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Who: Chris Gunn (guitar, vocals), Scott Simmons (bass, keyboards), Lucas Gunn (guitar), Ben Spencer (drums).
Sounds like: Pop music dreaming about itself.
For fans of: The Hunches, Eat Skull, Sic Alps, Neil Michael Hagerty, White Fence, Castanets, Amen Dunes, John Frusciante.
As the guitarist for Portland's beloved and bedeviling Hunches, Chris Gunn helped create some of the last decade's most memorable garage rock, the vim and venom of which struck the same raw nerve as Jay Reatard's best work. The band broke up after perfecting its chaotic art on 2009's Exit Dreams, and Gunn, who was living in San Francisco at the time, had what he calls a "weird vision" of his immediate musical future.
According to Gunn, he was possessed by an inchoate urge "to do this 7-inch that would morph between an original song and like a Townes Van Zandt song and then a John Fahey song."
Gunn did not release a 7-inch, but he did record music. A lot of music. He moved back to Portland in 2010, scored a room in Old Standard Sound, where the Hunches had recorded Exit Dreams, and embarked on an odyssey of analog experimentation that would eventually become the Lavender Flu.
"For three years, two years, I was like, 'OK, we're just going to drink beer, and whoever wants to come over and record can come over,'" Gunn says. "So it was a free-for-all."
Among those who joined Gunn's free-for-all were his brother Lucas Gunn, Hunches drummer Ben Spencer and Eat Skull vet Scott Simmons—all of whom now comprise the official Lavender Flu lineup—along with friends like Old Standard owner Justin Higgins, Hunches frontman Hart Gledhill and Adam Stonehouse of the Hospitals.
"It eventually got to the point where I had hundreds of these songs, or whatever you want to call them," Chris Gunn says. "So then we had to sit and decide which ones we wanted to focus on for this first record and think about which ones fit together, like putting together a puzzle or a map."
The result of Gunn's puzzling is Heavy Air, an intimate, 30-song headphone epic comprising sparkling pop gems, off-kilter covers, druggy soundscapes, abstract digressions and buzzing fragments. Although Gunn had plenty of help with Heavy Air, the Lavender Flu's sprawling double LP coheres as a portrait of a lonesome lo-fi perfectionist, a dude obsessed with shrinking the distance between the primal sounds in his head and the tape that awaits them.
In a way, Gunn continues to chase the reckless transcendence that powered his former band. But he's taking the scenic route this time, collecting evidence of damaged glory as he goes. Gunn is no longer sprinting headlong into oblivion, as was the Hunches' wont, and he is happy that way.
"It's cool to be able to play the songs and express it through that," he says, "rather than go jump into a wall." CHRIS STAMM.
SEE IT: The Lavender Flu plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Patsy's Rats, on Friday, Jan. 29. 9:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Willamette Week