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Rafter
Animal Feelings
(Asthmatic Kitty)
Rafter Roberts stands no taller than your average
human male, yet his fiery red-haired head is filled with the
minutiae of music, swirling and churning constantly. Fortunately
this leaves little room for fear, of which Rafter has nearly
none. His fearlessness has led him to do just about everything
he sets his mind to, which of course includes free-for-all
rowdy sweatiness, hanky panky, and rolling on the stage, yelping.
(Not to mention playing in bands since the age of two, new
fatherhood and marriage, running a business, goin' to shows,
building a new studio, makin' his own music, recording bands
and eating raw… all without going furiously nuts.) His
is a strong will tempered by humor. One of the most intense
and powerful music nerds you may ever meet, there is a refreshing
lack of poseur hipness to Rafter Roberts. In its stead is
a pure enthusiasm for people, for doing it yourself, and the
helping hand, for kicking against the pricks and kicking out
the jams.
Rafter grew up in the woody climes of Sebastopol,
California, where his parents raised him in a decidedly nontraditional
setting. "My parents named me Rafter," he told LAS
magazine. "I don't know if I want to call them 'hippies'
but they were definitely counterculture and outside the norm.
When my mom was pregnant with me one of the people they lived
with in this semi-commune made a joke that they should name
the baby Rafter because he was conceived in a loft. And it
just sorta stuck."
Rafter encountered early critical success in
high school with a band called Faucet, the most popular (and
only) punk band in town, boasting audiences of three or four
hundred strong. Despite this raging small-town success, Rafter
flew the coop after graduation and landed in a communist apartment
in New York City, banging out 4-track creations while the
uninspired tunes of a half-assed commie-party band wafted
in the background. The siren-song of his beloved homecoast
eventually brought him back west, but he stuck with the big
city atmosphere and moved to San Francisco. It was there that
Rafter figured out the beneficial equation of hosting house
shows and recording his friends' bands, many of whom were
coming up the coast from San Diego.
These paths of action and interaction finally
brought Rafter down to San Diego, where he landed a day-gig
with his friend Glen Galloway (Soul Junk, Trumans Water) making
music for commercials and, meanwhile, recording every lovely
musical soul in town in his souped-up garage studio. Eventually
Rafter and Glen started their own company, Singing Serpent,
and built a world-class studio, trading construction help
from local musicians for future recording time. Once the studio
was up and running, the income from commercial work put Rafter
in the ideal position to help out his brothers and sisters
in need, workin' on the cheap to record/engineer/master music
he believed in; the list of which is vast and humbling, running
the gamut from the Fiery Furnaces and Black Heart Procession
to Sufjan Stevens and the Hot Snakes. If you want a full list
you're going to be here all day, but try a few of these on
for size: Castanets, Gogogo Airheart, Rocket From The Crypt,
Liz Janes, Arab on Radar, The Rapture, The Album Leaf, Bedroom
Walls, Kill Me Tomorrow, Tristeza, The Peppermints, Rogue
Wave, Tarantula Hawk, Maquiladora, Aspects of Physics, Upsilon
Acrux, Howard Hello... the list, as you might imagine, goes
on and on.
His own musical exploits have been (and continue
to be) many and varied. It was all the way back in New York
that Rafter realized what direction he needed to head in:
He turned from the antagonism and nihilism of noisy punk to
the populism and catchy congruence of pop, meanwhile smuggling
in all the frantic noise and feedback squall to mash with
that pop syrup. And he’s been at it ever since, first
bringing his hybrid ideas to San Diego stages with fellow
KCR DJs/music-freaks The Free*Stars and later as one half
of the sing-song punk-pop of Bunky with local lady Emily Joyce.
The music released under Rafter's name is a
kaleidoscopic fountain of color and beats and joy. It's smart,
beautifully-produced pop and R&B jams as seen through
the lens of a man with a deep well of experimental and noise
chops. After a series of limited-run, self-funded cassettes,
Asthmatic Kitty released an early collection of Rafter jams,
10 Songs (2006), followed by the noise-inflected LPs Music
for Total Chickens (2007) and Sex Death Cassette
(2008) and the crunked-up Prince-ly party pop of Sweaty Magic
EP (2008).
Following the pop-leaning lead of Sweaty Magic,
Rafter's latest LP, Animal Feelings, is a Technicolor
pop blow-out that recalls Nintendo composer Koji Kondo leading
a fantasy super-jam with Cody Chesnutt, Justin Timberlake,
and the Tom Tom Club. Rafter's history and influences, his
dreams and ambition, and his love for love, all come together
as a sweet, fun, speaker-blowin', beat-busting ride into the
inner-core of pop and R&B music. Ask him to drop names
for his latest work and he'll say R. Kelly and Sublime Frequencies'
Radio Phnom Penh without batting an eye. He'll tell you Animal
Feelings is "a marriage record, a lust record, a death
and sex record" and he'll tell you to read KLF's notorious
manual on writing a #1 single. The album is an idea-packed
picnic of philosophies and fears, of affirmations and questions.
Like all of his work, Animal Feelings is a very personal piece
of music and Rafter has a lot to tell you. Whether you choose
to listen or not is the difference between you getting down
on the dancefloor or simply standing outside the club, listening
to the beats, muffled and gutless through the walls.
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