Just after midnight this past Saturday, Truckasauras slipped their
van into the KFC parking lot on Capitol Hill. Down the block, at 10th
Avenue and East Pike Street, Tyler Swan set his drum kit up against a
fire hydrant, Ryan Trudell plugged his Game Boy into a battery-powered
amp, and Adam Swan readied his melodica. “Street Truck,” a portable,
semiacoustic version of Truckasauras, began to play. As people spilled
out of the clubs at closing time, a crowd formed to watch the bleep-hop
trio under the streetlight’s bronze halogen glow.
Even without live drums—the band usually play with an array of
drum machines, synths, Game Boy, and fourth member Dan Bordon on video
projections—Truckasauras are a live band. Trudell is a master of
the Nanoloop, a German sequencer program for the Game Boy. Tyler Swan
programs beats with a real drummer’s feel. These guys do more than hit
a start button, cross faders, and let loops cycle. They play their gear
like instruments, improvising and feeding off each other. Knobs are
tweaked and buttons are pushed. There are hands and eyes on the
machines, brains making decisions based on what they hear.
The Street Truck performance was a stunt to celebrate and showcase
Truckasauras’s new album, Tea Parties, Guns, and Valor, a
joint release on Brooklyn’s semiannual Journal of Popular
Noise and Seattle’s own Fourthcity.
Seventeen tracks appear on the release—nine original
Truckasauras cuts, a cover of the Airwolf theme called “Super
Copter,” and seven remixes by DJs and producers including Plan B, Jerry
Abstract, Copy, and DJ Collage.
The record has been finished and shelved for much of the past year.
In that time, Truckasauras’s 8-bit party rocking has generated quite a
buzz. They’ve struck a chord, or a Korg to put it more accurately.
Their shows and their fan base have gotten bigger, but they’re still
the same dudes as always: self-proclaimed gear nerds who get as live as
they possibly can.
“I don’t think much has changed because of the hype,” says Adam
Swan. “We’re basically just getting better shows, playing shit like
Sasquatch! and the Block Party rather than the Baltic Room and grimy
house parties. The festivals are exposing us to a wider array of people
beyond the small community that attends electronic shows in
Seattle.”
Sasquatch! saw Truckasauras bring their beats, their family, and
their Maker’s Mark to the rock-festival crowd. Titties were called for.
Some were shown. It was stupid, supersized American fun. Sequenced
analog gear and tits—people either eat it up or don’t get it at
all.
“We’re still just doing our thing, making beats, drinking beer, and
having fun,” says Adam Swan.
All this for a band that’s really a side project. Truckasauras’s
“real” band is Foscil, an electro-acoustic blend of horns, synths,
drums, Rhodes, and guitar. Trudell explains, “Tea Parties, Guns,
and Valor represents the past couple years of doing the Truck
thing. Since it’s a side project, the recording was slow going. We
recorded to half-inch eight-track reel-to-reel, then mixed it down to
DAT. Adam engineered it.”
“All the songs are pretty much live,” says Adam Swan. “We left in
the imperfections and didn’t do overdubs.”
The first track they laid down was “Porkwich” which is just the drum
machines, a Commodore 64, and the Game Boy. There’s a slurred electro
gurgle on a fat-ass beat. “Fak!!!” shows off a TB-303 synth in a
Phantom of the Nintendo Opera. The last piece of gear that was
added was a FutureRetro Mobius sequencer. It sends CV signals out,
which allowed the SH-101 synth from Foscil to be incorporated. In
“Howie C,” the 101 is the main sequenced synth that plays throughout
the track. The song starts with oddly dropped clicks and the 101
sounding off foghorn squirms. The 808 claps snares, a jungle beat
falls, then the song turns inside out and a bulging 16th fuzz-bass runs
over shades of ice-synth into a wall of cathode static.
“The tracks evolved as we acquired gear,” says Trudell. “We don’t
want to get too pigeonholed by the Game Boy label. The future for
Truckasauras will be focusing more on different gear.”
If Tea Parties, Guns, and Valor‘s sound is still decidedly
old-school, the release itself is designed for right now. It’s a
digital album in the form of a 10-by-10-inch full-color glossy booklet
and a download code. There is no CD or vinyl, just the code.
“It’s an interesting time right now to be releasing music,” says
Adam Swan. “The industry is shifting and so much is still settling. We
see it as an opportunity for this to be a unique release. We’re big,
big fans of album artwork, like Led Zeppelin III with
that rotating wheel on the cover. People used to have a physical
representation of the music. With MP3s and CDs, album art is being
lost.”
The goal with Tea Parties, Guns, and Valor was to make a
piece of art worth hanging onto while getting the music to the people
in the most effective way possible. Tyler Swan says, “We really wanted
to have something physical that would accompany the music. In the
booklet, each page represents one of the songs.” Artist and Popular
Noise editor Brian Kalet illustrates pixel renderings of
Americana. Monster trucks fly high across Hulkamanian skies. It’s true
Truck.
“A monster truck is America,” says Trudell. “We wanted that epitome
of American overconsumerism in the art. And WrestleMania.” 
