Let the truth sear 'um
Santa Cruz's Residual Echoes come through with rock revelations.

By Keith Axline

HAVING INEXPLICABLY PUKED in the van only minutes before show time, bassist Dave Novick took the stage at the Hemlock Tavern a couple months ago with his usual aplomb. Accustomed to house shows in Santa Cruz where the line between performer and audience is traditionally – and drunkenly – broken, the members of Residual Echoes have a focus that puts distractions and ailments such as chronic nausea aside for the sake of the music. Or maybe they're just as mesmerized as the audience, experiencing the same feverish ecstasy through waves of distortion and wah.

Echoes are some of the most promising and aggressive colonials in a largely undiscovered frontier of rock music that exploits the intersection of sound, creation, and physiology – the bombardment of noise on your senses and the feeling that you're participating in the birth of the music as it's happening get you high.

That's not to say it's all just a cheap fix – part of the high lies in the context in which the Echoes play. The band emerged from a vacuum of belief in Santa Cruz – itself a bubble isolated from the rest of the world. In a music scene partially made up of privileged kids too aware of the world's oppressions and too insecure to risk anything but a slumming nihilism, Residual Echoes and its members' other bands, like Amcis and the Menses, gave them something pure to believe in by transcending ambivalence and cynicism.

I've seen the members of Residual Echoes – mastermind Adam Payne, Novick, and guitarist Jerry Encoe – play in various bands, together and separately, probably a dozen times and always at a co-op or house party crammed into a living room with too many thrill-starved mod-punk kids drinking 40s and High Life 32s. Heavy rock riffs that built to frantic spires of entropy were the soundtrack to confused dance-wrestling before the cops showed up and shut those shows down. This was the Santa Cruz rock scene as I knew it, and what many kids spent all week anticipating when the weekend came around. Payne, Encoe, and Novick stood out individually in the scene with their abilities to tap into something transcendental, and have unsurprisingly gravitated together to form the nucleus of Residual Echoes.

A critical view of music, however, has remained part of their approach. "I think rock music is slowly deteriorating," Payne says from a cell phone in kindred psych artists Jennifer Gentle's tour van, driving over the Appalachian Mountains. I knew of Payne from Santa Cruz, where we both went to school, and I'd heard he was hard to talk to, but on the phone he's friendly. "I think the most interesting music is going to be improvised – and truly improvised, not just jamming," he continues, going on to praise free jazz.

Residual Echoes are touring with Jennifer Gentle and Dead Meadow, who, Payne says, are "really cool" but whose approach to music he doesn't appreciate. "Bands you think are improvising, like Dead Meadow for instance ... seeing them do the same 'jam' every night – it's the same every time. It's a false sense of searching. Like Jerry said, 'They're always in – they never play out.' At this point, it's 2005 – I think people should be pushing themselves out a little more."

Still, Payne concedes that only about 30 percent of Residual Echoes' live performance is improvised, because they've only managed to assemble scattered, infrequent practices since Novick moved from Portland to join the band in February.

Payne has remained the one constant in Residual Echoes since 2003 and, in the process, has befriended fellow noise pioneers Ethan Miller and Ben Chasny of Comets on Fire through random jobs in Santa Cruz. Miller, in particular, "has helped me out a lot as far as finding my way through this shit," Payne says, referring to the business side of music.

Things have happened relatively quickly for Echoes, due to the enthusiastic reception of their self-titled debut, which was recently released by Holy Mountain, the San Francisco label that also put out Chasny's early Six Organs of Admittance discs.

I ask Payne to describe capturing the improvisational energy on record, to which he replies, "Yeah, truncated chaos. Controlled silence or whatever," displaying a jadedness he admits he struggles with. "I might sound like I don't care, but I really do. I'd rather be doing this than programming computer software or something like that, worrying about losing clients."

After discussing for a while what rock music should be, Payne grows weary and sarcastically concludes, "I just want good tunes, solid pop songs with good beats." Stuff that makes you feel good? "Yeah, might as well. We're all fucked – we might as well have a good time," he says drolly.

The Echoes' music does make you feel good, in a way. It's not the false and fleeting satisfaction of trendy commercial pop, the musical equivalent of eating a Snickers, but rather a satisfaction that comes from glimpsing a window of truth through the music. As with free jazz, the pleasure comes from a sense of transience, with rocker and rockee sharing the experience of discovery, rather than partaking in one-way truth-peddling.

With a 35-minute EP for the U.K.'s Rocket Recordings and another full-length for Holy Mountain due this summer, Residual Echoes seem poised to bring their apathy-annihilating rock outside the borders of the Bay Area. It's bound to happen, because, as Payne says, the new LP will be "a summer pop masterpiece called Breakfast Boulevard. We're gonna sing in British accents and all that."

Residual Echoes play Thurs/5, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. $6. (415) 923-0923.