Infernal machine

What is it about Portland that attracts musicians and bands to it like an odd, overcast magnet?

Portland definitely gets a steady and welcome immigration of musical talent. It’s almost as if at the gates of the city we should post a sign stating: “Give me your folk, your pop, your huddled masses yearning to rock free.”

The Weather Machines is just such a band of transplants who traveled to Stumptown from Rapid City, SD. Originally founded in 2004, The Weather Machines is an invention of Jason Ward, who performs many of the band’s various duties.

Songwriting, recording, management and other tasks all fall under his purview. Though Ward does gather assistance from friends and fellow musicians for the needs of live performance, in the end, The Weather Machines’ pop is very much Ward’s creation.

Currently The Weather Machines have one album out, The Sound of Pseudoscience, though later this month fans will also get some more of the Machine’s product with a five-song EP to be released on Nov. 25, followed up with an all-ages CD release party at Backspace.

Ward was kind enough to take some time and offer up some answers to a few questions the Vanguard sent his way earlier this week.

Richard D. Oxley: Who else is in the band, or who else has joined you in the past?Jason Ward: While we were in Rapid City we had pretty consistent live lineup of Ali DeMersseman (whom I’ve lived with in a “partner/special friend” capacity for a very long time now) and friends J. (John) Waylon Miller and Patrick Fleming. Occasionally we’d add a keyboard player.

I tracked everything on The Sound of Pseudoscience except drums, which John played. Oh, and Patrick came up one weekend from Wyoming where he was living and did a few guitar tracks, but usually it’s easier for me to track everything I’m able to do and bring in other people to play things I can’t.

Since moving the “band” to Portland, John’s brother Miyo One Arrow has been in and out of town and has done drum tracking and been drafted into occasional live duties. Our friend Tom Miller (We Are Tom) tracked some piano for our upcoming EP and has played guitar and keyboards live. More recently, I’ve hooked up with Sam Phillips and Oliver Francis (aka the Starkeys) and after taking some time off, Ali’s back on bass for at least the next couple of shows.

RO: When and why did you choose Portland to move to?JW: We left Rapid City in 2006 for Ali to pursue her master’s degree in city planning and she got accepted to Portland State and University of Minnesota. We’d lived in both Minneapolis and Portland in the ’90s, and while Minneapolis has more lakes, Portland offered better learning opportunities, more volcanoes, milder weather and a more promising basketball team. So Portland won out 4-1.

RO: How does the songwriting process go for you? Where do you begin and go from there?JW: I’ve always been into early rock and roll and early ’60s pop, especially Brill Building girl groups, so I’m always shooting for something that has the same energy. Growing up in a DIY punk scene (in the more genre-less indie sense) and being a guitar player without easy access to strings, horns, etc., things always wind up getting passed through the lens of the electric guitar.

The better songs always seem to come about from some vocal melody plus guitar hook that get built up from there. The guitar usually establishes a backbeat pretty firmly so the drums tend to fall out pretty easily. Then the lyrics get painstakingly crammed into whatever phonemes I spat out on the first recorded demo, and voila!

RO: If you could go on the road as a roadie for anyone, who would it be?JW: Fugazi circa Red Medicine? Or maybe Nation of Ulysses?

RO: How do you view the Portland music scene? Are there any other Portland-based groups or artists that you admire and enjoy?JW: The Portland music scene is so vast and deep that it boggles the mind. During our first stint here, things seemed simpler-I only knew of Quasi, Dead Moon and a few friends’ bands.

After we moved back to Rapid City we played shows with the Thermals and All Girl Summer Fun Band, who are both terrific. Past that and the more recently transplanted heavy hitters, there’s this blur of tons of really talented, popular bands/artists that I can’t seem to keep up with.

RO: Tell me about recording The Sound of Pseudoscience.JW: The Sound of Pseudoscience was recorded in the basement of our old house in Rapid City. It actually came about pretty quickly. I’d demoed nine songs over a month or so, and wrote three more on the fly as I was tracking. John came over and bashed out the drums in a couple of afternoons, and I spent maybe three weeks of evenings and weekends overdubbing everything else. Then mixing took me a few months.

The new EP took a little longer. I spent a few months of 2006 unemployed and got a ton of new material demoed before eventually finding a job here. Finally, around January 2008 got a space in Northwest Portland set up and started tracking drums. I have no idea exactly what happened between then and now, nor do I understand how it’s already November. I suspect I may have fallen into a time warp somewhere on the I-5 corridor between home and work.

RO: If there were to be a sandwich made in honor of you, what would it be called and what would it be made out of?JW: It would be a hot, open-faced sandwich on thin, crusty bread with crushed tomatoes, basil and mozzarella cheese. It would be called a “pizza.”

The Weather Machinesw/ Yoyodyne and Pancake BreakfastKelly’s OlympianNov. 8, 9 p.m. $521-plus