Fol Chen remembers new wave radio

By Beverly Bryan
Published: February 3rd, 2009 | 4:00am

In the fall of 2006, Samuel Bing, the future leader of enigmatic epic-pop quintet Fol Chen, visited his native Long Island where he was dismayed to find 92.7 WLIR, an early champion of new wave, had gone off the air. This was really more serious than it sounds.

Bing went home to the Highland Park area of Los Angeles to absorb himself in a nine-month songwriting project, eventually taking up full-time residence in his friend Rafter Roberts’ San Diego recording studio. “At first some of the songs were kind of Brit-pop, and some of the songs were kind of house, and some would be just straight-up acoustic pop — it was just all over the map. I kept working until I found something that sounded new to me,” Bing says. Eventually he found a mercurial mix of eccentric pop music and auto-tuned R&B now embodied in Fol Chen’s debut album Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made (Asthmatic Kitty).

As Bing wrote, he remained haunted by nostalgia for his lost WLIR. “Subconsciously, I was just crushed. I started having weird dreams that involved the station and why it went under,” he says. In these dreams, WLIR had a nemesis named John Shade. “Because of him — the way I rationalized it — WLIR didn’t actually stop, they just had to go underground,” he says.

He wrote the ominous “Red Skies Over Garden City,” which begins with a clip from a 1982 WLIR broadcast. After writing the song, Bing's dreams of the station merged with Fol Chen’s nascent identity. The lyrics on John Shade are only a little less cryptic once you know that they’re about fighting evil in the name of a martyred radio station and a DJ named Donna Donna — a fictional character based on a real WLIR DJ named Donna Donna — who guides the band through coded messages. The album itself is somewhat coded but the light, danceable “Cable TV” is an exception. “It’s based on true stories of hanging out in crappy motels in the desert,” says Bing.

More than 21 friends contributed sounds, vocals and production assistance to the album and lot of the beats and other elements on John Shade are processed sounds, such as snapping rubber bands. The main challenge for vocalist and musical collaborator Melissa Thorne, trumpet and bass player Alex Myrvold, keyboardist Jeph Valenzuela, and drummer Garrett Henritz, is to reproduce it all live. One solution has Henritz triggering a sample every time he hits the kick drum or snare.

Live appearances are consistently idiosyncratic with Fol Chen. For a recent event organized by a multi-disciplinary art center called Machine Project at the Los Angeles County Museum, Bing composed a piece using sounds assigned to colors in a textile pattern by Austrian design collective Weiner Werkstatte. Thorne painted a scale replica of the material and cut it up to make artwork for a CD distributed at the event. At one Machine Project show the band shared a bill with a lecture on sea slugs, writing a song for the occasion. “We’re very interested in things that go back and forth from art to pop music, and from being traditional venues to less traditional space, or being paired up with things that you might not expect,” Thorne says.

She says they plan to treat their February 7 record-release show at Los Angeles music and art venue Pehrspace like an art installation. “It’s interesting to have a little more control over creating an experience for the audience,” she adds.

But attendees should prepare to experience controlled chaos. “It’s important to all of us to have kind of an anarchic live show,” says Bing, blithely introducing another perplexing, contradictory facet of Fol Chen.

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