All Night Radio
No Sleep for the Supernatural
Published by Under The Radar

It’s a December afternoon at El Pescador Beach, north of Malibu, California. All Night Radio are here with Under The Radar for photos and an interview. Dave Scher and Jimi Hey, equal partners in their new project, are both Southern California natives. They’re also members of Beachwood Sparks, one of a long line of area bands -- The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Love -- whose styles blend varying amounts of sun, sand and psychedelia.

The winter weather is typically gorgeous and mild, but by 5:00 the sun is in a free fall, revealing coastal-crisp constellations. We look for the “green flash,” an optical phenomenon that occurs just as the sun dips beneath the horizon. If such a postcard setting captures something of L.A.’s rock mythology, it doesn’t quite encompass the music we’re here to talk about. A scene from All Night Radio’s door-opening debut album, Spirit Stereo Frequency, could happen anywhere. Or nowhere.

The idea behind the All Night Radio, as Scher describes it, is “a collision of sounds and ideas that might be atmospheric and colliding a little bit at times, like arrangements where there’s a lot of things happening… something imagination-oriented that doesn’t ever really stop. It’s like a perpetual fountain.” All night and day, really.

One of the first things you notice about the record is that there’s a ton of stuff in the mix. Not just a matter of pouring on psych signatures like strange echo, backwards sounds and exotic instruments, All Night Radio’s dense creations also connect to the world we walk around in. As it’s described to me, things like b-boy culture and bioluminescent sea creatures have a place as guiding principles if not audible musical motifs. Scher says the BBC’s Blue Planet series on ocean life was on constantly while they were in the studio. Hey was watching hip-hop docs like Style Wars and The Freshest Kids, and devouring everything from skiffle to wildlife records. Just going to the park and listening to the city were a big part of it, they say.

“A lot of those things have more to do with a picture of a way of living,” says Scher of the movies and music, “and a time period when people’s relationship to art was just really awesome and exciting.”

Scher and Hey spent nine months working on the album at Anchovya Studios, a.k.a. Scher’s house, in Echo Park. A trained recording engineer, Scher handled most of the mic placement and technical stuff; together they produced and played an array of instruments. Scher contributed mainly guitar, pedal steel and keyboards; Hey played drums, bass, glockenspiel, percussion, keyboards and samples. They both sang on the record, and friends provided additional parts for voice, horns and an Indian instrument called a tamboura. Their cat even laid down some meows.

Scher and Hey have an understanding with Beachwood Sparks’ label, SubPop, that pretty much guarantees a release for any of their side projects. Scher: “Jonathan Poneman sat us down once and said, ‘You always have a home here.’ That was a nice thing to say, and he seems to have honored it to the letter thus far.”

Even with such a family-style arrangement, a nine-month creative process is going to occasionally butt up against things like release schedules. “We’re fans of production,” says Hey. “We got kinda lost in the fantasy of it, and then when deadlines came around it was a weird wakeup call we weren’t even thinking about.”

They saw Spirit Stereo Frequency as a grand-scale work -- that’s just the way they think when they’ve got their hands on the controls. “We delved further and further into the possibilities of our arrangements,” says Scher, “and you can hear it on the tracks. It just kept getting more and more involved. You can go on forever that way.”

With what amounted to movable deadlines, they put a cap on the track stacking for another reason. The hardest part of the whole process was “getting final mixes of our ideas,” says Scher. “Both of us had fully fledged ideas that occupied the same frequency space a lot. You couldn’t keep everything feeling alive if you let everything in.”

But then again, “We wanted it to be a little bit murky and mysterious,” says Hey. “It’s good that not every single thing can be heard, I think.” So it is with “Sky Bicycle,” a dreamy High Llamas scenario staged in front of a sizeable wall of sound.

Hey and Scher have known each other since 1995. A Huntington Beach native, Scher went to high school in Long Beach with Snoop Dogg and went on to study recording at Loyola Marymount University on L.A.’s west side. He had a radio show at LMU’s indie-rocking KXLU, where a 16-year-old Jimi Hey would call him up and request Six Finger Satellite over and over. Before long the two were playing together in Bee Venom, which led to Beachwood Sparks.

Hey was born and raised in L.A. His parents were into music, and his mom would talk about her hippie years and acid experiences. An accelerated student of the counterculture, he managed to see The Clash at age four, meet Timothy Leary at 11 and drop his first tab of LSD at 12. He says that first trip was a formative experience, one that made “everything seem a lot bigger.” Before he got into skateboarding and punk rock, he learned music by playing violin in the grade-school orchestra.

Hey left Beachwood Sparks before their first single was released on Bomp! in 1998, and rejoined in 2002 for the excellent Make the Cowboy Robots Cry EP on SubPop. In between he played in The Rapture, Strictly Ballroom, Tristeza, Glass Candy and The Shattered Theater. A living example of record business disparity, Hey continues to work four days a week at the Amoeba record store in Hollywood, an admittedly utopian environment for a music fan. (Though he says he gets a little embarrassed when someone brings one of his records to the counter.) Before Bay Area-based Amoeba came to town, the hot shop in Hollywood was Aron’s, where Hey, The Warlocks’ Bobby Hecksher, and countless other area musicians once collected paychecks.

For the moment, with other members of Beachwood Sparks working on projects of their own (Chris Gunst in The Mystic Chords of Memory, Brent Rademaker in Frost Dots), Hey and Scher are putting all their energy into All Night Radio. They say they already have enough material for another record. The two of them will tour Spirit Stereo Frequency with Hey on drums and Scher on guitar, organ, pedal steel and melodica. A laptop computer will fill in the many additional layers.

One wonders if projects like theirs are a way of escaping the creative constraints of an existing band, so I ask them if they feel shackled in Beachwood Sparks. “I wouldn’t refer to that group as a shackle, no,” says Scher. “Between the two of us there are some different style interests that were never explored in Beachwood Sparks and we didn’t even know we were going to explore with this.”

“I did feel that maybe -- since there’s four people compromising their ideas in that band -- with two people more stuff can get in there,” adds Hey. “There’s a lot of things that we just couldn’t have done in Beachwood Sparks that I’ve always wanted to do all my life, and this is the first time that that’s happened.”

L.A. is home to a handful of well-known bands that make psychedelic music of one kind or another: Beachwood Sparks, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Tyde, The Warlocks. Is it enough to constitute a scene? “I wouldn’t imagine that,” says Scher, adding that he’d like to see more risk-taking. “A lot of it’s really predictable and uninspired,” he says of the L.A. club scene in general.

Hey concurs: “I would say, if anything, we’re in a void period before something really great. We’re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough, but we’re not there yet.”

The groups they are excited about include Future Pigeon, an experimental dub outfit they’ve shared bills with, as well as The Movies, Ariel Pinks, Seksu Roba and Haunted Graffiti.

With their genre-smashing approach to mind-altering music, All Night Radio are doing their share of void filling. And if Spirit Stereo Frequency gets properly transmitted, even the term “psychedelic” could begin a transformation. “I’m more into psychedelia as an idea or a way of life than an actual sound,” says Hey when I ask if theirs is drug music.

Scher says he hopes with all his heart that his record isn’t construed as drug music. He’s coming from a place where sea creatures outnumber weed dealers and perception doesn’t need to be altered so much as enhanced. “For me, my favorite words -- words with power in them -- would be ‘nature’ and ‘supernatural.’ To me that’s more important than something like drugs.”

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