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For Reed Juenger, music has always been an interdisciplinary pursuit. Though Beat Connection began in earnest as a party-starting DJ duo at the University of Washington, his dorm-bound project has since blossomed into a four-piece that's all but left the house-party scene behind. It still brings the beats, obviously, but the orchestration of its incandescent, sample-heavy tropicalia has quickly evolved from laptops churning out four-on-the-floor grooves to a rock fan's fantasy of exactly what a live electronic show should be. Namely, dudes with instruments sweating it out in real time. It helps that Juenger—who grew up in Vancouver, Wash.—daylights as a graphic designer, a skill that has catapulted Beat Connection's live set from modest collegiate beginnings to a mesmerizing multimedia experience. Seeing sounds and hearing colors is considered a malady in most medical circles, but the world Juenger and company have created on their forthcoming record, Product 3, would be nowhere near as lovely without it.
Willamette Week: A lot of people think they can just go on stage and fuck around with Ableton Live for an hour and call it a set. When or where did you decide you wanted to become more than that?
Reed Juenger: It was probably the plan from the beginning. I've been a fan of music my whole life, and I don't mean just recorded or live music. I mean all of the related peripheral arts that go into the release of a record. It's been an interest of mine as long as I can remember. Trying to do things in earnest and deliver something that we're really proud of to an audience is a key part of why we do this. Part of the artistry to me is something that happens by any means necessary. When we started out it was two guys with twenty bucks and a laptop trying to make it happen. I'm pretty proud of the fact that we were able to start there and end up where we are now. I don't know if there was ever a succinct moment when we decided to take that next step, but we started morphing about two or three years ago.
Were there even any expectations going in to this? You essentially started off playing parties at UW, and now you're playing festivals and remixing Odesza. Did you imagine any of this happening?
I think we hoped it would happen, but I don't know if we imagined it. I'm so focused on the day to day, trying to accomplish the goals I set for myself that I don't spend much time imagining where it will leave me and hoping where it might go if I keep working at it. I'm pretty disinterested in being involved in anything in my life if I'm not going to commit to it and do it all the way. I don't see much point in that.
Did you guys finish college?
Yeah we all graduated, which was kind of the turning point. It was kind of a cliché situation where we thought, "OK, we're out of college, what do we do now?" I have a day job too, working for Capitol Hill Block Party doing their graphic design and marketing, so I'm in super high gear right now because the festival starts on Friday [July 24] and we have two days left to do all the random shit that seems to go to the last minute.
Well, at least the job you have during the day can have some respect for what you're doing at night, right?
Yeah. I was a musician for a job for a year, to write this record we have coming out in the fall. I focused on it completely for a long time. This job started out as a sort of part-time thing and grew into a larger commitment. Once we're done with the festival I'm going back to being 100 percent focused. This was a cool opportunity for me to learn more about what I've been doing every day from the other side of the glass, I guess. I've worked for venues in the past and have done internships at labels and tried to gain as much knowledge as possible.
Iâve noticed you always have very interesting visuals, especially the tone and colors of âIn The Waterâ, which really nailed the aesthetic of that song. How has a background in design helped you as a musician?
I should say that I came to design out of necessity in order to create visuals for the band originally. Since then I've found they've grown hand in hand, and I've taken a similar approach to both things. When I write music I spent a lot of time fine-tuning little, teeny-tiny loops of music and then stringing them all together into a larger thing, which is the same process that happens within a song, and then placing the songs together in a record. I do a very similar process with graphic design—I find there to be very little separation between the two at times. When I'm working in music I draw inspiration from visual arts, design, cinema and from random, mundane, day-to-day experiences. Sometimes, when I'm working on design things, I find inspiration in music, so I don't see much separation between the different disciplines of art, and I try as often as possible to find ways to make an analogous sound to a feeling or a visual or a color or something like that.
Do you think that's important when you're playing bigger shows, where maybe people can't see the band but they have a clear view of what's happening on the screen behind you?
I see them as being 100 percent necessary to one another. When I told you I was a fan of music for as long as I can remember, when I first started buying CDs at Fred Meyer or some depressing convenience store like that near where I lived when I was 11 or whatever, I was really into looking at the artwork and taking that into consideration and finding inspiration in that and being super into that as much as the music. I think creating a coherent visual aesthetic that's in line with the music is super important to Beat Connection. I'm thinking all the time about how we create an eye-catching visual, especially now when we're in a completely saturated market and how the expectations are how I have to post twice daily on Instagram and fucking make sure I hashtag it or people aren't gonna care about the music, which is ultimately saddening to me, but it's a game I've accepted I have to play. So I want to find an artistic way to be a part of it, and that comes down to making sure the intent and the spirit behind the music are the same sort of, "Let's dive into the pop music world and fuck it up from the inside out instead of being stuck on the outside complaining about it."
That's a very punk rock attitude for the kind of music you're making. To an outsider, Seattle is still very much a "rockist" kind of town, which clearly isn't true to anyone who's lived there long enough. Has being in a place with that history made any impact on being in an electronic group?
It's changed a lot over the last couple years. There's still a super-strong presence that grunge music has cast over the city and the northwest, but as all this commercial EDM stuff has taken over the public consciousness there's been some growth. When we first started we encountered a lot of difficulty and criticism in being an electronic group, like, "Why do they have laptops? Why don't they play their instruments?" That sort of shit. Now, some of the most successful artists from all over the world are exactly that: some dude with a laptop. The audience is willing to accept that, and starting out it was much more accepted outside of the city than in it. It was an uphill battle from the beginning, but now we're a little bit suspicious of anyone in the town who wants to take part in this sort of thing because, man I've been here since the beginning trying to do this, and I'm not gonna stop and we're gonna keep growing and moving into it and doing art intuitively.
For a while the word "festival" brought up the idea of hippies and jam bands, but it's totally flipped a switch, especially in the northwest where there's a lot of EDM now. You're not an EDM group, but do you think that's given you a better foothold on getting booked for these events?
I think so. It feels like almost an over-correction that's been beneficial to us. It went from one extreme to the next and we have always existed sort of in the middle ground. I'm not trying to be some prickly, angry person. I'm very happy with the audience we've reached. But the whole idea of Beat Connection has been an experimental thing from the beginning and we don't really fit into these genres so it makes it difficult for people to fully respond to quickly.
What can you tell me about the next record?
We've finally got a new single coming out. We're gonna be signing with ANTI-, which has been in the works for a while and we're super excited about it.
That's awesome. They've snatched up a very diverse roster of talent recently, like they just put out the newest Title Fight record, which is nominally a punk band of sorts.
Yeah, the history of that label is incredibly diverse: Wilco, Tricky, Merle Haggard, all these bands across many genres. That was part of what drew us to them, and likely them to us. The next record is a pop record with a lot of songs about the intersection of art and artifice, hidden behind love songs because those are universal themes we think almost anyone can identify with and get stuck in their head. The whole idea of the record is about accepting commercialism and consumer culture as a necessary evil in creating pop music. It's also about not being all that pleased with that understanding an acceptance. It's called Product 3. We've been focused on how a lot of times our music has been a fitting soundtrack for a commercial for something we can't afford as artists. There are a lot of things changing in Seattle right now. I'm sure you've noticed it in Portland. I remember the Pearl District going through a lot of changes in the last couple of years. It's still growing and changing. It's sort of like, "Damn, this condo replaced this shitty dive bar I used to go to. I didn't really like that dive bar that much, but I don't really like this condo that much either." Which one is better?" Are they both bad or good? It's sort of questioning how we accept this and account for the potential destruction of culture through consumerism. Or, is there some way to embrace consumerism and sort of subvert it?
That's a total bummer of a theme for what is ostensibly a party-friendly electronic rock band.
Yeah, but I love it when something sounds really nice and you can slide it past all the listeners and then you hang out with it for a minute and realize there's a little more to it. We didn't want to make a completely mindless pop record- this is a facsimile of that that's digging in a little deeper. My inspiration musically is acts like Public Image Ltd. or the KLF who were very aware of what they were doing when they went for it in the pop-music world, and were trying to spread a larger message while making catchy pop tunes. I don't think that's exactly an easy thing to do, and to be self-aware of it emancipated us from having to second-guess if it was too much in either direction.
SEE IT: Beat Connection plays MusicfestNW at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on Sunday, Aug. 23. Go to musicfestnw.com for tickets.
WWeek 2015
