Trabants ‘Mirage’ – Video Premiere

Trabants (pronounced Truh-bonts) is orchestrated by musical auteur Eric Penna. They’ve shared bills with Dick Dale, Charlie Megira, Mark Sultan of The King Khan & BBQ Show, Yonatan Gat of Monotonix, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, La Luz, Messer Chups, The Sloths and more. They’ve played festivals across the world including the Surfer Joe Festival (Italy), Tiki Kon (Portland, Ore.) and Surf Guitar 101 Festival (Los Angeles). The roster of Trabants contributors have included members/sidemen of bands as diverse as The Pharcyde, The Monkees, World/Inferno Friendship Society and many more.

Penna’s songs have been used in a variety of media such as, Netflix’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Hulu’s Shut Eye, MTV’s Catfish, broadcasts by the MLB and UFC, Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours To Hell And Back, Becoming featuring Johnny Knoxville, films like Surf Noir, T-Rex, the recent documentary Blackangelcity, and ad campaigns for Zales, Mountain Dew, Yeti, Kit Kat and others. He was nominated for an Independent Music Award for best instrumental album.

”Mirage’ is the heart of this LP. Though it doesn’t get as fuzzy as many of the other songs on the record do, it elicits a spiritual journey which is central to the whole album. It was originally conceived as a more aggressive, driving, traditional surf song but drummer Pete Curry turned the whole thing on its side, creating a far more nuanced feel. He held back but layered the drums and it’s as if he took me from the desert and put me in the jungle. I ran with this new feeling and it led me down some paths I don’t usually follow, such as the use of vocalisations in the choruses. It helps distinguish the song and adds to the overall “lush” feeling when the chorus opens up; you almost feel the sunshine hit your face through a veil of rainforest leaves.That’s a really visceral feeling and I like when instrumental music can be evocative of things like that. For example, “feel the sunshine hit your face through a veil of rainforest leaves” isn’t the best lyric actually, but if the music evokes that feeling, It works better than spelling it out.

The guitar sounds are provided by the 1963 Fender Showman leant to the band by Portland instrumental surf legends Satan’s Pilgrims. It’s a magical, powerful, shimmering tone that has fueled the sounds of Dick Dale and countless other surf music legends before. The amp has a real presence that is impossible to duplicate with today’s technology (don’t believe anyone who says otherwise). The tone is a living, breathing thing that compliments the overall human feeling of “Mirage.”

The video is in fact a sequel to the video we made for our song “Mantra” from our most recent 45. I wanted the visuals to match the psychedelic nature of the music. Both videos share a protagonist who I like to call the psychedelic siren who, to me, represents creativity and inspiration. The siren navigates a labyrinth of obstacles in an attempt to transcend from abstraction into reality. Conceptually, I imagine two parts to our perceived existence – a concrete world and an abstract world – both existing at the same time but on separate planes. In the “Mantra” video, our psychedelic siren transcends from the concrete world to the abstract world; beginning the video in one realm and ending in the other. In the “Mirage” video, she sees herself lost in the abstract world and longs to return to the concrete world. That’s the cerebral backstory but the enjoyment comes from seeing the abstract obstacles she encounters throughout the journey.

I don’t consider myself a visual artist but I did enjoy creating images in the vein of ’60s european cinema. Few things inspire me in the same way as movies like Blow-Up, Danger Diabolik, The 10th Victim, etc… I love the bright colors and striking composition. I wanted to mix that with a touch of the surrealism found in the work of Spanish/Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñel. It was fun to dive into some of these different influences I don’t get to explore often.