Let’s Go Outside (Steve Schieberl) produces music at a
mystifying rate. Barely into his 30s, he’s just shy of completing his
600th track. A couple years ago, having never attempted to get his
peculiar brand of electronic music signed, he sent demos to a handful
of prominent record labels that even the most established producer
would be lucky to get a deal with. A week later he got a call from Soma
Records, the highly respected Glasgow-based label.
“I’d been making music so long, I thought I’d start big and just see
what they said. I thought they would appreciate that it was different,
but not too abstract,” Schieberl recalls. While his stage name refers
to his love of outdoor activities, it’s also appropriate to his sound,
which falls outside the lines of even the most innovative new genres of
dance music.
While on tour in Europe, Schieberl learned that he could get as
experimental as he wanted with his sound, as long as he kept a solid
foundation of dance beats that people could recognize. He returned to
Portland last year and started a vinyl-only record label, Slant, to
showcase an even weirder side of dance music.
When asked to describe the aesthetic of the label, he summed it up
as, “Textured, but abstract. Psychedelic, but driving. One thing all of
the music has in common is it can’t land on one genre. If you can
identify it strictly as deep house or techno it’s probably not going to
come out on Slant.”
The label’s inaugural release, Bicycle Day, is a tribute to
LSD inventor Albert Hofmann, and the infamous day Hofmann dosed himself
and rode his bike home from the laboratory. The debut track could
definitely be the soundtrack to a two-wheeled acid freakout; sinister
crackles, distant laser guns, and rusty water in metal tubes pull you
into a deep, dark place, while punishing beats remind you to stay aware
of your surroundings.
Schieberl explains, “It’s not a celebration of acid itself, but the
generation of thinking it spawned. The acid wave created a movement of
people who were socially responsible, people who thought about putting
peace before war, about ecology, and people who would ride their bikes
to save the planet.”