Dallas Orbitor is Making a Scene

October 12, 2024

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Dallas Orbiter

Post-punk/art-rock/psych-pop outfit Dallas Orbiter (singer/guitarist Mark Miller, bassist Dan Gahres, keyboardist Jon Schmig, and drummer Greg Flanagan) formed in Minneapolis at some point in 1999 out of the ashes of power-pop outfit Captain Sunshine and ska-punk group The Pinsetters. Wishing to maintain an element of melodicism, the members were also seeking more open-ended, lysergically-minded sonic and improvisational freedom. They soon settled on their name, a play on the manufacturer of a fairly ubiquitous fuzz guitar pedal from late 60s & early 70s psychedelia.

The band soon went back to a studio in Oshkosh to record their first demo/EP (variously named ‘Switch’ or ‘Five Lights’ depending on the cover art you got) with Fox Valley punk legend JJ Verner of Rebel Waltz engineering. In 2001, Eric Lodahl, former bassist of the excellent Milwaukee band The Lost Toothbrushes, would join on Farfisa organ & rhythm guitar. A limited-edition home-recorded first full-length record ‘There Are Machines for That’ would follow in 2002. Splendid E-zine, a website that no longer exists, would give it a highly enthusiastic review (you’ll begin to notice a pattern here).

Around this time, Dallas Orbiter would be invited to play the first few Twin Cities Heliotrope Festivals, a fantastically curated then-annual event which would feature relative outsider/non-commercial artists & groups playing mostly improvised music accompanied by psychedelic visual projections. DO would construct loosely conceptual frameworks each year and focus heavily on evocative sonic creativity & atmosphere over song structure. These experiences would serve the band well, both artistically and spiritually.

2005 & 2008 respectively would see the releases of self-recorded full-length albums ‘Magnesium Fireflies’ & ‘Motorcycle Diagrams’ which both got extensive college radio airplay (even appearing high on the CMJ charts—is that even a thing anymore??) and a lot of rapturous reviews on… a lot of websites that no longer exist. The latter record even made a few Minnesota top-10 end-of-year lists, including the Pioneer Press & the MN AV Club site.

In 2011, after constructing a new rehearsal space/fledgling home studio in Northeast Mpls, the group embarked on an ambitious project: releasing a new online single every month consisting of a new Dallas Orbiter song as the “A side” and a newly-recorded cover song as the “B-side.” This being a bit before the widespread popularity of the now-ubiquitous corporate streaming services, the singles were hosted exclusively on dallasorbiter.com. The project, while both creatively exhausting and artistically rewarding, obviously never met a wide audience. It was cool though, because the band got to interpret and sometimes mangle songs from Brian Eno/Cluster, Comsat Angels, Rita Coolidge, Manchester UK punk-poet John Cooper Clarke, Blue Oyster Cult, The Zombies, and more. You can find the project (non-monetized, of course) on YouTube.

Eric Lodahl left the band in 2013 to focus on family & raising his young twin sons. Though never really flashy or upfront, his contributions to those songs, albums, & live performances would be sorely missed. He remains a dear friend of the remaining band members forever.

The ensuing years would include some sporadic Dallas Orbiter song-based shows (mostly just when invited) and a few more conceptual Heliotrope Festival sets, but mostly, the band just jammed econo in private. The new rehearsal/studio space was now decked out with enough gear & mics to effectively record their weekly freestyle improvisations: Krautrock repetitions, drone-based zoneouts, fake-jazz skronk, post-rock space jams, and groovy modal explorations became the new aesthetic normal. It was wonderful.

Then came 2020. Yeah. That. Anyway, the band reconvened post-vaccinations in May of ’21, recording the usual (and now often even more ecstatic) weekly insular freestyle improv nights. In the summer of 2022, an invite from a friend came in for a live show at a small bar in south Minneapolis and Dallas Orbiter jumped at it, refocusing some songs they’d been working on over the years. The set was well-received and they were invited back for a New Year’s Eve gig heading into 2023, which also went well. Some talk of making a record of those songs had even predated the pandemic, but a committed plan never materialized.

Enter John Miller (the band had to call him JM, since there were two Jo(h)ns & two Millers). The co-owner and gifted engineer of the Future Condo studio in South Minneapolis reached out to Mark in early Spring of 2023 with a simple message: “Wanna make a record?” It was an opportunity to finally commit.

The recording of 12 songs for the ‘Spaceman Things’ sessions was completed at Future Condo in 4 days in late April/early May of 2023 & the mix was completed over several evenings in the ensuing weeks. Mastering was expertly done by Bruce Templeton soon thereafter. It’s a much more stripped-down beast than most of the band’s previous self-recorded albums, with an agile, muscular & BIG rhythm section sound plus the interplay between Miller’s guitars & Schmig’s keys somewhat reminiscent of Can’s Karoli & Schmidt, Television’s Verlaine & Lloyd, or Magazine’s McGeoch & Formula. It’s all good shit. You should check it out.

The record, lacking a working title before its recording, would eventually be named by a line in the B-side “Let’s Go Out” which said “Forgive my life, I’m just a spaceman, doing spaceman things.” Something about that line had people in the studio randomly singing it unprompted, so it stuck.

Oh! About those aforementioned recordings of all those years of studio jams: The band has started combing through them (at least 4 hard drives full of music) and will be releasing their favorite selections under the alias Laser Bats from Mars. Volume 1 of that series will be coming to Bandcamp & streaming services soon!

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