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The electric guitar was once the sound of the future, but it feels a little old fashioned these days. Declining guitar sales are cited just as much as chart data in analyses of rock’s constantly trumpeted death, and the instrument has become more of a weapon of rock orthodoxy than a gateway to unforeseen musical possibilities.
By naming his project Guitar, Portland musician Saia Kuli confronts listeners with all of these associations before they’ve heard a note of the music. But listen to his new record, Casting Spells on Turtlehead, and it’s obvious that orthodoxy is last on his list of priorities.
“I like cryptic messaging and the mystery of weird, bedroom-produced indie,” says Kuli, 30, who cites the long-running and prolific Midwestern cult band Guided By Voices as an influence on the disruptive and piecemeal sound of his music. Turtlehead has a lot in common with that band’s great ‘90s statements like Propeller, but an unexpected genre is just as influential on the sound of this music: hip-hop, which Kuli has a sideline in producing.
“The way that I made beats was just sort of messing around on Ableton and adding layers, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t,” Kuli says. “That’s kind of the approach that I brought to my indie music.”
Kuli is a rare thing in the local music scene—a Portland native, raised out “in the numbers” within Portland’s small but tight-knit Tongan American community. His brother, a rapper who records as Kavaface, introduced Kuli to hip-hop around the same time he was getting into rock (you can hear one of Kuli’s beats on “Metro PCS” from Kavaface’s 2023 album, Major Shift).
Though Kuli has played in a number of Portland rock bands, including Gary Supply and Nick Normal—the latter’s eponymous frontman is now a member of the Guitar live lineup—Kuli initially foresaw hip-hop as his primary focus rather than rock music. “I was just doing the hip-hop stuff, and I really felt like that’s where I should be putting my energy,” Kuli says. “But the energy of having shows again kind of brought me back into it.”
While Guitar’s self-titled album from 2022 comprised just Kuli and his partner, Jonny Smith, Turtlehead is a considerably more collaborative effort, featuring Nikhil Wadhwa on drums and Zoe Tricoche of rising young noise-punk band Kill Michael on screamed vocals. “[On] the last one I was kind of getting songs together to try and make a release, whereas for this one I was more careful in what I wanted to put out and have people really listen to and think about thematically,” Kuli says.
Both releases straddle the line between a full-length album and an EP, if either term is really sufficient to describe them. The borders between physical media are increasingly nebulous in the streaming era, especially in hip-hop, where the term “mixtape” now more typically delineates a lower-stakes release rather than a free collection of music based on dubiously legal samples.
“I kind of thought of it more like a mixtape than an EP or an album,” Kuli says of Turtlehead. “The album art is like tape art, and that’s kind of how I was thinking about it as I was making it.”
Listening to Turtlehead is like listening to a rock album on the fritz. Kuli’s vocals seem to emanate from different sides of the stereo field, and the guitars are often treated as choppy samples. Guitar has often been pegged as “shoegaze,” a term applied to indie rock defined by dense, gauzy, distorted guitars. But while shoegaze’s wall of sound often makes the songs sound monolithic, Turtlehead is a patchwork, and Kuli often uses “to Frankenstein” as a verb.
“I build different parts of the song and then copy, paste and move things around,” Kuli says. “There’s a lot of flexibility, and I think that’s helped me move faster through the process. And I think that, at least for me, it keeps the energy and the excitement.”
SEE IT: Guitar performs at Yuvees’ album release show at Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895, mississippistudios.com. 9 pm Friday, March 15. $12. 21+.