motel void

MOTEL VOID: I haven’t found much information about you on the internet. Could you introduce your project in a few sentences?

POWERLINE TRAPS AIRPLANE: powerline traps airplane is a slowcore/lofi pop project, using sonic elements of clean, compressed, and cozy contrasted with distortion and wall of sound. The vision board imagery I’m trying to convert into song includes: watching water damaged home video reels in grandmas basement, power lines that stretch on infinitely to the horizon, secret rooms in a building that only the janitor knows about, and the episode of cowboy bebop where they trek through underground ruins to find a working vhs player.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve just released a debut single ‘powerline traps airplane’. Will it be part of your new album as well?

POWERLINE TRAPS AIRPLANE: The debut single will be on an upcoming full album, as the first song in fact. I like the idea of self-titled songs that are a distillation of what the project is about. I also think it’s kind of funny to name a song the same as the band, so it’s a little joke just for me. So even though it’s short, and maybe not a typical single, I released that song first to introduce powerline traps airplane

MOTEL VOID: Could you tell us more about the recording and writing process of your songs?

POWERLINE TRAPS AIRPLANE: I started this project when I realized I had a collection of songs that didn’t really fit with my main band, 3AM, and making that division has allowed me to get a little weirder and free. I’m letting the music go where it needs to. Most of this is recorded in my DIY bedroom studio. Doing the drums has been a new experience, as for a lot of the songs I’ve been cutting and splicing stems from 3AM and reforming them to these new works (with the drummer’s permission of course!). For all my past diy production it’s always been “how do I get our home recorded drums to sound better” and the inversion of now being like “how do I get these drums to sound like they were recorded on a dusty Califone” has been really fun. All the production is diy, which is a continual learning process.

MOTEL VOID: Your biggest music inspirations right now?

POWERLINE TRAPS AIRPLANE: Foundational influences for this work are bedhead, duster (of course lol), WHY?, cLOUDDEAD, early beck and Alex g. Contemporary influences are Chinese Cigarettes, swim camp, and dark mtns, a country western and 22 degree halo

MOTEL VOID: Your plans for 2024?

POWERLINE TRAPS AIRPLANE: I’ve got 3/4 of an album tracked, which I hope to finish early 2024 and then send around to some diy labels. I’d like to see this release on cassette, I think it will sound nice on tape.