Just to get things straight, Neon Indian is a long distance collaboration – you were in Austin, and she's in Brooklyn, right?

Alan Polomo: Yes, I myself took care of all the music, and I don’t think Alicia has really had the opportunity yet to show off what her contributions to the project are – they’re going to be centered around these little visual one-minute pieces that accompany the music. They will start popping up around the time of the release.

How did you decide to put your efforts together? How do you two known each other?

Polomo: We’d known each other since high school - we actually met on the high school literary mag team. We’re very familiar with each other's work. I was initially inspired to work with her for the Neon Indian stuff after I saw this really unusual stop animation work she did for some Ariel Pink music.

The way that Neon Indian itself got started is kind of a funny story – I had this very unusual dream in which we had taken acid, and in some random conversation one day on the phone I kind of mentioned this, and she kind of responded with “Well...is that something you’d want to do?” Unfortunately we didn’t get to see each other in San Antonio over the holidays – which is where we’re both from – so I wrote this kind of tongue-in-cheek apology song based on a mutual, shared aesthetic - something I thought we would both enjoy.

I left for the University of North Texas for college, and my first initial musical effort was called Ghosthustler, which went on for roughly a year. Upon moving to Austin I thought it would be a good opportunity to start veering into my own direction, and I started working with Vega for pretty much most of that year. Upon completion of Well Known Pleasures, Neon Indian started to come into fruition. At that point I was ready to try a different recording style and just kind of experiment more with the equipment that I had.

From what I heard from Vega, it seemed like more of a hi-fi thing, while Neon Indian is more of a bedroom recording project. Is that accurate?

Polomo: I would definitely say that it’s just a different recording style, but “bedroom recording” would be fairly accurate, since most of the album was written in my bedroom within the course of a month. Vega is definitely a lot more production-oriented, and it’s sort of these premeditated efforts to create these grand-produced dance tracks, while Neon Indian is more about experimentation. It comes from a different creative approach.

People might be curious about what you used to write the Neon Indian music. Is there anything specific you can tell us about your set up?

Polomo: Absolutely. It tends to vary from song to song, given that this project doesn’t have very rigid guidelines in terms of experimentation, and I don’t tend to stick to one style very long. It is kind of this unusual blend between a lot of analog processing, rack-mounted phaser stuff, a lot of mutli-blend distortion and a lot of reduction that goes on through sampling. I’m a big fan of constantly evolving sounds, and if I can do that through phasing or through different kinds types of unsettled distortions, it’s a way to keep a song interesting for me. You might, in a sample-based song, have this little four bar hook that just repeats. As opposed to allowing it get stale, I like the idea of having it being reshaped and kind of transmuting as a song progresses.

You kept your identity a mystery at first. Was that something intentional, trying to keep the focus on the music and away from you and your other projects?

Polomo: Yeah, absolutely. I initially left it as this anonymous project because I wanted people to judge the music completely based on the songwriting and not be affiliated with any other project. I was very curious to hear what the reaction would be, and it gave me the opportunity not to be pigeonholed as a dance project or anything like that.

Given that Neon Indian is more of an intimate project and you’ll be playing Monolith, this big festival, how do you envision your set?

Polomo: It’s just going to be very loud (laughs). The way that we’ve been working at interpreting it leading up to Monolith is trying to find the best inclination of the live songs and still be true to the original aesthetic of the songs. It’s going to be this very fluid performance in which the songs run into each other through these weird sonic interludes. I’m not really sure if it will be dancey, but all I can say at this point is that it will be very loud, and very unusual, especially for a festival set.