In Fly Awake, a semi-hidden tea room in Portland, Oregon, three of the members of Hybrid Forms are looking at and talking about an oversized zine by Cap’n Jazz/Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella. It’s a collaborative catalog published by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago for a 2014 exhibition of photos by Michael Schmelling that also contains an essay by Kinsella. Titled Total Permission in Blue Utopia, the essay is a rumination on both the nature of music and the nature of making music. Kinsella had actually given Hybrid Forms guitarist/vocalist Matt Taylor a copy in 2018 when Joan of Arc played Portland. At the time, Taylor worked in the thriving legal weed industry and gave Kinsella some of his best bud, and he received the publication in return. Little did he know how inspirational it would be to a fledgling Hybrid Forms.
The band is now rounded out by fellow guitarist/vocalist/“house goblin” Kyle Lefton—absent today due to a recent vasectomy (“Please put that in the piece,” laughs Taylor. “The goblins don’t want to reproduce in Trump’s America!”)—bassist Andrew Legg, and drummer Keith Young. A few years on from that fateful exchange, Hybrid Forms have become a staple of the Portland alternative scene, and have just released their newest EP, the brilliantly titled Daydream Indignation. Recorded at Chicago’s famed Electrical Audio studio, it’s a bold and beautiful EP that not only demonstrates the incredibly unique range of Hybrid Forms—and the ever important hybrid forms that weave their songs together—but which fully immerses you in their own daydream unreality and transports you deep into the strange, mystical world that their magical soundscapes—which the band call “’nades,” short for “marinades”—conjure up.
Listen to the EP below, and read FLOOD’s conversation with the band’s three other goblins to get a glimpse of their weird, wonderful planes of existence.
Didn’t Hybrid Forms first start as a kind of poetry project for Kyle before becoming a bona fide band?
Matt Taylor: Hybrid Forms’ true origin essence is Kyle and I’s love story, because I invented him when I turned 30 and my partner and I at the time split ways, and I was like, “You know what? I need a best friend really bad.” Within a few months, I was introduced to Kyle at a show where his band Cave Full of Spiders played in a living room that was about to collapse because there were so many people jumping up and down. It turns out, serendipitously, we live two blocks away from each other, and then I find out, as we start hanging more, that he is, indeed, a goblin—he’s exactly the fucking fantastical adventure friend that I’ve always wanted. And so part of our lore is that I manifested him by just wanting a friend, and he was just plucked from the realm in which Andrew has basically illustrated for this EP cover.
The mythos of the band has developed significantly since then, obviously. It’s almost like there’s another universe that goes back eternities lying beneath the surface.
MT: We’re building that, because this miserable, capitalistic, postmodern, post-truth world we're living in...what else do we have? I’m tired of bands fronted by white men fucking leading this platitudinal charge of all the easy tropes of being a political band without actually really putting a lot of action behind it. The quote from bell hooks that always rings so true to me is that the role of an artist is not to tell things how they are, but to imagine a better world is possible. And so at this time we all want to escape into this more fantastical world. When we’re staring down the barrel of the futuristic hellscape, Armageddon, Terminator or Mad Max world, we’d much rather be in fucking 500 AD with a sword in our fucking hands fighting other assholes, but where the playing field is a lot more level. I wish we were in that time, but we’re not. We’re going to have to fight drones and shit, so we might as well poke fun at that absurdity.
There’s a lot of political conjecture tucked into our words, but as a band we’re trying to carve out our own alcove of, like, fantastical enjoyment, and bring people into that world—and also hold the funhouse mirror up to the absurdity that’s happening out there at all times. And that’s why we joke that our genre—since we don’t know what our genre is—is “post-glacier.”
The aesthetics of which very much fit in with the idea that there are eons behind this music.
MT: Yeah, it’s the tip of the iceberg and it’s melted it into a cauldron with the rest of the goop. The joke is: I’m tired of things being unprecedented, can we get back to precedented? And “post-glacier” is a tongue-in-cheek way of trying to get ahead of the curve, because we’re creating the fad now. We’re creating “post-glacier” before the glaciers have all melted. But it’s also a poke at the fact that we’re a melting pot of genres and we’re just drawing from different things that move us.
Not only is the title Daydream Indignation brilliant, but this feels like a record that you have to listen to all the way through, all at once. Like everything else you’ve made, this isn’t created for the world of Spotify playlists.
Keith Young: That’s what I really love about the EP—you have to listen to it front to back. Otherwise you’ll miss the point. In my opinion, it’s like a really fucking good movie: You can’t just stop it at a certain point once it starts. Every time I put it on, I won’t do anything else until it’s finished, because I’m so captivated by it. And I don’t want that to come off as arrogant or conceited. It’s just a piece of art that truly has to be taken in as a whole. You can’t half-ass it.
How do you feel the Portland scene has influenced you?
Andrew Legg: I love it. There are a lot of really amazing people in Portland right now. There’s a new scene growing. And what’s really cool to be a little part of that right now is that we’re always playing mixed bills. We play with so many different kinds of bands, and we can cater our set to whatever we need. Or we can just fucking rip this dream-pop show, who gives a shit? But there’s such an openness to cross-genre shows. And there are a lot of youngsters that are really brilliant musicians, too. To see kids going off at shows these days, it’s a blast to witness.
