Trans
Am
Sex
Change (Thrill Jockey Records)
Trans Am
After Trans Am’s last album, Liberation –
a bleak portrayal of life in a security obsessed imperial
capital, the band exploded and abandoned Washington, D.C.
for three different continents. The following period of programmed
isolation found Nathan Means in Auckland, Phil Manley in San
Francisco and Sebastian Thomson splitting time between London
and New York. Internal contact was
primarily electronic but for a handful of live shows.
With two years’ separation fueling them, the band began
in June 2006 on a program of sporadic rendezvous, reconvening
briefly on several continents to work on what would become
the most joyous and upbeat rock album of Trans Am’s
chronicle.
Down Under
In June of 2006, Trans Am reunited at MAINZ, a recording school
in Auckland, New Zealand, with a few songs and almost no musical
equipment. Recording moved forward with a wide range of borrowed
instruments, keyboards and other gear, including a 1960’s
Mellotron and remarkable vintage amps loaned by iconic New
Zealand musician Chris Knox (Tall Dwarfs).
The MAINZ session, recorded by a professor and a student who
received credit towards graduation, was threatened when photos
of the band drinking beer in
the on-campus studio were discovered by the administration.
Future drinking occurred off campus.
The Other Hemisphere
Two months later, recording continued in Brooklyn, New York
at the Okropolis: headquarters of New York band Oneida. Determined
to make a break with the past, Trans Am again arrived with
almost none of their signature gear - none of the vocoders,
keyboards, drums, drum machines and amps that they used on
previous albums.
Two weeks later the album was mixed at Tiny Telephone Studios
in San Francisco. Compared with previous records such as TA
and Liberation, which
took months to complete, Sex Change was conceived,
written, recorded and mixed in only three weeks.
Obscene Strategies
Although Sex Change marks a break from their past,
Trans Am have always embraced unnatural and perverse recording
techniques and concepts. In such a crush of time, Trans Am
had to rely on traditional time and possibility expanding
substances: coffee, yerba mate, et cetera, as well as a codified
series of recording
techniques called “Obscene Strategies”.
Brian Eno is well known for his “Oblique Strategies”
in which studio engineers - faced with an apparent roadblock
- draw a card from a deck. The card might
suggest, “Take something perfect and make it more human”,
with the intention of animating the track through an infusion
of randomness. Over many years, Trans Am developed their own
Obscene Strategies to provide a less humanist and more time-sensitive
set of guidelines for loosening creative blockages. Sample
suggestions include:
#11 Take a nap
#16 Make it sound like Jackson Browne
#18 Rip off black musicians
#19 Invite all your friends over
#20 Check your email
#23 Leave the studio unlocked overnight
#31 Hose down the control room
#43 Pillow fight!
Liberation
Perhaps the band’s geographical liberation was the inspiration
for the creation of Sex Change, Trans Am’s
most international and exhilarating album to date. Whatever
the reason may be, Sex Change is a welcome and forceful
return by a band that has been a consistent innovator and
touring machine for over a decade.
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