The Helio Sequence
Young Loud and Effectual

Words by Marcus Kagler



There’s a short introductory article on The Helio Sequence on page 90 of Issue 4 of Under the Radar. Below is the full article on the band, based on the same interview.

“We recently made the front page of our local newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon,” says vocalist/guitarist Brandon Summers of the duo The Helio Sequence. “We’re recording our new album in a bedroom above the garage of my parents house right now and we’ve had some major complaints so far.”

“Yeah, but the newspaper story was about this rooster that was loose in the neighborhood,” laughs the band’s other half and drummer Benjamin Weikel. “People were complaining because the rooster was waking them up really early in the morning. This made the front page which is ridiculous. A story about a rooster. Anyway, there was a quote from this one girl who lives next door and she said, ‘I don’t mind the rooster. The band playing the loud music next door is much more annoying than the rooster.”

It’s a cloudless and sunny afternoon in Los Angeles and Summers and Weikel are in the middle of scarfing down burritos at a Mexican restaurant on the Sunset Strip. The two boys who make up the Helio Sequence look like they haven’t gotten a decent nights sleep in days. Considering they’ve been on their first headlining tour for the past few weeks they probably haven’t. The guys have recently arrived in town fresh off of a sold out show at South by Southwest and freely admit to living it up on tour as much as humanly possible. Once they return home it’s back to the room above the garage in order finish their untitled third album. The first thing one notices upon meeting Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel is how young they look. Indeed, Summers is the ripe old age of 23 while Weikel is the elder of the two at 26. Having already released two incredibly profound and dense albums it’s hard to believe these two young kids are such seasoned artists. But if you’ve already heard The Helio Sequence peculiar brand of electro-garage-space-rock then you know they are no novelty. Yes, Summers was only 17 when the band released their first full length album Com Plex but The Helio Sequence are a far cry from Hanson. This Oregon duo’s sound leans more toward the complex avant-garde textures of My Bloody Valentine mixed with the lap-top generated burps and splutters of German electronic guru’s Mouse On Mars, than bubble-gum teen pop. Not only are they an incredibly talented pair of musicians but The Helio Sequence have gone the extra mile by producing all of their own material too. If anything, Summers and Weikel are the prototype for the new generation of do-it-yourself-because-you’re-poor-but-the-albums-sound-professional batch of musicians that have been sweeping America’s underground music scene for the past few years. Oh yeah, and they also like to play at an ungodly volume level. Going to a Helio Sequence show will certainly test the endurance of your eardrums.

“We play loud because it feels good,” says Summers, munching on a tortilla chip. “Guitars are supposed to be played loud. So is a drum set and that’s how we play them.”

“We like to rock the PA until it fizzles,” says Weikel with a devilish grin. “There are just certain textures from a guitar you can’t hear unless there is a certain amount of volume. It’s just a great sound you don’t get if you play quiet.”

If you witnessed their intensely energetic and kinetic live show at the Knitting Factory that night (or any of their other live shows) the first thing you will think to yourself after they wrap the set is, “Wow! That was amazing...and really fucking loud!” Of course, that’s if you can hear yourself think. Hailing from the Portland, Oregon suburb of Beaverton (claim to fame: the home of Nike world headquarters) the boys of The Helio Sequence had a humble beginning to say the least. “I was really good friends with Ben’s younger brother,” says Summers. “Ben was the older brother who was old enough to be in bands that actually played clubs and stuff. So me and Ben’s brother would sneak in and play with their gear when they weren’t practicing. I guess eventually Ben and I just started working together.”

“It was because my brother was dating his sister and they would be up all night talking on the phone,” elaborates Weikel. “So Brandon would come over to my place and spend the night and we would stay up watching Bohemian After Dark. We liked that show because they would play Aphex Twin and My Bloody Valentine videos. You know, the weird ones.”

Although they didn’t have a name for the band Summers and Weikel began recording what Weikel calls “super-ridiculously ambient textural stuff or really straight on Beatles pop shit with lots of harmonies” yet the songs never quite came together as the band thought they should. Their first unofficial gig was something of a family affair. “The first time we played was at this family picnic on my side of the family,” recalls Summers. “I was like 15 at the time and I didn’t have a band so I went to Ben and was like, ‘My mom wants us to play this picnic and I got this cool idea.’ Ben was in another band at the time, but he had all this keyboard stuff that he wasn't using at the time. He was really getting into keyboards. So we figured, ‘Well, we’ll sequence keyboards and mess with that.’ So at the picnic we plugged all these keyboards into a monitor about the size of a CD.”

“Everyone had to be real quiet so I could hear it,” says Weikel with a chuckle.

“This was in like 1995. We only played a couple of songs because that’s all we had. Then we went through the super-ambient stuff and the super-Beatles recordings. Around 1998 we decided to do this musical turn.”

The shift from the ambient/Beatles songs was when the Helio Sequence began to take their job seriously. Not only did they finally find a name for themselves, but they also discovered their own sound. It may have taken them a few years of experimentation, but in late ’98 the band stumbled upon a sound that (as far as they could tell) nobody else was doing. To accurately describe The Helio Sequence is something of a monumental task. There are so many different genres, textures, and over all sonic combustion going on within any given Helio Sequence track that it’s hard to slap a label on it. A song like “Give Give Give” begins with the prettiest electronic bells and whistles this side of a Star Wars droid before layering on a ton of shoegazer guitar effects. Then over that Weikel’s insanely complicated rock-drumming busts down the door until Summer’s finally swaggers up to the microphone and starts singing and yelling like The Hives partying with Iggy. That’s barely within the first minute of the song. Over the course of the next five minutes “Give Give Give” twists, turns and generally just keeps layering sounds upon sounds until it’s so full the song can barely be contained, so it has to end. That’s the general blueprint for a Helio Sequence track. Summers and Weikel are inclined to use multiple layers of textured sound until the song builds into such a surreal mass of dementia it literally has to stop because it has nowhere left to go. Their songs would almost be exhausting to listen to if they weren’t so damn catchy and interesting.

When asked to describe their sound even the band members find themselves at a loss. “It’s really dancy. It’s really noisy. It’s really melodic,” is Weikel's best description. Summers is a little more elaborate but not much. “Some people say its way too out there to be pop. It’s too progressive. But others say it’s just normal pop. I say it’s just rock music with a twist. People have made the weirdest comparisons to describe us. It’s everything from, ‘You guys sound like King Crimson meets Tears for Fears’ to ‘Pink Floyd meets XTC.’ It’s really weird.”
In 1999 The Helio Sequence signed with their local independent label Cavity Search and released their debut Com Plex to rave reviews. They also began playing around the Pacific Northwest to enthusiastic crowds, building a fan base one show at a time. The band’s 2001 sophomore effort, Young Effectuals further explored their schizophrenic leanings and proved to be something of landmark album for the boys. Young Effectuals is the sound of The Helio Sequence truly hitting the mark. With every song on full sensory overload there isn’t an album out there quite like it. “When we were doing Young Effectuals we just weren’t happy until every song was jam-packed with sounds,” says Weikel. “If the song wasn’t full enough we could just feel it. So we kept layering more and more sounds until it felt right.”

Yet The Helio Sequence are more than just talented musicians. Over the course of two albums now they have proved to be outstanding producers in their own right. Summers and Weikel spent an average of six months per album utilizing a computer as their studio. It’s a painstakingly long process, but one that gives them total creative control as well as pushing them into new directions. “We like to create in the studio,” says Weikel. “We always have songs that are entirely created in the studio. Half of the songs on the last two albums were completely made in the studio. It’s just a different experience than writing a song live. We record everything ourselves because if we were paying a certain amount of money per hour of studio time I don’t know if that creativity is going to come across as well.”

“These days I just don’t think it’s necessary to spend thousands of dollars an hour on studio time unless that studio has a certain piece of equipment you need or comes with a certain producer you want to work with,” says Summers. “For the most part studios have become less important.”

“I think it’s the dawn of new age where if bands have their shit together and know how to utilize a computer then they can play a major part in the production of their albums,” elaborates Weikel. “They can be apart of the creative process of the album full circle; from beginning to end. You no longer need somebody to engineer it and make certain sounds for you. Now a band can get in there and say, ‘This is the guitar sound I want. This is the drum sound I want. This is the sound I want for this song.’ Then you can sit down and make that sound happen and it costs next to nothing in the long run.” When asked if they would ever consider working with an outside producer the band says they had thought about it for this new record, but ultimately couldn’t think of anybody they would want to work with on such a limited budget. “The danger of having an outside producer is you might get a guy who is like, ‘I really want to be the producer in the sense that I want to help you write your songs,’” says Summers. “I don’t want somebody in there going, ‘O.K. cut that keyboard part. That guitar part isn’t right. Change it.’ No, we want to control the writing so we control what we sound like.”

Probably the most obscure story about the Helio Sequence recording process is the tale of their first “studio”. Since the boys didn’t have a place to record their first album they opted to make the record in the guitar shop where they were employed at the time. “We would have to clear the floor of the store every night at 8 o’clock and set up our monitoring system and all the rest of stuff,” explains Weikel. “Then we would plug everything in and record until 2 or 3 in the morning. Break all of our stuff down and hide it as best we could. If we ever left any evidence our boss would get really mad.”

“Yeah,” says Summers. “There was a stage in there that they would use for in-stores and we would hide our gear under there.”
“Our boss never knew that a lot of our stuff was under the stage the whole time. Towards the end of night at like 4 or 5 in the morning we would have to set the store back up. A lot of times it would be so late we would just sleep in the store for a few hours then wake up and open the shop.”

These late night session yielded their debut album Com Plex, but the recording arrangements proved to be a little unstable. “After our first tour we had to quit that job because it came to a point where our boss wouldn’t let us leave for a month and a half or two months at a time,” says Summers with a hardy laugh. “So we kind of bit the bullet and bid that job goodbye. Now we’re doing what we can to make money by playing shows and just getting by. We’ll make rent this month, but probably not the month after that.”
“We’re so poor it’s amazing,” says Weikel.

Since the release of Young Effectuals the boys have opted to leave Cavity Search and are now in the process of shopping for a new label. They hope to have their third album out by the end of the year if they can work out a suitable distribution deal. When asked about the new material Summers says, “I would say its step away from Young Effetuals. I don’t want to say it’s more direct in the mix, but a lot of elements are closer in the mix. The vocals are a little bit more prominently mixed. I’ve been focusing a lot on lyric writing and writing vocal parts for the songs on this one. We’re kind of getting different things in there like some harmonica and stuff.”

“I think this new record is more of a direct reflection of our influences over the past few years,” says Weikel. “More Kraftwerk and Talking Heads than My Bloody Valentine and Mouse on Mars. Four songs are totally done and recorded then we have an additional 8 or 9 songs we’re still playing with.”

Judging from the two new songs the band played at the Knitting Factory show the Helio Sequence still seem to be pushing themselves into new and unfamiliar territory. As a band their ambition is their greatest strength. If more bands showed as much drive and talent as The Helio Sequence then rock ‘n’ roll as we know it just might be saved after all. It’s all in the progression of the genre and The Helio Sequence are simply adding another chapter to the rock ‘n’ roll novel of the past fifty years. Let’s just hope the band doesn’t get booted out of the bedroom above the garage before they can complete the next record.

“I hope we can finish it before they kick us out,” laughs Summers. “The new album might be a five song record because we got kicked out.”

“But we’re not breaking any laws though,” explains Weikel. “By law we have to stop by six o’clock in the evening sharp and we always do.”

“It’s a really nice neighborhood too,” giggles Brandon Summers. “But it’s really loud until six.”