15 Years of 'Psychic Chasms' with Neon Indian's Alan Palomo

VMP: What’s your earliest music memory?

Alan Palomo: It would probably be my brother dancing to Wings’ “Silly Love Songs.” My parents used to play that song ’cause they knew my brother would dance along to it. But a lot of my earliest memories [were] also just seeing my dad on local TV performing. He was kind of like a one-hit wonder in Mexico. He had a moment with this song, and by the time my brother and I were born, he basically had transitioned into becoming a nightclub singer, and my mom, she was working in local television. When we moved to the States, she got a job at Telemundo, so my upbringing was around musicians and around cameras, honestly. It sort of created this friction that is still a part of my life, which is, like, on one side, I love film, and [on] the other side, I love music. And [I] try to find a way for these things to interact.

With Psychic Chasms, I’m interested in how the album initially came together, and why you opted to release it under the name [Neon Indian] rather than under VEGA, which was your other project at the time.

This is going to sound hokey, but it started with this dream I had where I took acid with my high school ex and I woke up just as it was supposed to kick in, so I had this jarring first few minutes of the day. I texted her about it, and we made plans to actually do acid over Christmas break. When Christmas rolled around, I got cold feet. To this day, I still haven’t tried acid — I just chickened out. That year, I moved to Austin and I had just gotten the Prophet ’08. I was futzing around on it and decided to write [my ex] an apology song called “Should Have Taken Acid With You,” and it was just kind of this spark. So this was something that, because I didn’t make it with the intention of sharing it with anybody other than her, it just kind of came out of me.

At the time, I was still doing VEGA, so I tried to reformat the song into a VEGA song and it just wasn’t working out. I think a few months after that, I realized that, rather than trying to make this into a VEGA song, [I] should just write more songs like [that]. Almost as a creative prompt, I would do a song every day. I think the first one that I started where I knew I was going to make something was probably “6669.” I started with a sample of one of my dad’s songs, from his second album. It was a sample I knew I didn’t have to clear so I just started doing it. It was a creative restraint that I haven’t been able to replicate since, because you’re constantly trying to outdo yourself, but in that moment, it was kind of that cliché where they say you have your whole life to write that first record. It didn’t matter how pristine it sounded, whether it was professional or lo-fi — it was just about getting it done and having fun doing it. It was this lightning-in-a-bottle moment where I had the right production tools, was playing with the right conflux of influences, and also just right-place-right-time because, though I beat them to the punch, Washed Out and Toro [Y Moi] happened pretty soon after.

What was your opinion of the “chillwave” label at the time?

At the time it was rough because it was coined by Hipster Runoff, this blogger — and the funny thing is, he was a friend of my best friend, and I didn’t realize that he had come to my high school graduation barbecue. It felt like it created an editorial narrative that was starting to overwhelm what this was actually about, which was, “In the rise of the internet-era, here are these new artists that are making music in their bedrooms.” Instead, there was this arms race to see what they could call it, how quickly they could hype it, and then how quickly they could dismiss it. It’s ironic because now it’s such an ingrained phrase or genre term when you go cruising to buy sample or preset packs. It’s so embedded in the vernacular of the electronic music genres that there’s also a pride. 

Genres used to kind of coincide with geographic location; it was usually a group of people with similar goals in mind who were influencing each other, creating a common sound. Suddenly the internet decentralized the idea of genre, and suddenly these three or four people who’ve never met, who all live in different cities, under some editorial lens can be lumped together [and] defined as a genre. I think that was the most jarring part of it. If it was my friends and other bands that I knew at the time in Texas, that would make sense. But it’s like, “Hey, there’s this guy in Georgia that sounds just like you.” That was a very strange thing, but they also came to be great friends. I know Chaz [Bear, of Toro Y Moi] and Ernest [Greene, of Washed Out] quite well, and we’ve kept in touch over the years, and everybody’s gone off into very different musical directions, which is cool to see.

I’m curious about the art for Psychic Chasms… did you do the collage?

No, so that was actually my ex, who I had the dream about. In the beginning, I thought we could have this collaborative element of audio-visual component to Neon Indian, but the reality was that she had just started art school and was plenty busy. So that never ended up coming to fruition, but she did wind up making the artwork, which was part of a collage assignment. She sent me a bunch of individual panels and I picked the two that I liked the most for the front cover and back cover.

What’s your favorite song on Psychic Chasms?

“Mind, Drips,” for sure. “Mind, Drips” was kind of the sequel to “Terminally Chill” in that they were both lifted from La Bionda songs. La Bionda had a significance to me because they were my introduction to Italo disco. La Bionda’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” to me is the most pure, unfettered dose of Italo disco. It ticks all the boxes: novelty sci-fi lyrics, weird synth sound design, arpeggiated bassline — and that was my introduction [to the genre]. I had never heard anything like it, and it sent me down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with this genre of music and it being this pervading sound throughout my career.

When I was writing Psychic Chasms I didn’t want to flip a sample of “I Wanna Be Your Lover” because that song to me was too recognizable and iconic. But I was going through their discography, and there was a b-side that had this very quick arpeggiated little intro that then went off into this other thing, but I was interested in that intro, and I slowed it down to a third of its speed and started playing the Prophet ’08 over it, and that, to me, was the most emotional song. Every record has something that was really just for me, and maybe isn’t what people resonate with the most, and they always tend to be the most “out there” songs or achieve a very specific vibe. And on [Psychic Chasms] “Mind, Drips” was this mission statement aesthetic piece.

What was the first synthesizer that you ever got?

Well, there’s the synth that got away and then the synth that I actually got. I remember in high school there used to be a pawn shop in San Antonio called Krazy Kat Music. They had an Oberheim OB-6, and I remember that back then they were selling it for, I think, $500, which is insane, considering that thing would cost four or five grand now. We wanted to get it; we just didn’t have the money [at the time], and by the time we came back, the synth was gone, but that started my interest in synthesizers.

In high school, I was getting into electronic music. In particular, Boards of Canada was a really big revelation. When I decided I wanted to try and make electronic music, I had an old Casio Rapman from when I was a kid, and I started distorting it and trying to record it on my computer and do things with it. When I actually started making music, I used one of my student loans to buy a Juno-106. It’s funny because, for the longest time when I had that synth, I was like, “Oh, it doesn’t sound pro.” I thought it was such an entry-level synth, and I was kind of embarrassed to use it. Ironically, recently I was watching the Chromeo guys doing some interview for Mix With The Masters and they were talking about how their whole first record was a Juno-106 and a Nord. It’s funny now, in hindsight, thinking about it like, “No dude, you just weren’t skilled enough to draw the right sounds out of that instrument.”

Eventually, when I started doing Neon Indian stuff, I was able to get my hands on a Prophet ’08 and that wound up being the sound of [Psychic Chasms], in part because it had such amazing presets. It’s funny that I’ve been labeled as this synth/sound-design guy over the years, and the burden of that is I’m constantly collecting stuff and trying to draw the right sounds out of it. But honestly if something just comes with good presets and just sounds good out of the box, I prefer that ten times over, just ’cause you’ll kill the song in the process of trying to get the right [sound].

What’s your current synth setup?

It’s funny because the transition from [Psychic Chasms] to [Era Extraña] was like, suddenly I had a little bit of money. I bought the whole setup, bought a good five or six synthesizers, and I spent most of [Era Extraña] just trying to learn how to use them. So then I realized the importance of working within certain limitations. When [Vega Intl. Night School] came along, I was like, “Alright, I’m going to do it with these three synthesizers.” It was a Minimoog, a Memorymoog, and a Korg PS-3100. And then on World of Hassle it was even more minimal, actually. I didn’t realize that the Casio CZ series — they’re still cheap, you can get ’em for $500; I hope it stays that way — but I think the reason why people never really saw the potential in them is that they kind of look like toys. It sounds like a toy [Yamaha] DX7 and the presets are pretty dinky, but its actual synth engine is sort of akin to FM and something they call phase distortion, and you can get pretty deep with it. So I got a programmer for it on my computer and I kind of just went ham. Most of the sounds on World of Hassle [are] just that Casio; occasionally there’s some high-powered stuff. I had a Jupiter-8 at some point and I sold it and I regret it because it’s gone up exponentially; it’s one you can never get back at this point. Unless I start producing for Rihanna, there’s no way I’m going to afford a Jupiter-8. But my friend Michael [Stein] has one, and I did some sessions over at his studio and — he’s one of the dudes who works on Stranger Things — [he] just has like, God’s synthesizer collection that he slowly amassed from when he was a tech at Switched On, this synth shop in Austin. He had a Jupiter-8 and a Jupiter-6, so there were some big sounds [on World of Hassle]. But for the most part, you listen to “Nudista Mundial [’89]” with Mac [DeMarco] and that song’s just CZ top-down.

I know that you’re a bit of a record collector. What’s your favorite record in your collection?

Oh, man. The rarest [is] this box set that I got that was the only known pressings of this band Supersempfft. It’s like Kraftwerk meets calypso or reggae — a very silly, cartoonish band. [Their] sound design has been such a constant in my influences… some of the freakiest music I’ve heard. I was rocking a lot of that stuff during [the making of] Vega Intl.