Pitchfork Music Festival 2010: Neon Indian Mastermind Alan Palomo Records With Ableton, Analog Synth

When you're composing and recording, do you consider the metaphoric implications of using true analog synths vs. virtual synths? Alan Palmomo does. As the frontman and creative force behind Neon Indian, Alan has thought a lot about those sorts of things, as well as production aspects more mundane, and his particular synthesis POV is readily apparent in his recorded work with the Neon Indian project—trippy synth-based psychedelic pop that sounds like it was mastered on a cassette tape*.

In addition to sharing his production philosophies, Alan talks about the efforts that go into translating his recorded songs to live performance, and relates some air travel horror stories.

*I asked Alan off-camera if his Neon Indian releases were, in fact, masted on a cassette. They weren't; Alan told me that he achieved this effect by employing a multi-band distortion plug in the Live master bus; by only effecting the extreme ends of the audio spectrum he was able to mimic lo-fi analog tape saturation (and pretty convincingly, I might add).

Category:

Music

Tags:

• music
• analog synthesis
• neon indian interview
• alan palomo interview
• neon indian
• dave smith
• moogerfooger
• ableton live
• soft synths

[mgmtisyeah]

It's cool how the interviewer actually knows everything that Alan is talking about and is really interested in his music.

[didibjj]

this is a damn good interview.

[coolcat1216]

he kinda looks like Josh from Drake and Josh sometimes

[DarmonProductions]

lmao

[chinesechongo]

WOW. An interview that isn't full of the same generic questions. AND the interviewer knows what he's talking about! This is a rare find in the music world! I love ALAN :)

[derekkozinski]

@mgmtisyeah right?? soo rare

[CannibalZombieKiller]

First :)