Sebastian Thomson on 20 years of Trans Am

As Trans Am notch their tenth studio album, Sebastian Thomson has an awful lot to reminisce about. He chats to The Skinny about longevity, irony and obscene strategies

Feature by Will Fitzpatrick | 28 Jul 2014

“Twenty years,” muses Sebastian Thomson, reflecting on his career as one third of post-rock polymaths Trans Am. In that time, the band have reinvented themselves time and time again, flitting from Dischord-inspired guitar experiments to krautrock hypnotics; from hardcore-infused electro soundclashes to arch pop freakouts. Always too far ahead of the game to be tidily pigeonholed, they’ve carved out a uniquely accessible niche for themselves amidst a scene more widely associated with chin-stroking repetition and furrowed-brow textural exploration. 

He laughs. “It’s fucking crazy when you think about it.”

Volume X, unsurprisingly, is Trans Am’s tenth album. It’s the sound of a band determined to remain at odds with its own sense of identity – despite drummer/programmer Sebastian’s modest assertion that the trio (completed by multi-instrumentalist cohorts Phil Manley and Nathan Means) have “figured out the four or five things we do well,” the record brims with ideas that have as yet remained untouched by their hyperactive imaginations.

In accordance with the standard narrative, we’re used to watching participants in the rock’n’roll myth as they gradually run out of ideas, their vision diluted by a nagging sense of audience expectation, or soured by touring’s knack for the erosion of enthusiasm. Not so here: opener Anthropocene finds the group toying with stoner rock’s more outré tendencies, whilst the metallic drive of Backlash sees them inventing a genre they call “kraut-thrash.” Their familiar motorik pulses remain; a repetitive mindfuck that anchors these spiralling ripples of invention. It’s almost enough to make you wonder why they plumped for such an uncharacteristically literal title.


"Life is hard, life is full of fucking bullshit. You’ve gotta fucking laugh at things, right?” – Sebastian Thomson


“It’s volume ten, as in ‘Turn it up to ten!’” goes the chuckled explanation. “And if you move ‘x’ over and make it one word, it sounds like a pharmaceutical company: Volumex! In all honesty, the main reasoning behind it is that it’s the tenth album. And I know that sounds kind of boring, but how many bands can do that? Ten fucking studio albums! That’s pretty impressive, I think.”

“In the early days we lived in the same house, for four years or something, and we were on the road together, in the van together... We’d go into the studio every day of the week, to rehearse and to jam and to record. And then we’d go back to the same house! You can’t keep that up. But y’know, we still like hanging out together. We’ve just discovered how to do it, which is to not live in the same city. When we do see each other, it’s more of an event, as opposed to just… ‘Oh, you again?’”

Formed in the mid-90s, Trans Am initially took root in the post-hardcore mecca that is Washington DC, famously home to Dischord Records and its attendant crowd of excitable minds. Sebastian is aware, however, that his band were far from major players in that particular scene.

“We were always a little bit left out,” he recalls. “When you’re younger, those sort of tribal differences seem more important than they really are, you know? We were very much influenced by Fugazi, Bad Brains and Soulside, and we did start out playing the typical shows of the time – at a church basement as a benefit for a homeless shelter, for example. But we very quickly veered away from that, and I think a lot of people in Washington thought that we were musically traitorous. Like we weren’t keeping true to the aesthetic or the ethos, because… well, we did like to party.”

Gradually, the three young musicians began to drift away from their peers, before stumbling across the sounds that would come to define their most popular records.

“Around '93, we were living in North Carolina for a summer, and we were just kinda bored of what we were doing. We were always fans of electronic music, which to us at the time was things like Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin and Autechre, so we thought ‘Why don’t we just incorporate some of this into the band?’ So I went to the music store and bought a drum module with some pads and triggers – it was a really cool way for us to still have the excitement of a rock band, but make this new fantastical sound with a drum machine. Which now seems totally obvious, but back then it was like ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’”

Over the course of four albums, Trans Am did as much as anyone to blur the lines between punk’s sweat-drenched rush and the pulsating rhythms of electronica, especially on 1999’s landmark Futureworld. Alongside forward-thinkers like Tortoise and Don Caballero, they came to define early understandings of the nascent ‘post-rock’ concept – a term with which our hero still takes issue.

“Post-rock is a strange one for me. It originally meant experimental, underground, instrumental rock music, and it made sense. And then Tortoise became the most popular of those bands, and they were much more dubby and jazzy, so post-rock came to mean that. ‘Soundtrack dub.’ Which is totally not what we do. There’s almost two post-rocks; it’s changed over time.”

With 2002’s T.A., they began to revolt against the general concept of what the band was supposed to be. This resulted in a gleeful collection of upbeat, synthetic pop songs – a deliberate shot at the mainstream, just for the hell of it, which was tragically misinterpreted as an ironic parody of electroclash’s brighter excesses. Again, Sebastian laughs.

“It was a parody of post-rock! No, I take that back. It was a reaction to post-rock. The whole post-rock thing is very po-faced – very few pictures of musicians, all very serious, very intellectualised… and we were reacting against that really. We were like, why can’t you make interesting, innovative music and still have a bit of fun? Why does it have to be one or the other? Obviously, because we’re a bunch of weirdos, our idea of a pop album is totally fucking bizarre. But I think people misinterpret that – there’s nothing in our music which is a joke to us. I think some critics sort of can’t believe that we wear these influences on our sleeves, so they’re like ‘this has to be a joke.’ We do like to entertain people, for sure, but it’s not a joke band.”

Where does the band’s Eno-lampooning ‘obscene strategies’ songwriting technique fit into this then?

“That’s a perfect example of our sense of humour – cracks me up to this day. But we never actually used them; we would just write them up. The ones I remember… ‘Leave the studio unlocked overnight.’ ‘Hose down the mixing desk’. And then there’s one that just said ‘PILLOW FIGHT!’ I mean, whatever. Life is hard, life is full of fucking bullshit. You’ve gotta fucking laugh at things, right?”

Since T.A., the band’s output has slowed down, with its constituent members relocating to different parts of the globe and indulging in their own projects (notably, New York-based Sebastian’s bewitching solo outlet The Publicist took off during the five years he lived in London). The time apart, we’re told, provides the trio with time and space to refresh – not that their enthusiasm ever really seems in question:

“Personally I feel like it’s a project that’s pretty unique. Maybe no-one does what we do, and so therefore we should maybe keep on doing it? It’s hard to explain without sounding like an asshole. It’s not nostalgic music. Even though our image of the future in Trans Am is a little unfashionable at this point, it is in some fantastical way meant to be the future.”

So there you go. The best possible summary of Trans Am in 2014: unique. Fantastical. The future. 

We’ll gladly take another two decades of it.

Volume X is released on 11 Aug via Thrill Jockey. They play Manchester's Ruby Lounge on on 10 Nov http://www.thrilljockey.com/thrill/Trans-Am