Everybody's News
15 minutes with...Hovercraft
by John Stoehrs

Unlike most music from the Northwest, Hovercraft create music--definable music. "Music: The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition." To this we add emotive response: "What the fuck is this" may be on, "I love this" another. Others have said that music is simply sound and silence, but whatever the parsing of semantics, Hovercraft have created something of significance and complication.

Hovercraft's music is unstructured, chaotic, and, in a way, strangely soothing. There is an undeniable frenzy of sound and turmoil, from ambiguous bass lines to driving, primitive drum sequences and washing, indiscernable guitar cascading over the entire band. Despite this, it is oddly relaxing.

"It's like the freezing of time. At the point of sensory overload you experience peace, like being cut off from oxygen or the terminal point before death. The overall structure is not critical," said Campbell 2000. "What matters most are the textures of sound bouncing off one another to create a structure by itself. It happens in an almost obtuse way, they just fall into place."

The concept stems back almost 150 years. The impressionists of France experimented with texture and color to create an "atmosphere." They utilized harmony in its conventional sense, but built additional harmonies on top, resulting in "tall" chords: 11th, 13th, 15th chords that expanded the color of the music, erasing the need for resolution. These layers of sound and texture belied resolution by way of not creating any tension to be resolved. They were seeking a new language of expression radically different than the vernacular of the time.

Campbell 2000 is articulate and focused on his goals, aware of his influences and predecessors. Together with bassist Sadie 7 and new drummer Dash 11, the members are accustomed to each other's venues of communication and are as precisely in tune with each other as a swarm of bees or a flock of geese. Their music demands such intimacy and closeness--equal parts of a whole.

"We feed off each other on stage: there's really no conductor of a set," said the husky voiced Sadie 7. "We just know how to communicate after playing together for so long."

"We don't communicate visually; we just know how to give acoustical cues," concurred Campbell 2000. This band will never be accepted by the masses and consumed like the Spice Girls. Their pieces run well past the four-minute maximum for convenient airplay and dare to continue on to lengths of nine to 15 minutes. "Songs," by the way, are not present. A "song" uses the voice has a principle role and carries a text of some kind; hence, the new album Experiment Below (Mute/Blast First) is songless. The band, however, has an inexhaustible work ethic, savoring the solitude of the studio to create thoughtful, imaginative works, and touring across the nation. This is where their popularity will lie, in the niche designed by bands who believed performing to live audiences was the truer venue as opposed to record sales and media relations.

References have been drawn between Hovercraft and space imagery. Their last album, Akathisia, was described as "a space-rock expedition of the highest order" and "intense psychedelic rock that unceremoniously boots us right out the shuttle door." Although these are clever, colorful bylines, Hovercraft seem to have a more introspective center.

"I'm definitely not a scientist, more like [Jackson] Pollack," said Campbell 2000. "I'm more fascinated with observing the psyche, mirroring the mind, and seeing what comes out." A constant inquiry of the band is why the absence of lyrics and meaning. Countless fans have propagated theories as to the meaning of a piece. Without the issuance of text, many fans have opted to invent their own, from depicting the inward raving of a homicidal sociopath to sex fantasies to angelic romping in heaven. No interpretation is wrong, but none of them is quite right. This is music too universal for our limited language.

"Lyrics would interfere with what we are trying to accomplish," said Campbell 2000, but he is not obstinately opposed to vocals, which may be used in the future. "We just haven't gotten around to it yet." In the meantime, he says, "the guitar fills the void where there would be a voice. I try to fill the gaps with texture and sound."

Campbell 2000 and Sadie 7 have been together for four years while Dash 11 joined the lineup only recently. But this band, with its integrity and motivation to explore hidden dimensions of the mind and transfer them through sonority, will endure for years to come. When asked to place themselves in musical history, Campbell 2000 responded, "I don't think I really want to touch that."

"That's not for us to decide," added Sadie 7. "We just do what comes naturally." A modest reply from a group that puts the music above themselves. They are not analysts or the historians. They are the doers and ones who do it well.