Askeleton: The Future is Now
Wednesday 18 February @ 13:43:05 |
 by Keith Pille
Here’s one of the weirdest memories I have of my formative years: I remember watching MTV and seeing the video for INXS’s “New Sensation,” in which frontman Michael Hutchence (in suit, tie and ponytail) vamps at the camera with animated neon squiggles radiating from his head and a repetitive two-chord guitar part jangling in the background. For whatever reason, this spectacle left me with an intense feeling along the lines of “Wow, 1987 is soooo futuristic, and I’m lucky to be here.”
 In retrospect, that was so silly as to make me cringe, but now, some 17 years later, I’m getting the same feeling—only with more justification. Sometimes a piece of music seems intrinsically tied up with a specific moment in time; and, just as INXS seemed like the embodiment of late-’80s cool to me and the Pixies will always be synonymous with the early ’90s, St. Paul’s Askeleton seems to be writing the soundtrack to life in 2004. Elaborate and layered but not overbusy, the forthcoming Angry Album (an early taste of which is available on the aptly-named Future EP) throws interplaying keyboard melodies and chirps at the listener much as the modern world throws random data at you; and, like modern life, the end result is a mixture of confusion, breathlessness and beauty. That’s a whole lot of metaphor to be coming out of an outfit that is, in essence, one man with a laptop, a lot of musical instruments, and an itch to make music.
Knol Tate is that man, and his itch is pretty specific. “My favorite music,” he says, “is the stuff that’s really poppy but too weird to be mainstream.” That’s as fair a description of Askeleton as I’ve heard—in the grand tradition of the Talking Heads, Bowie (in his good moments), and the Flaming Lips, Askeleton is weird as hell but very accessible, a sort of pop music from an alternate dimension where the atmosphere is composed mainly of laughing gas.
Like all good weirdness, there’s much planning and intent behind Tate’s forays into the strange. One factor is a conscious decision to be different from other Twin Cities bands.  “In this scene in particular, everywhere, all the time, guitars are just going, going and going,” he says. “I got really sick of that. I’ve been in the same kind of band, too—two guitars, everyone’s going all the time, not leaving any space in their music. Full bar rock, constantly. Kind of sucks. I don’t like it.”
After starting out playing guitar, Tate moved to keyboards to capitalize on two things: the ease of picking up a zillion old Casio keyboards (available for $5 a pop at garage sales), and the ability to make an endless range of sounds that had been unavailable with a guitar. “Keyboards have so many more options for sounds  than a guitar does,” he asserts. “You can think of so many cool sounds and not really know how to play them ... It’s more rhythmic. Everything I do now is all rhythm and simple melody. I can’t really play a keyboard at all, but I know the notes on it. I know scales ... That’s why it’s all one note back and forth.”
Out of this professed ignorance, Tate’s Askeleton output represents a whole quite a bit greater than the sum of its parts. Each individual keyboard or guitar (they’re in there, they just don’t run the show) part may be simple, but the thing that makes Askeleton so special is the way they all integrate. A given keyboard line might be reproducible by a cat walking across a piano, but that would be one hell of a musical cat if it could then whip up a counterpoint guitar line and a beat that perfectly raises the tension (we’ll leave vocals out of this for now). And I humbly submit that ignorance of the correct way to play an instrument can be a strength if you use it correctly—if you’re looking for unconventional noises, unconventional technique may be the best way to go. Tate says something along those  lines himself, when discussing some of the other musical textures that show up in Askeleton: “I’ve got a bunch of broken instruments I like to use ... banjos, lutes and weird things. I don’t know how to play a banjo, but they sound neat. It’s fun to try to do things that are different, especially if you don’t know how to play it and you come at it blindly. Then you don’t know how it’s supposed to sound.”
This, in fact, seems to be one of the guiding principles of Askeleton. Tate makes no claims to being a great singer; and while his vocal delivery sits somewhere between singing and speaking, it’s hard to imagine anything else matching as perfectly with the music in the background. And, recalling David Byrne of the Talking Heads, he turns this around into a strength. “[Byrne] says something like ‘I believe that the better somebody sings, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying, so I use my faults to my advantage. That way, you can believe what I’m saying.’  I think that’s great, but at the same time, what the hell is David Byrne saying? What the hell does ‘facts are useless in emergencies’ mean, really? It’s true, but what is there to take to heart? I don’t really say anything either, but I want people to hear what I say.”
And when, in the song “The Future,” Tate claims that he’s seen the future, and it is tonight, he has me convinced. Wow. 2004 is very futuristic, and we’re lucky to be here.
Askeleton plays Fri., Feb. 20, at the Whole Music Club in the basement of the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota with Avenpitch. 6:30 p.m. $3 U of M with valid student ID / $5 general public. 18+. 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Mpls. 612-624-4636.
And again on Thu., Feb. 26, at the Triple Rock Social Club with Vox Vermillion, Doomtree and Podland. 9 p.m. $6. 21+. 629 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-333-7399.
Click here to download an mp3 of Askeleton’s song “The Future (Single Edit).”
You can find out more about Askeleton on Tate’s official website.
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