motel void

MOTEL VOID: You’re from Portland, Oregon. How would you describe the local music scene? Do you have any favorite venues?

GOLDEN TILES: Very active! There’s always so many great bands and projects, all across the genre map. Since we all listen to a broad range of music, the Portland music scene really fits our listening tendencies.

While we don’t play out a ton, the great post-punk band Chiko has really taken us under their wing and invited us to play on almost every bill they put together.

I think our favorite venue is Turn! Turn! Turn!, a living room-esque space that welcomes all kinds of bands and weirdo arts events. We also love Mississippi Studios, the perfect intimate venue. A newer venue, Swan Dive, is a really interesting spot in the upstairs mini-ballroom of an old brick building.

MOTEL VOID: Your debut EP, The First EP, was released this November on the Antiquated Future label. Could you tell us more about the writing and recording process behind it?

GOLDEN TILES: I think what makes this band unique from other bands we’ve individually played in is that we’re okay with taking things very slowly. We played together for over a year before playing our first show, for example. Similarly, we took our time on this EP. That might sound funny, considering how lo-fi it is, but we just wanted it to have a particular sound for our first time out. We had a very kind offer to record for free in a friend’s studio, but we decided that being in a studio didn’t feel quite right with where we were at. We really just wanted to keep it in our basement practice space. So we bought a cassette four-track and had a recording session last year that we ultimately scrapped. Then we recorded this version at the beginning of this year and just mixed it slowly over the course of the year.

Our singer/guitarist, Oliver, usually brings songs or rough sketches and we flesh them out as a band. It’s a really fun and collaborative process. At this point, the six songs on the EP aren’t our most current songs, but they’re representative of our first couple years of just learning to improvise and write together.

MOTEL VOID: How did your collaboration with the Antiquated Future label begin? Could you also name a few of your favorite artists they’ve released?

GOLDEN TILES: Nepotism, I suppose. Our bassist, Joshua, co-curates the label. He’s maybe not impartial enough to list favorites on the label, but Oliver particularly likes Fred Thomas, Dao Strom, and Yaara Valey’s Antiquated Future releases and Justin loves Yaara Valey and Oh, Rose’s 2024 albums.

MOTEL VOID: Who are your biggest influences right now?

GOLDEN TILES: We don’t talk much about influences as a band. Joshua has played in a lot of mellow and rather restrained projects, so he’s often pushing the band to get a little louder and more free. And Justin often tries to get some dance-y beats into the mix. But songwriting influences mainly apply to Oliver, who has recently been especially most inspired by the Neil Young archive project, Teen Suicide/Julia Brown, Greg Mendez, Low, Bedhead, Duster, Love, Mick Turner, and Lomelda.

MOTEL VOID: Do you have plans for a tour to promote your new album?

GOLDEN TILES: Well, part of our slowness as a band is due to the fact that we’re all teachers in one form or another and not all of us have summers off. Since this EP took us so long to mix and fit into the Antiquated Future release schedule, we already have the seeds of our first full-length. So, hopefully we’ll be able to get a short tour together whenever that comes to be. But right now it’s largely about bringing our new songs to life.

We didn’t expect much fanfare with this EP—we put it out too close to the holidays, we didn’t have a release show, we really just wanted to do it to prove we existed. But the response has been so sweet and surprising; it’s really got us excited for what’s next.