Artist: Trans Am
Genre(s):
Instrumental
Discography:
Sex Change
Year: 2007
Tracks: 11
Trans Am are loosely associated with the mid-'90s post-rock scenery centered around Tortoise, Ui, Labradford, Windy & Carl, etc., and the Thrill Jockey, Kranky, UHF, and Southern labels, among others. Although a huge distance separates Trans Am's albums, all of them are implicated with an extreme, somewhat humorous reorientation of the clichés and conventions of rock music, primarily through either technical (magnified displays of skill) or instrumental (electronics, personal effects) deviation.
Formed in Washington, D.C., in 1990, the group didn't begin gravely recording until 1995, after its members (Phil Manley, Nathan Means, and Sebastian Thomson) finished college. Their self-titled debut, on the Chicago-based Thrill Jockey mark, was recorded after precisely a few rehearsals back together, and contained subservient, largely improvised versions of simple rock-oriented figures based loosely (and, once more, quite humorously) on '70s and '80s pop and progressive bands such as Boston, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and Yes. Produced by Tortoise's John McEntire at Chicago's Idful Studios, the album was instantaneously (if middling ironically) lauded as an example of "post-rock" (an association that as much proves the meaningless of the "genre" as Trans Am's possess telling to it), in turn leading to a short alive tour of duty as Tortoise's opening act.
The group returned in the fall of 1996 with a self-titled EP of slightly retro electro-funk experiments (released by Happy Go Lucky) that brought to the fore an fondness for electronics antecedently reserved either for between-time studio distraction or the abbreviated interludes separating the meatier segments of their debut. With 1997's Surrender to the Night, even so, Trans Am expanded that approach to record album length, with accidental tributes to Kraftwerk, Hashim, Can, and New Order ascendant and entirely a few recognizably "rock" songs included. Also signal a variety in focus was the expanded role electronics would act as in their live performances; where earlier incarnations of the radical included noodly Casio interludes that ne'er grew beyond sideshow, Yielding's more electronics-heavy real meant more than of the point space was minded over to analogue machines, gun trigger devices, and MIDI-wired beatboxes.
Trans Am's inclusion on the Mille Plateaux label's double-CD digest In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (alongside Cristian Vogel, Beequeen, Mike Ink, and Atom Heart, as easily as labelmates Rome and Oval) also helped inaugurate the striation to audiences in European, where the grouping has establish similar popularity as such electronic/acoustic hybrids as Flying Saucer Attack and Stereolab. A fourth album, Futureworld, followed in 1999, and a year later the radical returned with its virtually expansive album even so, The Red Line, recorded in the band's own National Recording Studio. In 2002, a cool-handed Trans Am released T.A. -- some other foray into late-'80s/early-'90s electro-rock. The ironic, political Sacking followed in early 2004; after the album's release, the members of Trans Am scattered across the globe on a planned hiatus for deuce years. Means over up in Auckland, New Zealand, and the banding convened there to commence roger Sessions for their next album at MAINZ, a local recording schooling. After complemental the album at Brooklyn's Okropolis studio, the results, Sex Change, were released in early 2007.
