When Seattle recording studio Calleye burned down Jan. 8, it took the masters of self-described “po-pomo post-punk” trio Motorik’s new record, Klang!, with it. Motorik guitarist Adrian Garver, though, isn’t losing any sleep.



“The digital age is evil in its own way,” he told me recently over the phone. With today’s technologies, a record is never finished.



“You can endlessly change it,” says Garver. Bands can go nuts second guessing.

With Klang!, what you hear is what you get. There won’t be a remix; the DNA is lost. The angular beats, twitchy guitar and insistent, muscular vocals are frozen in time, chiseled in digital stone. For a band that somehow makes the modern feel prehistoric, the accident seems a fitting twist of fate.



Po-pomo (usually popomo), in case you’re wondering, is short for post-postmodern. And, in case you’re wondering, you live in the popomo era. And don’t worry, no one else knows what the hell that means either.



Put simply, Motorik is end-times rock. Imagine a Mad Max wasteland littered with the bones of mighty machines. Imagine strange, dark-clad scavengers sorting through them, salvaging rods and gears to create weird new deadly contraptions. Now imagine the decrepit machines are old albums, the scavengers are musicians and the wild resulting contrivance is Klang!



Garver, drummer Hoagie Gero and bassist/vocalist Sio are unapologetic musical vultures — admitted vinyl addicts all. And Sio is downright depraved.



“If you walked in and looked at Sio’s record collection, you wouldn’t step away from the pile for like four or five hours,” Garver told me.



Her tastes are bafflingly eclectic. “You’d be amazed at the stuff that’s in there — good, bad and indifferent. When I let her, she’ll torture me with this wack-ass ’80s stuff. Then she’ll turn around and put on Van Morrison.”



Motorik takes its name from the “motorik,” or “Apache,” beat popularized by ’70s and ’80s krautrock bands like Kraftwerk and Neu! (thanks, Wikipedia), bands many haven’t heard of, much less collected, much less referenced in their own creative work. Based on the name, it would be easy to flag Motorik as “a sort of — ugh — techno-pop,” as Maude Lebowski describes the fictional band Autobahn, a Kraftwerk parody, in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. Motorik’s sound is a little bit techno-pop (no ugh). But it’s also a little bit punk, a little bit post-punk, a little bit goth, a little bit prog, a little bit Northwest garage and grunge, and a little bit Tex-Mex. OK, maybe not Tex-Mex. But you get the point.



Garver sees a lot of bands — a lot of good bands — that seem to “pick through a focus group” who they’ll emulate. But Motorik isn’t so precise. They sort through the musical rubble, keep what they like and leave what they don’t. The sum of the parts is an invention all their own. Its shape is recognizable, but you can’t quite name it, either.

Heading up the process is Sio. While Garver and drummer Hoagie Gero have played together in bands dating back to the early ’90s, they have no trouble deferring to their gifted frontwoman.  



“She grew up roadie-ing for her parents’ bluegrass band,” Garver says. “She took naps under the piano. Music is just in her.” 



And it all comes out on Klang! First of all, Sio plays a mean bass. (One listener reportedly called her “Les Claypool with a vagina.”) But what stands out most is the voice. Her vocals have the weight and depth of Grace Slick’s, but there’s nothing slick about her delivery. (Pun intended. Cha-ching!) Sio’s singing is sharp and forceful, as percussive as it is expressive.



Sharp and forceful might be a good way of describing Sio herself. Or it might not. Even Garver can’t pin her down.



“She definitely believes in couture,” he told me. So she’s feminine and sexy. But Garver says too that girls in the audience are sometimes taken aback by her. Not that she’s, like, mean or anything. It’s just that ...



Maybe the word is uncompromising. Motorik is an uncompromising band with an uncompromising leader.  Klang! is an uncompromising disc — popomo uncompromising — and some will be taken aback by it, or just plain hate it. But according to Garver, it’s only the beginning of their end-times sound. “Whatever’s abrasive on this record,” he says, “will be even more so on the next. I think that if people get your personality, the more of it you have, the more of it they get.”

Get it?



[Bob’s Java Jive, with GROWLR, Fun Fun Fun and If Bears Were Bees, Friday, April 17, 8 p.m., $5, 2102 S. Tacoma Way, Tacoma, 253.475.9843]