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2-5: Machine Country
Sounds like: TV static rushing in to fill the empty spaces of a lobotomized brain.
Given the sound of Machine Country’s music, you’d think they’d spent their whole lives bumping foreheads in basement mosh pits and blowing out their ears at harsh noise shows.
It’s surprising to learn, then, that the band’s three members are all refugees from comparatively conventional bands. While guitarist Steel Heer’s earlier band Candy Picnic played ’90s-worshipping alt-rock whose monochromatic aesthetic betrayed some of Machine Country’s brutalist bleakness, the other two members cut their teeth in the psych-rock world that the band excoriates on “Lobotomize a Psych Rocker,” from last month’s scouring debut, Industrial Offering.
“We were all tired of playing indie music, I guess,” Heer says.
Industrial Offering is the opposite of psych rock: monochromatic and decidedly unstoner-friendly music that seems to dip a brush into a reservoir of TV static and dribble it willy-nilly like a Pollock painting. Sometimes their sound approaches the jerkiness of Devo’s dystopian funk or the breakneck tempos of classic hardcore, but just as often their music sounds like two sheets of metal grinding together set to a beat.
One interesting quality of Machine Country’s music is the dual lead vocals by Heer and bassist-vocalist Velvet Edwards, whose last gig was with bad-trip psychonauts Spoon Bender. This aspect of their sound is especially underlined on their debut release, the three-song demo Example No.1, which came out in 2024.
“I’m super into a two-different-people-screaming-at-each-other kind of deal,” Heer says, citing powerviolence pioneers Man Is the Bastard as a key inspiration.
The band calls itself “noise violence”—the intersection of the hardcore punk subgenre powerviolence and the more shapeless dungeons of the avant-garde. While many bands relegate their forays into experimental sound art to intros and interludes, Machine Country puts them front and center.
“I feel like when a lot of people put noise or ambient stuff in a record, it’s because they wanna get it to a releasable length, they need more songs,” Heer says. “For us, those are very important songs to the record.”
Machine Country is one of a number of bands in Portland making music that sounds more like a soundtrack for collapsing buildings than the indie-rock pageantry typically associated with the city. Others include Kill Michael and the new band Of Wires, the latter of which will perform with Machine Country on May 1 at The High Water Mark Lounge.
You could call this music “in the red” if that description didn’t feel too colorful for music whose palette ranges from eggshell to monochrome to ash—that is to say, gray, gray and more gray. Counterintuitively, this darker and starker mode has allowed the band members to grow looser and more capricious with their ideas.
“I think you get a lot more creative liberty with heavier music,” says drummer Zach Clifton, who cut his teeth in the comparatively polite indie-rock band Novacane. “You can get away with more masturbatory playing. You can do whatever the hell you want, get fun with it.”