BETWEEN STATIONS

Right now the universe is playing the song of the Big Bang…

It plays all the time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after. This song goes on and on and on, saturating space, bombarding earth. Huge and always in-rotation, you could say it's the cosmic disk jockey's favorite tune. Only, this song is not particularly tuneful; there is no discernable melody. It's more like a portable radio stuck between stations, out of tune, broadcasting static, hiss, and fizz: ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!

We strive to stay on station, resisting the in-between. Our signal is aimed. It has targets

Man-made radio is different. Unlike cosmic radio, human radio is meant to be tuned, and, when done right, it is tuneful. We strive to stay on station, resisting the in-between. Our signal is aimed. It has targets. Someone is meant to receive. And we send and receive all the time. Radio, television, phone calls, computers, GPS, all are forms of radio.

Case in point, on a chilly night in Oregon, pulling down a particularly strong signal, his receiver aimed, is one Portland resident, Santiago Diego Carmona Barrenechea.

Call him Santi.

Santi steps outside into the night and adjusts a homemade antennae. The device, stuck atop a plump shrub, is cobbled together from scraps of metal, wire, and, most strange, strings of red beads. Although it looks every bit an art object, Santiago reassures tonight's house guests that the thing is functional. That "yah yah, it works." Inside his apartment, as proof positive, the receiver grabs radio signal from the antennae, and out the stereo speakers rages the message of punk rock. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

A REVOLUTIONARY VIEW

Pirate radio is the sexy title given to unlicensed broadcasting. Santi, born and raised in Argentina, spent his early adult years in Mexico working on just such bootleg radio stations, a very real and romantic cause.

Sharply contrasting the image of blood-thirsty marauders dedicated to plunder, the pirate in pirate radio can many times actually be an honest-to-goodness do-gooder. These well meaning souls are often motivated by little more than an inability to afford the economic price, or, sometimes the seriously costly, political price of legit radio. A radio Robin Hood, a pirate gives rather than takes. And what the pirate radio jockey gives can be of real benefit to locals. A home for ideas and music and culture and outreach, a hookup for the homespun, a rallying point for community.

...Menacing automatic weapons and rubber shoes that came in a variety of jolly colors

Santi was fascinated by exactly that. So much so that he spent years building and maintaining stations all over Mexico. Working with other Mexican pirates, Santi became a crackerjack pirate radio engineer. He and his friends amassed a reputation. Their celebrity carried far enough that Subcommandante Marcos, a real outlaw, risked a visit to them. Marcos, leader of the Zapatista Liberation Army, a movement defending Oaxacan peasants against powerful and longstanding oppression, is a man used to leveraging limited resources. He and his rag-tag army brought about some of the most significant changes in Mexican politics in the last century. Hearing about Santi and company, the Subcommandante rationalized his traveling north, which included being followed by secret police in many colored rubber boots, with a solid compliment. "I hear from many people that they can make a radio transmitter out of a tree branch."

Well, not exactly, according to Santi. But close enough.

While the visit struck Santi as serious, to say the least, the rebels rather jovially spent time buying phone cards and booze. While the police, who followed the rebels constantly, they wore, along with menacing automatic weapons, rubber shoes that came in a variety of jolly colors. Orange, red and blue.

A SWASHBUCKLING PIRATE

This wasn't the only time Santi got swept into serious Mexican politics. An occasion in 2007 was the closest he has come to feeling like a swashbuckling pirate. During this episode, after having entered the city in a somewhat clandestine manner, Santi was performing a radio installation, in middle of the night, on the roof of a building, overlooking Oaxaca City. In the streets below, the city sparked with scattered fires, protests, riots.

Santi did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances. He bought a six-pack.

Eerie silhouettes scuttled about the surrounding rooftops. Eyeballing the shadows, Santi hesitated to begin, thinking to himself, This is fucking scary. He stared down at the transmitter gear awaiting his attention. He grumbled to the night air. "Do I want to be climbing a radio tower," he said, "if there are snipers about? What have I got myself into?"

He'd got himself into a lot. The year preceding, Oaxaca City police attacked protesters during a teachers union strike. As many as one hundred people may have been injured. Citizens rebelled. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), a citizen group, took over part of the city. The APPO challenged city government authority, which they considered corrupt, and continued to do so over the course of that year. The nation's president got involved. People died in the conflict. Radio communication had been important to the APPO cause, and Santi, who had received a request by them to set up a radio station on the conflict's one-year anniversary, was flown into the city under special auspices, snuck through customs, along with his equipment, in quasi secret.

And now he was under deadline, and, if unlucky, possibly under fire. The first broadcast was scheduled for early morning. Given that was already after midnight, and he was just getting started, Santi did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances. He bought a six-pack. Returning, Santi cracked a beer, looked out toward the fires in the city below, and set to work. The beer performed its magic. Hours later, with the sun coming up, the job was complete. Santi paused and considered the situation in a new light.

It's nice view, really.

Then he got the hell outta there.

RADIO TARGETS…

Oaxaca City was the culmination of seven years in pirate radio. Santi felt due for a change. Fleeing the radio tower before things got too hot, when the broadcast went live, he was about to get that change.

Later that evening, decompressing in bar, Santi meets a girl, Mary-Rain O'Mera of Portland, Oregon. Mary-Rain is attracted to the stranger's blend of the serious and the free-spirited. The feeling is mutual. They dance. A romance begins. As fortune would have it, they are both living in Mexico at the moment and are able to spend a lot time together. But time passes, and Mary-Rain must return to Portland. Cell phones allow them to stay connected. The calls are radio waves, signals with a target, signals aimed at someone, someone who is meant to receive.

Man-made radio transmissions are escaping, all the time, through the earth's atmosphere, where they continue into space, on and on, passing asteroids, planets, stars. Out there, in vast enigma of the universe, are commercials for wedding dresses and posture-correcting mattresses, fast food and hair removal, old broadcasts of AD/DC and the Wipers, talk show vitriol, news of the world, reruns of Frazier. Among the cosmic flotsam, too, are personal communications: gossip, disputes, seductions, happy birthday to mom. While the universe bombards us with its programming, its static's song, it seems that we, in turn, shoot back with our own programming, a farrago of human noise.

Also among the noise are the many calls between Santiago Diego Carmona Barrenechea and Mary-Rain O'Meara: calls that began by bridging a sizable distance, between Mexico and the U.S., until, one day, calls were placed from close range, and there they remained… in the same city. Portland, Oregon.

Other people's trash is Santi's source of inspiration

STEAMPUNK SANTI

In a Portland living room, Mary-Rain, moved-in-with and married-to Santi, leans over a vintage sixties-era stereo console. Opening the polished wood lid, and, reaching in to the place normally housing the record player, which has been removed, she chooses music from a makeshift tablet screen, picking out songs from a long list of artists and albums on a digital display screen. She hits play. Out of the cabinet comes blasting an assortment of Spanish language punk rock, funky Cumbia, and lesser known alternative acts. Mary-Rain adjusts volume using the original plastic knobs.

Santi, his pirate radio days behind him, has metamorphosed into inventor of devices conceived from salvaged junk, scraps, and the second-hand, a reuse artist. The hybrid stereo console is one of his trademarks: a Frankenstein mongrel mixing older discarded technology with newer discarded technology. Other people's trash is Santi's source of inspiration. Whether it's resurrecting straight razors using silicon chipboards for handles, distilling motor oil out of spent restaurant vegetable grease, cobbling together electric guitar amplifiers out of stereo cabinets, or reanimating and reconfiguring a lifeless lead-burning Mercedes into diesel daily driver, nothing gets wasted.

The living room tonight is replete with guests, the music plays festively. It's Santi's birthday. Santi carries in a homemade Argentine-style pizza, fresh from the oven. He smiles. "Here's some pizza," he says, setting the pie on the coffee table.

"Santi has been making hats!" Mary-Rain announces, amused and amazed, to the people in the room, pointing at her husband's head. The hat is a red and black plaid, made from reuse fabric.

It's a great hat, someone tells him. Everyone agrees.

TRUMPET TECHNOLOGY

Santi is a deceptive character. It takes time to get a bead on him. The man can be untalkative, responding to questions in clipped syllables. Yes. No. Maybe. Seeming a stoic. Yet, get him talking, and he has a lot to say, and is eager to say it. He can appear phlegmatic, slow moving, introverted. Yet, as a steady and relaxed laborer, he is productive and nimble, his long and slender hands constantly moving, his mind musing on the next project. In appearance, garbed in loose fitting clothes over a thin frame, somehow reminiscent of a scarecrow on his stick, patient and drowsy, Santi exudes an air of immateriality, the kind of weightlessness common to daydreamers. Yet, with all manner of material objects as his playground, Santi is one of the most industrious people you'll ever meet.

Possibly his most mystifying attribute, however, is a curious sense of humor.

"Probably a false statement," he says, nodding, indicating the message on the door

Sitting on a sidewalk bench outside of Roots Organic Brewery, Santi wears yet another newly constructed hat, this one of tan cloth and long brim, shading his eyes from the hot sun. In his hand is a dinged up trumpet that he repaired and has been learning to play. He stares across the street, where there is an auto transmission shop with an accordion-style garage door. Painted on the door are the words SOUND HORN TO OPEN DOOR.

Pointing the trumpet at the door, Santi blows hard, sounding a splay of random notes with no particular pattern. Lowering the trumpet, he waits for a response. The door does not open. He sets the trumpet in his lap and sips beer. After a while, he nods toward the garage, saying, "I'll try again—the door." And puts the horn to his lips. The pub patrons at the surrounding benches glance at Santi, repeatedly, but quickly turn away. Unfazed by the attention, Santi blows again, this time calling out a single screeching note, loud and long. The trumpet blast echoes off the wall of the garage, reverberates crisply, and disappears.

After a long while of intermittent door testing, a number of beers, and a long conversation, Santi surrenders. "Probably a false statement," he says, nodding, indicating the message on the door. He retires the trumpet to the tabletop, where it gleams, pock marked and greasy, in the sun. Not once during the trumpeting did Santi crack a smile. And he does not smile now.

But you easily could. And, looking up, you could just as easily wonder about the blue sky. About people. About radio… And its targets.

Who are those little people made of clay? For that matter, who is that animator behind the mask? We'll tell you.

It's Bartek, a Portland one-of-a-kind animator, and some of his creations.

What is it about the woods that brings his creativity all together? We're not sure. But enjoy the photo essay: only Bartek knows for sure.

"I had a cousin who started young, I mean 13. She was always out, running on Union, back before it was MLK, smoking crack. My dad would go out to find her at night and bring her home. One night, after he had brought her back, she left a note. 'I can't do this'. She was in her addiction for a long time. She got clean, was doing well for a while. But as soon as I got clean, she started going down hill again."

For Dawnyell Gaddis, addiction and recovery have both been supported by the same complex and changing community. These days she has The Miracles Club, new white neighbors, and her children back.

Dawnyell Gaddis reminisces about the Northeast Portland in which she was raised ten to fifteen years ago. "Riffraff" is the word she uses to describe the folks who hung about: drug addicts, prostitutes, derelicts and pimps. She sketches a picture of an impoverished African American community, both socially and financially, that equally encouraged the dope fiend and the pusher, the gang-banger and the hustler, to sprout as invasive as a tree of heaven. Mostly, her narrative traces her own journey, her descent into addiction and stomping the same ground as the rest of the riffraff.

Ms. Gaddis is a tall, understated woman with a beautiful freckle-accented, russet brown complexion. She dresses casually and usually wears a hat. At 37, she is the mother of three children. One of her daughters, attentively listening, sits with us as we talk. Periodically, Gaddis reaches over to rest her hand on top of her daughter's long thin fingers. Proudly, she admits that she is now able to independently care for them since becoming clean and sober almost three years ago.

The three of us have commandeered a table in a bright, busy room, the parlor of an NGO recovery community, targeted toward Portland area African Americans. Located on NE MLK and Shaver, this program offers NA meetings and spiritual services for men and women struggling to maintain their sobriety. Former addicts walk in and out of the doors to an inner room, the sanctuary where meetings are held. As they pass through the room, they joke and chide one another. Children, some as young as toddlers, trace back and forth behind moms, grandparents, aunties, and the like. Outside, men and women smoke cigarettes and share hardships and triumphs, their body language always the same, standing side by side shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Above the glass front doors in perfect cursive is a steel sign: THE MIRACLES CLUB.

DOWNRIGHT DESPERATE

At one point, Miracles was nearly shut down. The previous landlord had put the building on the market. In 2010, Miracles had been providing these services from a run down building across the street for ten years, but between stimulus dollars and taxpayer funding, Miracles was able to break ground on a new building, which even offers 40 clean and sober apartments, available to low-income individuals who demonstrate 18 months or more of sobriety. No small feat.

Gaddis walks these rooms almost daily, using meetings, sponsors and friends to support her recovery. She sites Miracles as having been a central pillar for her over the last three years. Another pillar for her was Project Network, where I first met her, a residential addictions recovery program in North Portland. Part of culture-specific services offered by Lifeworks NW, developed for the African American community, this 32-bed facility provides services to women, especially those involved with child protective services and/or corrections, in addition to counseling, case management and continuity of care, as clients transition into outpatient settings.

As a therapist with expertise in addictions and trauma, I am familiar with the planting-a-seed phenomenon of drug and alcohol treatment. Often, people who enter treatment are not ready to give up use. Much of my work with clients focuses on developing motivation to take opportunities to restore balance to life. In the simplest terms, the work is hard and often heart-wrenching. I have witnessed clients irrevocably lose their children to the system, return to their addictions, and even die while using.

Unlike many who enter treatment, Gaddis was ready, was downright desperate, for change. Her hunger for sobriety was palpable. At the point she entered treatment, she had burned her bridges. No longer parenting her children and homeless , she was using prostitution as the main source of income to support her crack cocaine addition. Addicts call it hitting bottom.

THE SPOT

Sitting in the meeting space at Miracles Club years after we first met, the fruit of her hard work is beginning to ripen. "Project Network saved my life. And I come to Miracles every week for a meeting. I hate to hear people talking badly about them. I owe everything to them. I didn't know anything about recovery before Project Network. I mean, they really saved my life."

She talks about who she was before treatment. "St John's was where I hit bottom. I used to go into this tavern [The Wishing Well] to pick up guys [johns]. I would just walk up and down Lombard, strung out. Up and down, all day long, all night. For a while, I was sleeping in this, like, crack house. You'd walk in and there were people laid out everywhere. You had to step over people."

For years, Project Network has been housed in a large washed-out former apartment building in disrepair. Not the easiest place to use as a launching pad for recovery. It sits away from the road with a shoddy play structure in front for the children who live there with their mothers. The walls need painting. The carpet needs replacing. There are rats that incessantly plague the building due to an interconnected sewer with the Widmer brewery next door. Oh, and there is a brewery next door. Problem pipes, problem gas. You name it, PNET is burdened with it.

Gaddis remembers a time, before Lifeworks purchased the building, when it was "the spot," meaning an abandoned building used as a drug squat.

"I never used there, but I know a lot of girls in the program who did. I mean, I don't know how they did it. To come up in there after knowing that people OD'ed and died in there." She makes a guttural noise indicating, "No way." And still, she, and those like her, find a way to make treatment at Project Network a success. Needless to say, it's easy to be proud of her.

White people! I remember the first time I saw a white person walking their dog down Mississippi.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR LIVES

Pnet (as it's lovingly called) and Miracles Club illustrate the interconnectedness of Portland's African American recovery community. Like the African American community here in general, it is small and there are many overlapping relationships. Friends, family members, fictive kin, former work colleagues, former treatment providers, neighbors, the boundaries of relationships blend and blur in these rooms where men and women like Gaddis speak their truths about their lives, their hopes, their struggles and their joys.

It is well known that North and Northeast (N/NE) Portland were areas in which gang violence was a regular occurrence, making it unsafe not only on the streets after dark but also in Jefferson High School's hallways, where youth often were recruited to be 'jumped in'. Gaddis is aware of how much both her addiction and recovery have been supported by the very make up of the community in which she lives. She tries to explain why drug addiction and crime were so prevalent in the community in the past. "Absentee parents, gangs, no education. It was everywhere in the community back then."

WHITE PEOPLE !

When asked what are the best changes in the N/NE community over the years she has lived here, she promptly replies "White people! I remember the first time I saw a white person walking their dog down Mississippi [avenue in North Portland]. I said, 'Oh my God! I never thought that would happen.' There was a time when they were scared to walk the street. Now, I love to seem them, all in the coffee shops with their little laptops. I have never been a negative person, even in my addiction. I see it as a good thing. Where they go, the money follows."

She is right. In fact, prior to 2005, Multnomah County Department of County Human Services did not even separately track the culture-specific mental health fund in the budget. Prior to 2005, culture specific services dollars were pulled from the general mental health fund without any public accountability to how much of those funds were earmarked for culture specific services.

When one compares her description of the N/NE Portland neighborhoods of yesteryear and today, it is clear why she is excited. Much of the decrepit social infrastructure that maintained hotbeds for the riffraff are gone. But she tempers her excitement with a dose of her own reality. "I remember, irregardless of the nice buildings. The things that happened, the places are like ghosts. It doesn't matter that that abandoned building is now a coffee shop. I know what went on there. I can't ever turn my back on this disease. When I was living in the Betty Campbell (a transitional living residence maintained by Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives Inc. and located on North Mississippi and Shaver) the drug dealers were still right outside my door. I mean, there was one apartment in the building that had nothing to do with Lifeworks and they were always smoking weed up in there. I always have to be on the look out for my recovery."

Gaddis' enthusiasm made me wonder if she saw any downsides to gentrification, the term so often tossed around to describe the displacement of African Americans, especially those of low income, from the N/NE Portland neighborhoods in which they were historically the majority. She shakes her head, "I'm disappointed that we [African Americans] can't get our shit together. No one is willing to take any action. I mean, there are no businesses, no organizations. It's like we're afraid to be successful. We're letting them [Caucasians] run us out of our community because all we do is complain, but won't do anything. We have no presence anymore. I remember looking around on Alberta and saying 'Where are all the black people?'"

She and I are both quiet for a moment, another recognition that she is right. There is no sense of dwelling here. It would bring about a sense of helplessness, and we both agree that an ingrained sense of helplessness from the legacy of slavery is at the root of why some African Americans fail to take full advantage of the programs offered by Portland Development Commission's Urban Renewal Areas or microloans offered for minority entrepreneurs at various Portland area organizations, programs that would ensure a continued presence in N/NE Portland for many generations to come.

GET WITH THE NORMIES

In juxtaposition, Gaddis frames her own goals for the future. "I know I want to work with children. I just feel strongly about them. I'm going to start taking classes in child development when I feel ready. I don't want to take on too much at once and overwhelm myself." She beams as she speaks, and looks at her daughter. It is obvious from the excitement in her tone that she means every word, that she is aware of how close she came to losing her life and how easily it could happen again. Also, it is apparent how much she wants to use this opportunity she has carved from passion and pain to achieve the fullest with this new life she has made.

Gaddis takes me to her small apartment near Portland Community College's Cascade Campus. It is close enough to the school to readily make her goals a reality. We climb the tall steps outside that lead up to her second floor apartment, after exchanging a few words with the neighbors. Just another day-in-the-life. This kind of 'normie' (what addicts sometimes call people who have never had an addiction) routine can be empowering.

THE BACKYARD

Inside, the ceiling is low and the furniture still sparse. She just moved herself and her family into this apartment a few days before. Pride is written all over her face. Not only, can she call this place home for herself and her children, but she can remain in the community in which she was raised, a testament to the benefit of the culture-specific recovery programs right her in backyard.

I cannot help but draw the connection between Gaddis receiving treatment in her community and being able to rebuild her life in her community. Over the last several years, the interests of 'revitalization' and communities of color have been at odds with one another in N/NE Portland. Often, Miracles Club centering in the debate about homeowners rights and the needs for African Americans to have a recovery place of their own. But while the controversy continues, property values increase, and demographics change, Dawnyell Gaddis happily goes about the business of living, knowing that even the presence of white folks in black neighborhoods raises the profile on changes a long time coming for N/NE Portland.

To Eric and Emily, Mopeds are more than a hobby or transportation. Together they raise the dead, the beaten, and the burned. They grease the chains and paint the frames. They reincarnate. For these two, Mopeds are happy outlets and a complete lifestyle. And not just for them, but for thousands across the nation are a way of life.

Just cause it's in pieces doesn't mean it won't live again. Moreover, it's not a scooter, it's a moped.

Among the numerous characteristics that endear the Moped to the hearts of so many, if it were only for this one feature—simplicity—the Moped deserves recognition. The engine ignites with a continuous thrusting of the pedals. With only 3 moving parts, it's 2- stroke engine sounds of fury with each combusting pop. All together, sporting 50cc's of raw winding power and a legal top speed of 32mph, this motorbike weighs less than it's passenger.

Standing shorter on both ends than a standard bicycle, the Moped's bulky frame and gas tank give it girth. Although it scoots, it's pedals set it apart from the Moped's closest relative, the scooter, which requires no pumping legs.

With dependability often at a low, the breakdowns make the adventure all-the-more about the journey, and less about the destination.

As it should be.

Mopeds are the centerpiece for a community of true believers. Within that community, Eric and Emily have devoted their mechanical and creative art skills to keeping vintage Mopeds on the street—and in style. It's all part of a deep-hearted culture that keeps the Moped living in the moment.

As the years went by, and I noticed that I began to fit all the stereotypes of being an artist, I began to feel duped. Myself as an artist is typical, but, yet, the art is still as addicting as anything else.

Destiny doesn't know Daniel. But she finds him fascinating to consider.

One moment he gives off the air of a rock star, wild and confident, talking out the side of his mouth and drawing on his Wildhorse filters, the smoke curling about his lips, a look in his eye, a look that hints at loose gears. The next moment he seems entirely struck-down, civilized, infirmed with minimal coverage. One thing is certain, however. The cap on his head says so, in gold threaded letters. Vietnam Era Veteran.

The two are sitting at nearby benches outside a coffee shop, so what the hell. Destiny decides to talk to the man.

Daniel speaks openly, quickly finding his subject.

After the war, Daniel tells her, he'd fallen in love with Christine. Though, it's unclear if Christine was a steady girl or a one-night stand. Destiny can't figure it out. Regardless, at some point, his true love disappears without a trace and it drives him to madness. His family takes notice, they circle wagons, and the next thing Daniel knows he's gone medical and is on a regimen of medication. The little pills scurry like ants, covering everything.

Staring in the mirror for hours every day does nothing to make this kind of problem go away. And now here he is. All Daniel wants for his life is to be let go, to run free. But they won't let him.

"Who are they?" Destiny asks.

Family, doctors. The institutions. That's what he claims. And Daniel is emphatic: he's trapped. But something in his story is foggy. It's hard to tell if Daniel is being saved from himself or prevented from being himself. Or somehow—both.

Daniel takes Destiny for a short walk to show off his residence, a small room in a facility up the street. The apartment key hangs from a chord about his neck, forcing the man to lean drastically forward to unlock his door. There is something endearing about this, though it's hard to put one's finger on just what. Destiny feels safe, however, so she ventures inside.

"Would you like coffee?"

"Sure."

Watching Daniel scour the apartment for the next ten minutes, however, looking for his coffee cup in places that include under the bed and in his sock drawer, she begins to regret her answer. But only sort of. Daniel gives up on coffee, eventually, and plops comfortably into a stuffed chair and submits to being photographed.

As she focuses through the lens and chooses angles, Destiny notices for the first time how high the man's pants ride at the waist, cinched by a belt that pulls too firmly at his shirt, which is bunched and tucked at what could be described as a somewhat misdirected angle. It's an improvised affair barely covering the unhook of the gentleman's fly.

At the coffee shop, Daniel is likewise agreeable to Destiny's camera. Through the viewfinder, she sees the sunlight flare, casting an aura about his head. She shoots. He stands and he sits and he stands and he smokes. He salutes the U S of A. She shoots. He spreads two fingers into a "V" that might be for peace—or for victory. She shoots. He takes a pull on another cigarette and makes a claim.

"There is an era after every war," says the man.

And he should know. For Daniel is a veteran. And life hasn't been kind.

Opposite Day stars Lester, an animated columnist. He might look primitive, but Lester keeps on eye on the human animal. Each month, Lester makes a report — about the funny business, the niceties, the hypocrisy.

Lester pulls his car over for a racing ambulance. But he suffers a change of heart. Which gets Lester going again—in a hurry.

Destiny Lane interviews Alan Singely, musician, song composer.

Alan riffs on music, Pants Machine, eba eba dab dab a doo doo, PDX in '03, original shows, being hungry, and more.

Pants Machine was a sextet from Portland, Oregon. They wove a tight, groovy pop sound that would shake you up and mellow you out. Their last album, "Feelin' Citrus", is an orchestral Indie rock cocktail packed with genuine sunshine and vitamin-c, inducing a citrus spell. It's Burt Bacharach on a sunny day....

Alan Singley is now onto a new project.