It is difficult to get a bead on local art/indie rockers Explode Into Colors, largely due to the fact that their videos and art projects far outnumber their musical recordings. Having recorded a total of zero albums, the band has nonetheless managed to play a steady stream of shows and have received a warm welcome into the avant-garde musical and arts community. Their anonymity in the recorded world adds mystique to their performances, making these shows the true measure of them as a band and making the experience of seeing them feel all the more exciting.
Explode Into Colors’ beginnings can be traced to a mutual love for percussion and drum circles. Claudia Meza (baritone guitar/vocals) and Lisa Schonberg have been playing together since 2000, focusing on, as Schonberg puts it, “mathy guitar and drums together and with friends.”
The duo played in a band called Thunder!Thunder!Thunder! until Schonberg met Heather Treadway at an African drumming club at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. (where all three were going to school at the time). The two had a short-lived drum and dance project called Motion Commotion.
Eventually the three ended up in Portland and hooked up again, switching the musical lineup around to form what would become Explode into Colors.
“I was craving something somewhat melodic,” reflects Schonberg, “so Claudia decided to play her baritone guitar. Claudia couldn’t play percussion and guitar and sing all at once, so that’s about when we really started playing with Heather, who plays killer beats, and is trained on piano and can sing.”
But it seemed their ambitions and insatiable need to experiment made it hard to crank out new music.
“The artists that Claudia has been inspired by,” says Schonberg, “have often collaborated with other artists in their work, and never limited themselves to any one means of being creative—Claudia was very much inspired by these artists, and similarly suggested from the start that we become more than a ‘rock band.'”
If this sounds more theatrical than it does musical, that’s because it is. Each of the ladies of EIC has gravitated toward different outlets in the arts community.
As Treadway envisions it, “I hope to create lots of interesting stuff for us to wear on stage. Hopefully more people will see my clothes and I won’t have to sling burgers in the future!”
Meza and Schonberg have seemed to gravitate toward video displays with various visual artists around town.
“I’m an ecologist,” says Schonberg, “[my specialty is entomology] and I am very interested in how music and other art forms can reflect on ecological ideas and vice versa. We’re currently developing a proposal for a project that will integrate music and science.”
EIC’s live shows are a testament to their growing awareness of how to incorporate various art forms into their other passion, music. At a recent show at the Holocene, Meza could be seen wearing a white full-bodied workman’s suit equipped with hood, resembling that of a beekeeper without the netted face mask. Behind the three women were random images and visual art that seized and blinked and flashed, illuminating the otherwise dark room.
“I personally see playing music in a band as a continuum of creative expression that could also manifest itself into other forms,” says Meza. “Being in a band is already so theatrical just by its very nature: There is a stage you perform on and there is an audience.”
Currently, the band is trying to figure out how their energy, visuals and theatrics translate into recorded material. What it has boiled down to thus far are baritone- and drum-driven funky songs, with effected vocals that are rooted in psychedlia. It makes for something danceable but also something one can trip out on quite easily.
“Sometimes we’ll all just have a spontaneous jam, record it on cassette and come up with a song that way,” says Schonberg. “Claudia is a skilled arranger, so usually what happens is we write our parts and she’ll make suggestions as to how to arrange those parts most effectively. And everything gets recorded on cassette. We’d be pretty lost without our Caliphone.”
Naturally apt to veer off the well-beaten path, the girls of EIC open up what the label “music” really is and where its boundaries are. For those that are looking for a totally danceable, funky bass and percussion-driven musical act, there may be more to come, as EIC is currently writing new material to be recorded later this year, and should have a few 7-inch releases before that, all on various labels.
It is tough to say what will happen between now and the end of the year, especially with so many projects in the works, but sufficed to say, Explode Into Colors will be around the arts community is some capacity for quite a while.