Over the course of two years - Portland, Oregon's GRAILS have released two astonishing records through San Francisco label Neurot Recordings. More astonishing is their relative obscurity to North American record buyers and music aficionados. In support of their most recent October 2004 release, Redlight, GRAILS toured Europe and the UK for five weeks, presenting their earnest Eastern influenced improv-rock to thankful audiences from Berlin to Glasgow.

Stateside, they have made perfect sense supporting bands like Low and label-mates Tarentel. The instrumental songs are built around unique minor key arrangements that include drums, violin, bass, piano, Fender Rhodes, and two electric guitars. GRAILS have taken the tired formula of played out "Post Rock" and offer listeners something much more original. These songs (borne of improvisation) can be dark and ruminating. Others build slowly into wildly ecstatic crescendos or piano grooves. Some do all of this in the course of one track. Many of the songs are formed around the exploratory guitar lines of Alex Hall. Hall's inventive guitar work is at times extremely complex, but often breathtakingly simple.

Alex took time to answer some questions for us, offering insight into GRAILS and their recordings.

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Compared to The Burden of Hope your first full length, Redlight seems to be built on more complex arrangements. The phrases and melodies are more developed and when different musicians enter into the songs it's with much more assuredness. How did this come about? Do you think you had more time to polish and revise things in the studio or have you all become better at improvising/playing with each other?

It's probably inevitable that any group would become more comfortable playing with each other or in the studio over time - just a byproduct (probably hazard, in our case) of experience. It's certainly not the result of having more studio time - we've never had a recording budget. And we work very haphazardly in the studio anyway: production decisions are usually made on the spot, lots of improvising around loose structures, etc. We just throw a ton of stuff down on tape and sort it all out later and just hope
that it hangs OK.

How did the songwriting of Redlight differ from The Burden of Hope?

Redlight represents a much more democratic approach, with all five members being much more active in contributing ideas.

Again you had Jason Powers record the album. In both cases he's been very successful in capturing changes in volume. The quieter passages never drop too far out of the speakers, but when the louder parts hit, they hit harder than almost any record I've heard. In addition to this, the drums are never compressed too much (if they're compressed at all). Is this something that you've been careful to pay attention to or is just what happens in the room at Type Foundry when you guys record an album with Jason?

Excellent question! We've fought with Jason tooth and nail over that stuff. He has that unfortunate engineer's disease where he's constantly trying to compress and limit things and we typically hate that shit. It's of course necessary at times, but generally we try to avoid it. There have been times that Jason has covertly put a heavy limiter on something that we specifically asked him not to and then we go home with the mixes and immediately hear it and then have no choice but to drive by his house and throw rocks. Music like ours relies heavily on the dynamic range; when I listen to it, I wanna feel like the music is punching me in the gut, it should be visceral. So much music these days seems to sit at all times at the top of the dynamic range, like you can just hear the producer in the room with the mastering engineer: "No, louder! It's gotta be fuckin' louder!!" That just seems boring to me. Makes more sense to me to use a greater amount of the (still somewhat limited) range of audio playback afforded to you.

Track two, "The Volunteer" has a haunting saxophone solo by The Stooges' Steve MacKay. How did this collaboration come about?

We played a show in Seattle with Steve and his ensemble about a year ago. The show was booked last minute at this ridiculous heavy metal club. The soundman kept trying to turn on the fog machine while we played - pretty embarrassing. But at least we had guitars - Steve and his band were doing free improvisation with saxophone and homemade instruments. The show was not a huge success. Oh, anyway, so, we met him and he was a super great guy, and when we got the idea to put saxophone on that song I got back in touch with him. He lives in the bay area, so I went down to SF and met him at a studio and he did some tracks. End of story.

Neurot Recordings out of San Francisco has released both of your albums. Do you feel like they understand what GRAILS is about and do your expectations of each other (label and artist) align?

Yeah, I think so. The more I've talked to other musicians about this sort of thing, the luckier I think we are to have the kind of relationship that we have with Neurot. They're super great, honorable people, they genuinely like what we do - it's a fine arrangement. I guess I can't really speak to any expectations they may have of us, though....

GRAILS just toured Europe for five weeks in October and November of 2004. How did the audiences respond to the performances? What differences do you perceive between your American and European audiences?

Overall, the audiences were fantastic, very respectful. People we know used to joke that we would do very well with the sort of intense German chin scratching set, and whaddya know, they were sorta right. Hard to compare with American audiences, though, because I feel that we really haven't played in front of very many.

I read that you participated in a recording session at Southern Studios in London during your tour. What is the status of these recordings?

We're finishing up the mixes right now; supposed to come out in March or April, something like that. Although it looks like it'll be available mostly overseas. We're really excited about that stuff; it's too bad that not many folks will actually hear it.

Do you think that GRAILS has blossomed out of any certain improvisation/underground scene in Portland or the West Coast or do you feel apart from a community of likeminded bands?

We've always been apart from any group of likeminded bands. For a long time, we really had no idea who we were playing for. Shows were regularly disasters. Nowadays, we have some lovely friends that we enjoy playing occasional local shows with, but none of them are similar stylistically to us. It's been mentioned in the past that Jeez (Timothy) used to play with Jackie-O Motherfucker, but we've never had any other connection with them at all.

Will GRAILS tour in the US or Europe in 2005?

Europe - yes. We're going back to Europe in the fall of this year, probably for another 4 or 5 weeks. This is a really good thing. US - not sure. We'd like very much to get out to the east coast for a bit but haven't yet figured out a realistic way to do it. We'll probably do a west coast one-weeker later in the spring or early summer 2005.

What have you learned from the recording of Redlight that will affect the way you will record in the future?

Hard to say right now. We probably won't know until we get back into the studio.

Lastly are there musicians or bands that you hope to someday collaborate with or perform with?

Every member of the band would have a different answer for this, but for me...Lately I've been listening a lot to an amazing Hungarian violinist named Felix Lajko. I find myself fantasizing about the nasty tracks that he could lay down. I guess I'd like to tour with the ol' Polyphonic Spree just so we could pick fights with them and talk shit on the mic.



GRAILS records are available at fine independent record stores across the U.S.
and online at neurotrecordings.com