At Dusk Thursday, July 2
Pulling a stylistic fast one before bidding farewell.
[EXPERIMENTAL POP] Though landing a berth on PDX Pop Now!’s annual compilation CD is an auspicious occasion for any Portland musician, the members of At Dusk had extra cause for celebration when they found out they were to be included on this year’s LP: At Dusk’s members—Cary Clarke, Greg Borenstein and Will Hattman—were instrumental in founding the popular annual festival for which the disc is named.
Thursday will mark the group’s final performance, and the trio could not have asked for a better send-off from the scene it helped build. “When we came to town [in 2002], I feel like it was hard to find a community,” says Borenstein. “So PDX Pop was how we met a lot of people in bands, how we kind of got to be part of the community.”
Since forming during middle school in its native Los Angeles, At Dusk has been largely inseparable, eventually gravitating toward Portland to continue making its compositionally ambitious pop punk.
“It’s obviously emotionally complicated to have the band coming to an end. It’s been the central part of my life for the past seven years,” Clark says. “My whole Portland adventure has been predicated on this band.”
At Dusk’s Portland tenure yielded three progressively tighter albums, but the true culmination of its talents has been stewing for
2 1/2 years in the form of Small Light, the group’s final disc. After deciding to disband last August to pursue other interests, At Dusk has gone the surprising route of throwing its stylistic considerations to the wind and reimagining itself as a folk band.
“I think we all felt like we’d fulfilled the trajectory that our original sound could follow,” Clarke says. “This new style is more of a natural fit, I think.”
Indeed, Small Light is At Dusk’s most cohesive work to date. The record chooses obscured, overdriven guitars over dense vocal harmonies and ambient percussion (“Jacaranda”), and the band’s inflated composition is replaced by singalong hooks (“For A Reason”).
The musical about-face may seem sudden, but it’s fitting with At Dusk’s try-anything ethos. And though the trio bids farewell this week, it does so at the center of a thriving community to which it can happily claim to have been essential.
SEE IT: At Dusk releases Small Light on Thursday, July 2, at the Artistery with Team Evil and Alan Singley. 7:30 pm. $6. All ages.
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Jack Johnson
says:Wow, big surprise the guy that puts on the festival has his song on the compilation. I wonder how that happened? It’s not like there aren’t a lot of other hard working, deserving bands out there. Talk about a conflict of interest. Has anyone even heard of them?
Posted @ July 1st, 2009 at 5:54 pm (July 1st, 2009) | Flag this Comment | permalinkCasey Jarman
says:actually, this isn’t really a fair knock. there was a line in the original copy (which i had to cut down for space) about how stringent pdx-pop’s listening committee is with its comps. they have a listening committee preview tracks blind, without knowing the names of the band they’re listening to. and honestly it would have been tough to peg these tracks as at dusk even knowing those guys. i don’t want cary to have to come here and defend himself, because he has a long track record of sacrificing self-interest for the portland music community. having one track out of 40 on a compilation (and a very good track at that) doesn’t change things at all.
not to mention the fact that there never would have been a pdx-pop without cary and company at the helm…
Posted @ July 1st, 2009 at 6:05 pm (July 1st, 2009) | Flag this Comment | permalinkCary Clarke
says:Hi Jack-
This is Cary Clarke from At Dusk – and, yes, PDX Pop Now! – writing. I can certainly understand your incredulity with respect to At Dusk being on the PDX Pop Now! 2009 compilation given that Shane, the author, did not have space to go into the details of how PDX Pop Now! curates the album. However, let me address that for a moment, since I do have the space.
There is a very rigorous system for curating the PDX Pop Now! compilation every year that takes conflicts of interest firmly into account. Every year PDX Pop Now! received a large pool of submissions from local bands (about 620 this year). These submissions are stripped of their id3 information and split into groups of about 80 tracks. A large group of volunteers are then split into groups of 5-7 people each, with each group being assigned one of the groups of tracks which, again, have all been anonymized. All volunteers are required to state any conflicts of interest they have – their bands, best friends’ bands, business interests’ bands etc. – and about which they could not evaluate in the same way they could other tracks. The tracks are broken up into groups in such a way that volunteers do not receive any tracks to evaluate by artists that are conflicts of interest for them. Each volunteer votes Y or N on each anonymous track, and the PPN! Compilation Coordinator tallies the percentage of Y votes in each volunteer pool.
The 100-150 tracks that receive the highest percentage of yes votes in their volunteer pool are then listened to – again anonymously with conflicts of interest declared – by the PDX Pop Now! Board of Directors. Needless to say, neither Greg nor I was allowed to vote for our own track, nor were any other board members who recognized it as belonging to us. The 30 or so most vote-getting tracks from this board round make it onto the comp along with 10-ish tracks solicited from big-name artists (e.g. The Thermals, M Ward), after a curatorial discussion amongst the board to guarantee stylistic diversity.
And that’s more or less how it works. As you can see, whether or not anyone has ever heard of a band is irrelevant for compilation curation, with the exception of the handful of marquis names, to which At Dusk clearly does not belong. Greg Borenstein and I have been involved with PDX Pop Now! since day 1 and have been rigorous about never using the organization as a promotional tool for our own creative projects. At Dusk has submitted to the PDX Pop Now! compilation ever year, and made it on only once – this final and sixth time. If you include solo projects and such things, member of At Dusk have submitted to the PPN! compilations twelve times and, again, none of these tracks has gotten on to the compilation until “For A Reason” this year. We had long ago become used to At Dusk not making it onto the compilation and had more or less expected a similar result this year out of habit. Moreover, the track on the compilation – “For A Reason” – has never been performed live, and literally no one listening to submissions on any level had ever heard it. We were very pleasantly surprised to be included. If the means to that inclusion had been irregular or unfair in any way, we would have withdrawn our track, for the integrity of PDX Pop Now! and for our own as individuals. We have invested far too much time, energy and passion into both At Dusk and PDX Pop Now! to tolerate otherwise from ourselves. On a similar note, I have served as the Booking Coordinator for PDX Pop Now! this year and would not have allowed At Dusk to perform at a PDX Pop Now! event as there is not a similar anonymizing mechanism that could neutralize my involvement in that process.
Speaking for myself, I have been very fastidious about keeping sharp boundaries between my various roles in the local music community – musician, organizer, journalist – and I would wager that anyone who knows me or has worked with me would validate that assertion. You would be surprised by the number of people I know in Portland who have not only never seen or listened to my band, but who don’t even know that I have one. I am much more comfortable promoting other people’s music than my own.
Again, I can see how people might have questions about At Dusk having a track on the PDX Pop Now! compilation and, at the risk of seeming to protest too much, I did want to go on record to explain how the compilation curation process is designed to take conflicts of interest and such into account. I hope that helps put any suspicions to rest.
P.S. As a minor correction, Will Hattman has never been involved with PDX Pop Now! Only Cary Clarke and Greg Borenstein have, as co-founders and organizers through this year.
Posted @ July 1st, 2009 at 6:32 pm (July 1st, 2009) | Flag this Comment | permalinkPR Walters
says:Sorry your band didn’t make it, Jack
Posted @ July 2nd, 2009 at 7:48 am (July 1st, 2009) | Flag this Comment | permalink