Neptune: Inside the Construct

By C.D. Di Guardia

Photos by JB Galusha

Walking along the sidewalk on a quiet Jamaica Plain street, Dan Boucher of Neptune gestures at the side of a plain white van. “This is ours, in case you couldn’t tell,” he states. He considers the white side of what could be anyone’s van and stops himself. “Oh, come around this way,” he says. He walks around to the driver’s side of the vehicle — the entire length of which is painted up in a colorful mermaid mural. Now it makes sense. “It’s hard to miss us,” he says, and he’s right.

Neptune is an extraordinarily difficult band to miss. They have existed since 1994 — a veritable eternity in the local music scene. Boucher and Mark Pearson are the “new” guys; they have only been in the band since the turn of the century. Master sculptor and band founder Jason Sanford has been in the band the longest — he started Neptune back in the mid-’90s. “I’m the last remaining original member,” says Sanford. “First and last,” corrects Pearson.

Sanford can easily recall the initial idea behind Neptune: “The band started with the idea of manufacturing instruments from scratch and using the unusual sounds that they produce,” he matter-of-facts. Sanford personally creates almost every instrument that the band uses. A skilled metalworker, he uses items in unconventional ways to suit his needs — the end of an oil drum becomes the body of a guitar. Saw blades are attached to a pick-up, creating a sharp-harp that produces a buzzy chime.

The trio now sits around a small, flooded fire pit, over which a thin layer of ice still sits. “We’re trying real hard to become hippies,” smiles Boucher. The stumps are a little wet from a morning rain, but Sanford’s on top of it, appearing from behind a shed with improvised seat cushions of plywood blocks. Boucher and Pearson are accustomed to their cohort’s ingenuity; they don’t even seem surprised.

This is their “backyard” of sorts — their practice space lies between the yard and the street, housed in a short row of converted garages. Inside, it looks like the laboratory of a mad scientist. Several of Sanford’s metal-bodied guitars hang on the walls and various footswitches rest on the floor, creating a snake’s pit of cables. Just inside the door, a humungous contraption sprouting all kind of cables topped off with a multitude of animal skulls sits dormant. “That is not ours,” says Sanford — they share the rehearsal space not with another band, but another materials artist.

Most of the instruments appear extremely dangerous, and Boucher’s arms and hands are a roadmap of battle scars from run-ins with various instruments. “Jason does the sculpting, Mark does a lot of the electronics, and I mostly break stuff and hurt myself,” he states. He points at one of his more dangerous instruments, an arc with various saw blades hanging from points in the frame. “I do not miss that thing,” he says, almost shuddering.

The instruments are nothing short of amazing; most of the acoustic ones were fashioned by Sanford, with the majority of the electronic ones coming from Pearson’s workbench. One is a box with eight light switches and a knob. This is Neptune’s idea of a synthesizer; the switches each control — through an impossible network of oscillators and capacitors — a saw wave, which can then be further perverted through the knob. Other creations include the Tupperphone, which produces excessive amounts of feedback in the live situation, and the pseudo-legendary Electric Slinky, which the group says is simply too delicate to even think about bringing onstage.

The set-pieces of Neptune’s arsenal are the baritone guitars, the chief of which is the oil drum guitar, weighing around 40 pounds and with a headstock shaped like the business end of the Grim Reaper’s scythe. The neck of the guitar is the appropriate length, except it is fashioned out of metal rods. This guitar actually has a fret board, even if the frets are metal nails welded onto the rods. Somehow this thing plugs into an amplifier (the amplifiers are the only things easily identified as store-bought) and is both easy and difficult to play. The strings aren’t tuned as expected — the fourth string is actually a few tones lower than the third.

Pearson watches people pick up this stringed monstrosity with a smile, and often refuses to take it back — “No, try it out,” he insists. The instruments are part of the atmosphere in this weird world that Neptune have created for themselves. “What we’re doing makes no sense,” shrugs Pearson, who pauses to chuckle with his partners before finishing “...in traditional Western music writing.” Pearson and company aren’t doing this just to fly in the face of tradition, however; it’s not just iconoclasty for iconoclasticism’s sake. Neptune aren’t trying to turn the world on its ear; they’re simply following their own artistic and musical desires.

“It makes no sense, but it all feels right to me. I feel like our mess is somehow the right thing,” he concludes.

The group has played host to a large cast of characters, in both the band line-up and supporting artists like Jessica Ryland and Kevin Micka of Animal Hospital. “I think of [each record] as a collaboration with other artists,” says Sanford, who has seen the entire ensemble through.

It seems that the band has begun developing a further identity as of late — a direction that they accredit to the solid three-man line-up that has lasted through recent years. While Sanford created the band on a welded-together foundation of scrap metal and found objects, Pearson has brought an electronic know-how into the mix, and while Boucher is by far the most self-effacing member of the group, his spirit adds a zest to the group’s dynamic, whether sparking conversation or pounding the home-made drums.

“We have started to release this ephemeral stuff,” says Pearson, who relishes the new path in Neptune’s orbit. “It’s kind of our blueprints — sometimes straight-up improvisations from our practice space,” he says. The three artists operate on the same channel — they are able to bust right into an in-progress composition with a minimum of adjusting and remembering. While their instruments aren’t “played” with much regard for “normal” melodic music, they find no difficulty in developing and recalling their specific parts, even without a melodic framework.

“One time we were recording a song,” remembers Boucher, “Mark was like ‘I dare anyone to find a single note in that song!’” Pearson simply shrugs. “Yeah, I’m pretty immune to dissonance now.”

Neptune’s dissonance isn’t simple musical carelessness, however; it is most definitely a different sort of science that the band has nurtured to the point of an identity. “Musically, it has become a little more experimental. Instead of the traditional kind of rock sound, we have developed our own voice,” explains Pearson. He’s not quick to affix any form of classical “structure” to the band’s work, but he sees a correlation. “At one point, the band sounded like a rock band with a little something wrong — all the traditional sounds with just something a little askew,” he says, twisting his hands about to reflect the canted angle of Neptune’s form of rock music. His hands open up in an all-encompassing gesture: “At this point, we kind of celebrate that.”

Neptune’s approach to music — all this improvisation and discovery and free-form tone — makes the band sound somewhat psychedelic in nature, but there’s a difference. Whereas most psychedelic music comes based on the Acid-Test idea that these sensations are going to twist the “average” brain into something different, Neptune’s music already comes from someplace different where familiar objects are used in unfamiliar ways. The group isn’t just a bunch of rhythmic artists banging on found objects; there’s an intention behind the sound. It’s a celebration, but still an art — whether it be post-psychedelia, scrap metal, or the self-prescribed “math rock with the problems done wrong.”

“We’re at this point where we just play; we all freely do whatever the moment provides us,” says Pearson. “The idea of playing ‘in tune’ or following any kind of scale or anything is completely out the window. We just play and it all sounds in tune to me,” he says, getting more and more excited at the prospect. He is unsure whether this has expanded his musical palette or diminished it, but he seems pleased with the result.

“I feel like when the three of us are together I can play anything and it will work,” says Pearson. “I’m glad about what it has done for me as a musician in that sense.”

“At the same time,” says Sanford from across the circle, “there’s a consensual aesthetic opinion constantly being formed. We know when something isn’t fitting or sounds wrong.”

The pensive Sanford shapes up a little piece of wood in his hands before sending it skittering across the short ice surface before him. His words come out as carefully crafted as the musical creations in the shed. He quietly sees the pattern; he understands the science — he has created this with his bare hands and welding torches, coupled with a tendency for juxtaposition — forming and discovering tiny relationships and correlations in the world and channeling them into melodic content.

“There’s a parallel between the practice of instrument building and using found objects,” posits Sanford, who sees yet another parallel between this and the band’s approach to songwriting. “We’re not overly concerned about realizing a pre-conceived idea of what our music should sound like. We discover sounds as we’re experimenting in the rehearsal studio and from the sounds we’ve discovered construct a song.”

The members of Neptune have so far constructed everything necessary — from the songs to the actual instruments used to play the songs. Even more impressive, they have constructed perhaps the most difficult thing of all to find — not just an original sound, but a wholly original artistic voice that comes through every aspect of the band’s existence. From their dangerous-looking instruments to their home-screened disc artwork, Neptune takes the idea of “Do It Yourself” to “Do Everything Yourself,” and thus far they have succeeded.

www.neptuneband.com