MUSIC
Call it open source rock 'n' roll. The mission of the band Poster Children is to give their fans the tools and inspiration to become as creative as they wanna be. The punk-pop quartet hails from Champaign, Illinois (birthplace of Mosaic), where founding members Rose Marshack and Rick Valentin wrote assembly language code for military-grade flight trainers before launching their group in 1987.
Poster Children's last several albums, boasting marvelously geeky titles like RTFM and DDD, were recorded in their basement and mixed down on a humble Mac Quadra 650 (DDD, released in February, cost less than $500 to produce). Multimedia enhancements on the discs were also done at home, including QuickTime VR tours of the band's programming "lab," original games, HTML tutorials, and tips on launching your own record label.
"Our focus is never to buy the most expensive stuff," Marshack says. "We use what we can afford and let the limitations of our technology become assets."
The group's Web site (www.posterchildren.com) and listserv aren't so much channels for product-flogging as gathering places for quirky young minds. "A couple of the guys on our list," Valentin says admiringly, "have never even heard our music."
Fusing garage-god hooks, Rubik's Cube time signatures, and lyrics that fly on wit rather than angst, the Poster Children are prolific enough for two bands. In fact, sans guitars, they have a thriving second career in Europe as a keyboard techno ensemble called Salaryman.
Currently on tour to support DDD, the band is cooking up a verité account of their travels on the indie circuit, to be shot and edited on digital video. Valentin promises that the film, tentatively titled Zero Stars, will stay true to the surreal realities of life on the road. "It's like space travel," he says.
The listserv kids seem to be getting the message. At a recent show in Texas, fans requested a tune from the first Poster Children album as an encore. The band members couldn't remember the lyrics, but someone in the audience shouted, "I know the words - my band covers it!" Marshack invited the guy and his buddies to take over the instruments and play the song. "What fun!!" Marshack wrote in her online tour journal. What fun indeed.
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