Culture

Three Mile Pilot's Sci-Fi Art-Rock Readies for Relaunch

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This two-song 7-inch contains the first new music from Three Mile Pilot in more than a decade.
Image courtesy Temporary Residence

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Three Mile Pilot

Merging sci-fi, horror, military manuals and vintage videogame Star Control, Three Mile Pilot’s challenging art-punk never really had a chance to explode before the trio fractured around the turn of the century.

Now the band is crawling from the music-industry wreckage on the back of its sonic descendants — laptop-poppers Pinback and Systems Officer and goth-folkies The Black Heart Procession — and clearing the launch pad for a Three Mile Pilot comeback in 2010.

“The new record is being mixed,” said bassist Zach Smith, whose post-Three Mile Pilot project Pinback is on tour through mid-November. (Smith’s solo project, Systems Officer, releases its debut Underslept, next month as well.)

Other Three Mile Pilot members have kept busy since the breakup as well. Singer/guitarist Pall Jenkins and keyboardist Tobias Nathaniel splintered off with Black Heart Procession, currently touring in support of recent album Six.

Three Mile Pilot, Pinback, Systems Officer and Black Heart Procession have all found a home on Temporary Residence Limited, which recently released Three Mile Pilot’s first new tunes in a decade (at right), available on limited-edition 7-inch vinyl.

The splinter groups’ tours could give Three Mile Pilot’s anticipated full-length album the kind of publicity punch the band sorely lacked back when its experimental rock was bounced between indie and major labels.

Three Mile Pilot’s The Chief Assassin to the Sinister is the most ambitious album you’ve never heard.

Image courtesy Cargo Music“It’s been over 10 years since we got twisted in the world of Geffen, which is when we broke off,” Smith said. “Now that we’re back with drummer Tom Zinser in the mix, we’re not worrying about it. That’s how we were in those early days: happy to be together.”

Back in that alternative universe of the ’90s, making a punk album like Na Vucca Do Lupu using only Smith’s spidery bass, Zinser’s whirlwind drums and Jenkins’ throat-shredding vocals was career suicide. Same goes for the stark, surreal epics on The Chief Assassin to the Sinister, an album imbued with the military sci-fi of the game Star Control.

But Three Mile Pilot’s musical and lyrical experimentation made for riveting listening.

“We played Star Control a lot,” the self-described “military brat” Jenkins told Wired.com by phone. “Now the guys have moved onto World of Warcraft.”

Jenkins and his band mates thought Star Control‘s cloaking devices, fighting styles and names were cool enough to graft directly onto unconventional Chief Assassin tracks like “Androsyn Guardian” and “Chenjesu.”

Not that those gamer homages were the only ammo in Three Mile Pilot’s clip: From the sci-fi of “Shang vs. Hangar” to the skeletal fury of “Circumcised,” Chief Assassin to the Sinister remains one of the most ambitious musical exercises you’ve probably never heard.

LISTEN: “Circumcised” by Three Mile Pilot

“We were in a military mind,” Smith said of the sophomore effort’s martial art-rock. “We were into crazy gas masks and weird technical manuals. San Diego bled into that. My grandfather was the head of the Miramar Navy base. In San Diego, you can’t go far without seeing an aircraft carrier.”

Even the straight-ahead indie rock of Three Mile Pilot’s last official full-length, Another Desert, Another Sea, fit the mainstream like a hole in the head. But destruction demands reconstruction, and Jenkins’ and Smith’s work outside the defunct band would come to overshadow Three Mile Pilot’s unclassifiable catalog.

Zach Smith, right, and Rob Crow formed Pinback shortly after Three Mile Pilot imploded.

Image courtesy Touch and Go

An early evolution took shape with Pinback, the low-budget, laptop-pop duo named after the lovable loser from the cult sci-fi classic Dark Star. Smith formed the band with multitasking uber-geek Rob Crow, who has as many bands as most people have living relatives. Then Smith channeled his rage at Pilot’s label drama by drafting a series of cerebral and danceable full-lengths that captivated taste-makers as different as The O.C. and Digg’s Kevin Rose.

Even YouTube remixers got a kick out of Pinback: One seamlessly integrated the duo’s kinetic single “From Nothing to Nowhere” into the corny dance scene from The Breakfast Club. The mashup made sense: Pinback was one of the earliest bands to exploit personal computers to make indie music for mass consumption.

LISTEN: “B” BY PINBACK

“It was amazing that we didn’t have to sit around in the studio and watch some dude change the reels,” Smith said of the band’s early days wrestling with SAWStudio, multitracking software that would make GarageBand noobs lose their minds if they had to use it today.

“Computers and software have gotten better since then,” laughed Smith, who’s now a fan of Cubase. “But in the beginning we were scared to death that nothing was going to render. We thrashed so many CDs trying to burn the first Pinback album, because we never had backed up a computer before that. It never crossed our minds until we lost about half that album.”

Image courtesy Temporary Residence" title="black-heart-procession_optimized" width="342" height="227" class="size-full wp-image-19553"> Pall Jenkins, right, and Tobias Nathaniel have moved from games and sci-fi to melodrama and horror with Black Heart Procession.

Image courtesy Temporary Residence LimitedThe Breakfast Club is a far cry from Blade Runner, the film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, that both Jenkins and Smith say is the last sci-fi film that truly baked their noodles.

Following Three Mile Pilot’s hiatus, Jenkins leaned more toward theatrical melodrama and surreal horror, teaming up with Pilot pianist Nathaniel to form Black Heart Procession and churn out six confessional efforts filled with bleeding organs and mental mystery.

“I guess it’s like seeing a horror movie and you leave thinking, ‘Thank God my life isn’t that fucked,'” Jenkins said of his band’s preference for sinister tones and themes.

“Toby and I write better in the darker realm,” he said. “With Six, I didn’t want any apologies or happy endings. I didn’t want to say that we’re all going to be OK.”

LISTEN: “A SIGN ON THE ROAD” BY BLACK HEART PROCESSION

Jenkins is speaking about the music industry as much as he is about his band’s latest effort.

Earlier this year, the indie music landscape was delivered a knockout blow when Touch and Go — the label home of Black Heart Procession, Pinback and Three Mile Pilot, which also served as a spiritual home to fans of nonconformist music by bands like The Jesus Lizard and Slint — was severely downsized.

Three Mile Pilot Likes:

Maritime metaphor: “Systems Officer songs are all about ships,” Smith said. “One called ‘Sand 2’ is about me sinking in one. If there’s no ocean, beach or breeze, then it’s not Pinback, Black Heart Procession or Three Mile Pilot.”

The Bridge: “I just watched it,” said Jenkins. “It’s about how people jump off of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The filmmakers shot it for a year straight, and witnessed several people jumping. It makes you think for days.”

Three Mile Pilot Dislikes:

Auto-Tune: “It drives me crazy,” said Smith. “That’s where the beauty of computers gets scary. I’ve probably tuned my vocals five times over several years, but nothing like Cher. I can’t stand the sound.”

District 9: “I was really excited to see it,” said Jenkins. “But after 10 minutes, I was like, ‘Who the fuck wants to watch a movie about a guy whose hands turn into lobster claws?’ Maybe I’m talking about some great director, but District 9 is not a good sci-fi movie.”

The combination of a pernicious economic recession and a music industry still maddeningly unsure how to survive a digital transformation collapsed the label’s roster and staff, sending Three Mile Pilot and its sonic spinoffs (as well as the bands of Pinback’s Crow) once again in search of a home.

“It was a real blow, because I always wanted to be on that label,” Jenkins said. “The music industry is in a sad state when labels like Touch and Go have to close their doors. It was like having your home and job taken away from you.”

“It gets us into another conversation about how the album is dead,” Smith added. “As much as it’s great that kids are sharing music, because music is for sharing, iTunes is part of the problem: Now people decide to buy the hit. But bands like ours want you to listen to our albums from beginning to end. If you download only one song, you’re not going to get any idea of what the band is about.”

Nowadays, bands better have their live shows in order if they want to make any money at music, Smith said. Luckily, Three Mile Pilot and its members’ other bands have zero problem filling a stage (especially when Crow’s various groups are figured into the equation). Right now, all the bands are touring separately for months, getting warmed up for Three Mile Pilot’s proper tour next year.

So why not join forces and centralize the San Diego squad for a mammoth, multiband tour?

“We’ve always thought about it, but it never quite materializes,” Smith said. “Instead of three bands, we’d present a 30-song set, with shifting musicians walking on and off the stage. We could make it one huge show under this umbrella of a name we don’t know yet. I think it would be cool to have it all meld together, because that’s what it’s been like for us. Three Mile Pilot was about experimentation, not just verse/chorus/verse.”

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