Portland Electronic Duo Microfilm Is Branching Into Dance Music … – Willamette Week

If there’s one thing consistent about the music that Microfilm has made together over the past 15 years and change, it’s that everything they do is a reaction to their previous work. The Portland duo’s last album, O/V/N/I, was a sprawling and spaced-out opus containing a six-minute, beatless, astrally drifting cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” So what’s the next logical step? An album of dance music, of course.

“We don’t really like repeating ourselves and making a replica from album to album,” says singer Matt Keppel, who forms the duo with his husband, Matt Mercer. “Some artists do that, but we like to have some kind of different goal for the next thing.”

Enter Body Arcana, an album that leans heavily into the sounds of ‘80s and ‘90s clubland, especially the tough, danceable, experimental acts through which the duo first approached electronic music: Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, The Human League. An interview with the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant from Keppel’s youthful music journalism days is sampled throughout closer “Pink Champagne, White Label,” and other songs shout out Australian disco diva Kylie Minogue and legendary English smooth-soul singer Sade.

If you’re thinking this turn from insular, cerebral ambient toward the communal ecstasy of dance music has something to do with emerging from pandemic lockdown, you’d be right—but not in the way you’d think.

“The first year-plus of the pandemic was really creatively rewarding for some people because they had a lot of time on their hands,” Mercer says. “But for me at least, I felt really blocked for that whole first year and a half or so. I think that’s part of why those tracks [on O/V/N/I] all came together kind of slowly.”

The tracks on Body Arcana came quickly and spontaneously in comparison. “We were leaning toward dance music again for the first time in a while, and I was able to bang out some tracks relatively quickly,” Mercer says. “And it happened to click with what Matt was exploring lyrically.”

Keppel and Mercer met in 2004 in Chicago through planetout.com, an early queer dating site. Mercer had been making music for a while, but Keppel had never sung on record before Microfilm began recording.

“This lovely voice just started coming out,” Keppel says, laughing. “I just wanted to try it, and I asked [Matt] if I could do it on some music he was making. And it snowballed pretty quickly—we had 10 tracks in about two months.”

Microfilm released their debut album, After Dark, in 2006 during a transitional time for the music industry, when digital downloads were beginning to dominate the music market and the streaming era was faintly on the horizon. They were early users of iTunes, one of the only places to buy digital downloads at the time, and their beginnings coincided with the rise of MP3 blogs.

“I think our bestselling album was the one that we leaked through a bunch of MP3 blogs and even, like, piracy blogs,” Mercer says. “We were just like, here’s a link to this album. And then a bunch of people downloaded it, and it turned into sales.”

“It’s weird how the blog era was a big access point for a lot of people, and now that’s kind of gone away,” Keppel says. “It’s back to being a little bit more gatekeeper-y than it was. And there’s a lot more competition—I think there’s just a lot more people making music.”

Microfilm has remained prolific in the time since, and Body Arcana is only one of a long list of projects in the tank for the duo. Mercer is releasing a solo album called Sub/Super later this month on Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and they have a remix project tentatively slated to come out next month (“It’s not other people remixing us, which is what usually happens; it’s us remixing ourselves, in a way,” Keppel says cryptically).

They’ve also got a soundtrack to an imaginary horror film finished, which they’re planning to put out in October to suit a Halloween theme, and more tracks from the Body Arcana sessions.

“Since we were kind of banging through stuff for this record, we did even more tracks than the 10 that are on there,” Keppel says. They’re thinking of turning them into their own album, which would be a breakthrough for the duo in its own way—the first Microfilm project that isn’t a reaction to the last one.