Rock the basement

For the past year Daniel Hukill has been crisscrossing the United States via plane, car and whatever other means have been available, playing his music to anyone who would listen.

“I feel gritty in my daily life,” said Hukill–and not for an instant would you think to doubt him.

Hukill has spent four years fronting one of the most aggressive live acts in Portland: The Vonneguts. And for the past decade, he has been integrally involved in an ever-expanding web of underground musicians, who he has collected from basements, dive bars and strip malls–placing DIY rock landmarks on a dirty, well-loved road map stretching from one coast to the next.

Suffice to say, that’s enough to make a guy feel a little haggard.

Fortunately, though, it’s also been apt to inspire this California native to continue pumping out his gritty, visceral rawk at a pace that is likely to yield another two EPs by the time I’ve finished this sentence.

“I don’t try and set long goals for the band,” said Hukill. “I try and take it one step at a time, just set little goals for us.”

Accomplishing these more modest goals has proven a consuming task for Hukill and his fellow Vonneguts, bassist Matt Bonauto and drummer Jamey Anderson.

In the past two years, the group has released collections of loud and dirty rock via a plethora of different labels and formats across the country. Their recent vinyl release on Southern California’s Tiny Shrine Records is to be followed up by a tape-only release later this summer, and a full-length is expected to see the light of day sometime in early September via the Dischord Records sister label Exotic Fever.

Get all that? Well, I’m not entirely sure they do either. But then again, The Vonneguts are really more interested in writing songs than press releases. And with so many EPs and basement shows littering the band’s past, their material is sure to find an outlet for mass consumption somehow.

“My only goal is to be able to make records that feed our shows,” says Hukill. “If we make money beyond that, then that’s good, but I only want to make enough money to fuel our next record and so on.”

To date, The Vonneguts’ recordings have been exercises in free-form energy. Adding lyrical sophistication to a “so ugly it’s pretty” punk racket has been their mode of operation for most of their existence, and in the past year, the band has finally solidified its membership to the point where Hukill and company can indulge some of the melodic offshoots of their confrontational idiom.

“The three of us [Hukill, Anderson and Bonauto] have very wide-ranging tastes in music,” said Bonauto, “and what comes out of us as a three-piece band is, I’d like to believe, unique in a lot of ways.”

What this means in practice for the group is that they will be interspersing their fuzzy power chords with piano and Rhodes organ in a collection of songs that has so far been bouncing happily between the band’s two competing voices.

“When we do our sets,” said Hukill, “we try to make it like, ‘Okay, this is stuff that’s 100 percent… this way,’ and then if we’re going to [play] another set, it’ll be more like ‘These are our songs that are 100 percent the other way.’ … When we’re playing electric, it’ll be loud and aggressive the whole time, and then if we do a piano set, it’ll be completely different.”

Whatever mode of operation The Vonneguts happen to be entertaining at any particular moment, their one consistent factor is always the dog-eared momentum, which continues to fuel their recordings, and their lives in general.

“[Our next record] is really just our experience together,” said Bonauto. “It’s about the three of us.”

It appears that whatever is at play in The Vonneguts’ relationship, it is enough to inspire ample creativity.

The band’s upcoming releases are sure to delight sweaty basement-show denizens across the country, and will continue the proliferation of a band that can’t seem to help but acquire fans like a scruffy punk-rock magnet.

Aside from their recordings, The Vonneguts’ greatest strength may yet prove to be their ability to thrash a basement full of kids into an adoring frenzy. It’s certainly something they’re good at, and for a group this frenetic in their presentation, such lightly constrained chaos seems a logical fit.

The Vonneguts

The Waypost 3120 N.E. Williams Ave.Saturday, March 18 p.m.