Joshua Loring, singer and guitarist for the rock group Brenda, pledges a strong allegiance to the veiled music culture of Portland-or, rather, to its unveiling. He is Portland’s adamant champion, its believer, and most recently, its spokesperson.
With a grant of $7,500 from the Maine Arts Commission, Loring, a resident artist at the Space Gallery, is creating a multi-platform audio-visual project to document the art and lives of a thriving yet largely hidden treasure trove of Portland musicians.
The project consists of three main components: a book of photographs and text portraying the musicians at shows, practices and their day jobs; an audio compilation; and a blog which will continue on after the completion of the project.
Loring will ship about 500 copies to college radio stations; clout-wielding independent media outlets such as CMJ, Tiny Mix Tapes and Pitchfork; mp3 blogs; FM stations such as Jersey City’s brilliant freeform juggernaut WFMU; and booking agencies like Bowery Presents.
Though he considers it a “prehistoric concept,” he will also send the project to various independent record labels. He’ll send it to friends in strategic places-to anybody with the capacity to help these artists sustain themselves as musicians in a larger marketplace.
“Part of living in Portland is this frustration at having no real exposure,” Loring says.
He considers local bands like the RattleSnakes, Honey Clouds and Metal Feathers to be far more compelling than the mainstream local music Mainers at large are exposed to.
Moreover, he feels the quality of these bands’ work is on par with-if not superior to-much of the nationally celebrated music from the New York scene and others like it.
“Here, it’s a very self-sustaining community where everybody takes an interest and will continually go out to see you,” he says. “But it’s often the same people over and over again because of population.”
Loring points out that in addition to Portland’s size, its isolation from major cities keeps its talented musicians below the radar.
Bands from New York can drive to Philadelphia to do a show one night, Washington D.C. the next, and back to New York for two more nights of shows. These types of opportunities are virtually nonexistent for bands in Portland, especially considering the stagnant quality of Boston’s independent music scene, he adds.
As an artist, Loring possesses an uncanny devotion to his hometown of Portland. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 2002. For the next few years, he worked at a design studio in Manhattan. He played with a band that practiced in a textile mill-turned-studio in his neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
He described the group as “anticipating a nostalgia wave that would tend toward a mid-’70s Thin Lizzy-esque type of cock rock.”
But his interests, aesthetically and geographically, were elsewhere.
He fled his design job to travel to southeast Asia and live with a family in Bangkok.
In 2004, he was drawn back to Portland to contribute to its music scene, and ultimately attempt to stimulate its static nature.
After working on solo efforts and briefly playing in the band Certain Numbers, Loring formed Cult Maze with Jay Lobley, Peet Chamberlain and Andrew Barron.
For two years, they played Portland vigorously, put out a few records and generated considerable critical acclaim around town.
But despite their increasing popularity, Cult Maze disintegrated in 2008 on the verge of a national tour.
Loring, eager to start a band to perform his own songs, formed the alt-rock trio Brenda with Chamberlain on bass and DJ Moore on drums.
Brenda is a mid/high-tempo, catchy and fluid pop outfit. Their songs sound vigilantly crafted in structure, yet completely let loose in performance.
Cult Maze front man Jay Lobley, along with his brother Derek Lobley, Althea Pajak and Jason Rogers, formed the auspicious Metal Feathers.
Their self-titled, self-released debut is remarkably well-written and beautifully assembled.
Jay Lobley is a whiz-kid songwriter and embodies the vital message of Loring’s thesis: the rock music coming out of this city-albeit tiny and tucked away-is as good as what comes out of any other city in America.
In addition to Brenda and Metal Feathers, Loring’s project documents nine other bands: the RattleSnakes, Gully, Honey Clouds, An Evening With, Cursillistas, Vince Nez, Moneycastasia, Turn Down Day and Huak.
The bands’ sounds vary from straightforward ’90s indie and ’60s pop to pastoral soundscapes and alt-pop. Somehow, each group possesses something invisible that keeps their sounds in the same world, as with Athens, Georgia’s Elephant 6 Collective.
“I think that one of the things about the bands that are being covered in the project is that ultimately, each of them is accessible in their own way for a broad audience,” Loring says.
In other words, it’s all pop music. The bands do share a similar sound, but it is its own animal.
They’re not imitating another scene or attempting to ride any sort of high-cresting wave. Generally speaking, if these bands are under a common influence, it’s something along the lines of former greats like Guided by Voices, the Rock *A* Teens or Sleater-Kinney.
The factors holding back any initial commercial success for these bands-minimal exposure, isolation, lack of recognition-may, in fact, be incubating their unique spirit. They live together, play live shows together and share rehearsal spaces. Portland is, after all, an intimate locale.
In the early 2000s, Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe, along with representatives from thirty-nine other states, sued a handful of major music companies, including Tower Records, BMG, Sony and Capitol Records, on the grounds that they illegally instituted massive scale CD price-fixing at the retail and distribution levels.
The companies were forced to compensate each of the states with thousands of CDs for their libraries and schools, rebate checks for its music consumers and a chunk of change to benefit the state’s artists and art consumers.
In 2007, Maine’s share of $23,000 went to the MAC to be distributed through its Artists in Maine Communities Grant. Rowe, a strong proponent for the arts and a 2010 gubernatorial candidate, demanded that the money went toward music specifically.
Loring met Donna McNeil, director of the Maine Arts Commission, at a photo shoot in Orono around the time the funds became available. They were working on a public relations campaign intended to depict a cross-section of contemporary Maine culture through its residents. Among the representatives were Sudanese refugees, Native Americans and Loring.
McNeil, intrigued by Loring’s commitment to Portland’s independent music, encouraged him to apply for the newly acquired lawsuit money through the Space Gallery with his friend Ian Paige, the gallery’s events coordinator.
“I kind of went to her with a head full of ideas and things I wanted to do with the music community,” Loring said. “She helped to turn it into something that was more reality-based.”
McNeil liked that the proposal reached out to musicians who could really use the help. She wasn’t familiar with most of the bands it highlighted, but deferred to Loring and Paige: “Those guys are experts in the field as far as I’m concerned.”
She was particularly interested in the idea that there was something deeply communal in Portland’s music scene.
“He was really talking about the city of Portland as a lifestyle, in a way,” she said. “A community that is really nurturing to young musicians. There’s just something in the water, or something in the air that has created this particular community.”
The final product of Loring’s project, which he hopes to have finished by June, will illustrate both the artistic virtues and practical needs of Portland’s hardworking musicians.
Lately, he has been photographing individual band members at their day jobs. He took the Metro to the Maine Mall with Tara Bincarousky from the RattleSnakes and one of her clients. Bincarousky works for a facility that assists developmentally disabled people.
He visited a jobsite with Brian Cohen, also from the RattleSnakes, who works for a company that neutralizes spaces contaminated by asbestos.
“He showed me one instrument that shoots an inferred beam hundreds of feet,” he recalled. “And wherever the little laser lands, you can tell the surface temperature, which is really weird.”
Loring says the physical nature of the book portion has yet to be fully realized. They have decided to use a thin paper stock to save money, which will allow for more content and more copies. Portland’s 43rd Parallel Press will print the literature. Rather than sending out individual CDs, objects Loring considers tacky, clunky and outdated he will include a barcode for access to the music compilation online.
If nothing else, Loring hopes the project will serve as a catalyst for greater local media representation from unlikely outlets such as the Portland Press Herald or WCSH 6.
But the ultimate objective isn’t implausible: to generate widespread recognition of and effectively buoy Portland’s unusually good music in a larger marketplace.
Frequenters of the scene, as it stands today, should stop and count their lucky stars now and again. Few other cities of Portland’s size, if any, boast such a high concentration of fierce talent and ambition. For better or worse, Portland’s musicians are nocturnal, growing pale beneath a cloud of conventional mediocrity by day. But by night, they slave over their art, playing hard and true for their patrons like dutiful troubadours earning their keep.
The project blog:
www.trebletreble.com
[under construction]
Maine Arts Commission:
www.mainearts.maine.gov