drum machines, Reporter give the droid face of their electronic sound a human mouth and eyes. Sounds of techno and house also flow from their circuit veins. Staccato guitar rhythms driven over rounded, metered bass configurations. Minor note psychedelic slapback delayed synths also slant into the merger. Live, Reporter reads the audience like a DJ does, directing, effecting, and looping sounds to fit the energy that's present in the room. Poon spoke, no weightless go-go dancers were present.

Your music makes me want to be trapped on a space station with you. There would be cognac and a tame lynx enjoying the weightlessness. And some sort of futuristic hot tub. Disco balls would be floating around. Would you be mad if the lynx were declawed? I wouldn't want it scratching up the shag carpet walls.

Not at all. Actually, we hope you would replace all his fangs with a gold grill, as well.

Reporter's sound is sexy. Do you sprinkle love drugs into the air when you play? Or have fresh oxygen pumped into the room for your shows? Is there a mating animal like a lynx involved? You all use some sort of pheromone, don't you?

Yes we do. It takes a combination of a few minute details to get shit this sexy. First, drug the audience. We spike the fog machine with love drugs that vaporize into the air and trick people into falling head over heels for us. Next, we throw lynx urine all over Mike, our drummer, right before we go on, and the pheromones steam off him, driving everyone in a 69-foot radius into a complete frenzy. The urine has to be from when the lynx is in heat, so this is a seasonal thing. And, lastly, we write songs about love and put a nice groove to them, but this probably has nothing to do with it.

You all use multitudes of electronics, but you do more than just press buttons.

We collect vintage gear like synths, drum machines, and rack effects like an old lady collects thimbles. Then we obsess over getting the best and most unique sounds and tones, much like how I imagine an old lady obsesses over how shiny and presentable her thimble collection looks hanging on the wall.

How have you been able to stay together for so long? What is the key to band longevity?

The key is that everyone in the band has to be a masochist. I mean everybody. If even one person strays from this tried-and-true formula, then the band breaks up because that one selfish person doesn't want to be miserable like the rest of us.

Reporter employ some French house and Italo disco influences.

We definitely draw a lot of influence from both of those genres. Fred Falke, Daft Punk, Laurent Garnier, and Pepe Bradock are some French house artists we love. Italo disco has also been a big influence, but I think we have been more inspired by the lost pop gems that exist in that genre than by the aesthetics. The Aeroplane Beats in Space mix is a great cross section of the best of that genre. That mix blows our minds.

What do you think about lynxes? And disco balls?

Let's break this down. Lynxes are like the strippers of the big-cat world. Unappreciated and pretty, but dirty and work hard to survive. Disco balls are the most brilliant simple idea of all time. At some point, some genius thought, "Hey, I'm gonna invent a spherical mirror and shine a light on it." The world has never been the same.

Live, you are of and for dance music. Why the shift toward dance music?

So many reasons. We were sick of boring, prude indie-rock music. We wanted to move as far away from that as possible, and we've all liked dance/pop music for as long as we can remember. We had just never fully thrown ourselves into it. We hinted at it, but with Reporter, it was time and we just went for it. Also it's about time the United States caught up with the rest of the world in appreciating dance music.

How do you all trigger your samples live?

Roland SPD-S pad.

What is the Reporter gear setup for shows?

Bass, guitar, drums. Mike triggers all the loops/samples with the SPD-S, adds delay, and loops my vocals live. Not playing to a sterile backing track and being able to start and stop the loops makes the live show feel a lot more organic.

How often do you jump on a trampoline and play bass at the same time?

Every day, 20-minute sessions at home alone. My downstairs neighbors love me. How do you think I stay so fit?

What kind of bass do you play? Who are your favorite bass players?

It's some weird, rare St. George bass with amazing tone. At our CD release, a ton of people from the crowd got up onstage with us to dance and someone stepped on the headstock and fractured it. It's in the instrument hospital recovering as we speak. As for what bass players inspire me, I'd have to say Simon Gallup from the Cure. Maybe the most genius bass player of all time, for one of my favorite bands ever. For a more modern bass player, Sebastien Tellier is amazing. He is better known as a songwriter/frontman, but he plays bass on all his albums and his bass lines are brilliant.

How did the songs come together for Time Incredible? Talk about your song "Love Sounds."

In a way, the whole album was built around opening track "Geronimo's Bones." We took a vocal loop out of this old German soundtrack we were obsessed with and started building the song around it. That vocal loop became the building block for a large portion of the album. Most of the songs were based on it but eventually took on their own identity. "Love Sounds" is the one that we kept similar to "Geronimo's Bones." It's basically a remix of the opening track with a different chord progression. Dan has an Ensoniq Mirage, an early-1980s eight-bit sampler/synth, that we used for the piano and choral sounds, and the bass line of that song is from Mike's ARP Axxe.

What other bands do you like playing with in Portland? Who's doing well right now?

So many rad bands in Portland: Wampire, Soft Metals, Miracles Club, Chromatics, Glass Candy, just to name a few.

What is your perception of Seattle music? What do people from Portland think of Seattle music?

To be honest, I haven't really heard much coming out of Seattle. There are great hiphop acts like Mad Rad and Champagne Champagne. But other than that, I'm pretty clueless.

Do you think there is big beef between Seattle and Portland music?

No. I think Portlanders love to hate on Seattle, and Seattleites are like, "Portland? What's Portland?"

What's next for Reporter?

We just finished up Thermals and Starfucker remixes. We're super-excited about both of them, so hopefully those deadbeat bands do something about it. Also, our next album is in the works. We feel our sound and style are improving and becoming more refined. Expect poppier songs, but with our signature sexy lynx-soaked flair.

This article has been updated since its original publication.