From the outside, life in the Pacific Northwest seems an earthy existence, rain soaked and cedar smoked. Salmon spawning and coffee percolating. SuicideGirls and strawberry burns. Laura Palmer’s murder and logging camps. Something the media deemed the ‘alternative revolution’. Imagine all of that is nothing but gibberish on a dry erase board, two passes and it's past tense. Born Evan Railton, Ovian takes the exploratory, instrumental prowess of the Portland, Oregon indie scene, translates it into binary and casts the field of vision within a stereogram. Now relax your eyes and wait for the goose pimples as Ovian’s Arena Rock Recording Company debut And If On Your Journey You Should Encounter God unfolds a nimble nebula of motorik and melody.
A face bathed in a pointillist wash of red LED lights, like mini-beacons for the space-born blips of druids conversing about the weather over a pint of 10W-40, Ovian was created behind a bank of pawn ship consoles and computer monitors. Surprisingly, however, the music’s background is a nautical map to classic rock.
Hailing from a northern Oregon beach town, ‘where white trash meets the sea’, Ovian makes music as aqueous as his origins. Located in a migratory area whose population ebbed and flowed with the summer, Ovian existed in seasonal isolation. The Stones, Buddy Holly, the Kinks, the Smiths, however, were not fair-weather friends, though they did give way to but never fell to the wayside of free jazz and psyche-rock jams.
‘Seeing that you could flout the norm was the thread that ran through my influences,’ says Ovian. ‘I spent countless hours in my room, studying how instrumentation would evolved along a song, how different instruments would engage in call-and-response. These are facets I’ve infused in my own music.’
The weather that drove everyone else from the sea drove Ovian to create. Sequestered at home, Ovian learned, like many Northwesterners, to weave a mood rather than wait for one to be hand-delivered; fighting the weather engrained a work ethic. And If On Your Journey… radiates its own prismatic charm informed by Ovian’s self-taught tendencies, further formal education in percussion and music theory, and stints in bands that culminated in his work with another Arena Rock band…Swords.
Serendipity, and an older brother, introduced Ovian to digital recording and Swords’ Corey Ficken. ‘While I was touring in a pop band my brother bought a sampler, mixer and computer to run Cubase,’ says Ovian. ‘I got home and basically became a recluse to learn how it worked. Then my brother told me he knew this guy looking to start a band and I should talk to him. Corey said he was looking for someone who could do electronics really well, so I lied and told him I could just so I could play with him. The toughest thing was figuring out how to do live things I could fudge then develop in the computer.’
Whether working with Swords or on solo material, Ovian values immediacy – striving to epoxy acoustic resonance to electronic relevance, produce solitary songs that sound like ensembles. Within the inky sonic diaspora of the 10 tracks of And If On Your Journey…exist bulbous buoys afloat in pinprick percussion, the sounds of insects mating with cell phones, and the déjà vu of flipping through audio Polaroid’s, their emulsion smeared into new synaptic jelly. Found sounds, found objects, string quartets and virtual environs all find their way through the blender.
‘Electronics are the melting pot of all instruments, ‘ says Ovian. ‘I use them to tweak unnatural facets from sounds, make anything percussive, etc. There was never a lot of gear around, so I would be forced to figure out how to EQ a guitar to play like a Rhodes, for example; I would get close, but it was always slightly off, which made it more interesting, and that tonal aesthetic stuck with me. Above all, however, I want the music to hold the power of a band.’
Using presence of mind and matter, Ovian layers translucence into a shifting miasma of billowing blips and mellow chirps, creating an immersive origin point for the Journey ahead.