by John Glab (@glab.ii)
Saia Kuli, also known as Guitar, has been playing in the Portland, Oregon indie and DIY scenes for over a decade. He’s been working on the Guitar project for the past couple of years, pushing together noisy power pop riffs and crushed shoegaze tones, into constantly flowing rippers of freaked out moments strung together in winding compositions. The tracks are always livid, never falling sedentary.
Following last year’s raspy and raw Casting Spells On Turtlehead, Kuli comes back with his new record We’re Headed To The Lake. At times, it’s both cleaner and disfigured, weaving together the lo-fi with the hi-fi into disorientating but familiar pop structures.
Kuli called in from his garage where he writes a lot of his music. He talked about the album a couple weeks before its release, the writing process, and how a lot of his creative processes changed this time around. He talked about Portland, regional sounds and scenes, the mundane, and how he got to this point in time. Overall, he describes snippets of what makes him tick.
Guitar by Ryan Belote-Rosen
Glab: You had a pizza party to announce your first single for your new album We’re Headed To The Lake, how’d that go?
Saia Kuli: It was funny. I think for the two hours I was there, two people showed up.
Glab: Damn, really?
SK: Well, I kinda figured it. It’s actually where I grew up in Portland, it’s not where people live really. People from the music scene anyway. It’s a little further out, so it would’ve been a mission for people to come out, and I did it so last minute anyway. A couple people pulled up, and then there were a couple people who were like “I pulled it up on maps and it was too far.”
But it was fun, I love that place. I just had some pizza and chilled out. I watched one of the workers there just totally destroy on Halo, they have one of those arcade ones. He was just ripping.
Glab: What was it like growing up in Portland, and being part of the indie scenes there?
SK: It was cool. I grew up in the outer east of Portland. Some people call it “The Numbers.” It’s kinda like working class, very immigrant part of town. My dad’s a welder and my mom worked at Target. It was cool, I love Portland.
It’s definitely different over there than Portlandia vibes. It’s like a working class area, and you can transport that kinda thing to a lot of different cities. I loved growing up out there. No one form my school was really into music except for a couple of friends. We formed a band. So it was kinda hard getting into the indie scene at first. We weren’t really in the same circles where bandmates were roommates and would hang out all the time. We were the people who were from the city, but not really attached to the scene, so it took some time.
Eventually, I got into the punk scene, and that’s really where I made connections. Through those connections, I was able to do more stuff with music and build up the different iterations of Guitar over the years.
The Portland music scene is really great. It’s got a good DIY ethos to it. Everybody is down to throw shows, or if a house venue gets shut down they’ll just find another house. Stuff like that. I think it’s a pretty special scene.
I don’t wanna like talk smack about Seattle or anything, but I feel like Seattle scene—and I hear this a lot from Seattle-heads—is what the Portland scene could be if everyone gave up. It’s so hard to book shows. And for the only venues left in town, for them it’s just a numbers game. The venues don’t really care about the music, they’re just looking at your Spotify and Instagram.
I was trying to book a show for a fall tour, and I think I hit up like 12 places, and they were all like “No” or “What’s your draw in Seattle? What’s your history?” and I would tell them we played a couple good shows there with around 50 people or something like that, and then they’d ghost me.
Glab: That’s wack.
SK: Yeah, it’s pretty wack, and there’s a lot of great bands up there for sure. It’s just I don’t know what happened to the scene over the years. I think sometimes stuff just loses momentum, I guess. Luckily, Portland has momentum, and people move here and keep it energized.
Just a quick shoutout, my homie Coral runs a DIY booking project in Portland called Mall Brawl Reds, and she throws awesome shows and keeps it alive. They’re all ages which is really cool, so younger-heads can make it out to the shows.
Glab: When I was in Seattle, we were in a taxi, and the taxi driver was saying that Seattle felt like what San Francisco felt like post-Silicon Valley, and now Portland has now what he saw in Seattle.
SK: I can see that for sure, cause they all got techy and stuff.
Glab: You mentioned Mall Brawl Reds, what are those shows they book like?
SK: They used to do shows at Commonwealth skatepark for a long time. It was all ages. Those were really cool. They were some of my favorite shows. But that got shutdown by the city. They had the Fire Marshall outside the show, measuring the decibels with some kind of contraption. Then they said it was over and shut it down permanently.
Glab: They were waiting for that.
SK: They hate fun, it sucks. But they did stuff at a church recently and found art galleries where they can do all ages shows. A lot of the times, the music is more skramz and screamo, but sometimes they have more power pop, like my band, or other things on the edge of the Venn diagram of what they do.
Glab: What are some of the best shows you played as Guitar?
SK: Two shows really stick out. My friend who used to play drums in the band, Nikhil Wadhwa, moved to Philly. His going away party was just a house show he had. We played that and it was really epic. It was just out of his garage, and the neighbors were pissed. I think we played like 10 minutes after 10:00 PM which was the sound curfew, but one of the neighbors came in holding up a note that Nikhil put on their doors saying that we’re going til 10:00 PM but then cut it off. In the middle of our set, she went up to each one of us, yelling at us and showing us the note, and we just kinda played through it. It was pretty crazy. That was pretty legendary. That was a lot of fun. Cause it was so tense, everyone was just going hard moshing. It was just fun.
The vibe in the room was like, “It’s ten minutes past, we have like two songs left.” That was just really funny.
The other one that was really good was on our last tour on the East Coast. We played in the homie's basement in Indianapolis, and that was really special too. I’ve always had this mythology in my head about the region because I love a lot of bands from there. Guided By Voices is probably my favorite band, but I was also really into the mid-2010s Bloomington scene in Northwest Indiana. Now they’d be called egg punk bands, like Coneheads and stuff like that was really big to me.
But going there was exactly how I’d imagined it to be. There was old, rusted muscle cars around, and we were sorta playing this regular area. The people at the house were awesome and the bands we played with were awesome too. We played with Good Flying Birds, and this band Sacred Copy. It was just awesome music, really sweet nice people. Those two were just the highlights of my time playing music.
Glab: You said egg punk, I listened to some of Gary Supply and that very much felt like egg punk.
SK: Oh no way! Yes exactly, that was my old band. It’s a very dear genre to me.
Glab: I feel the same way about early 2010s garage rock, I know it’s not a sound that people are hella with at the moment, but something about it is really iconic to me, I just really like that energy of it.
SK: I agree, I would say similar to that scene, before egg punk was even coined as a term, there was just an electricity to it. That’s probably how a lot of scenes are right as they start, and that’s why people fuck with it.
Glab: Casting Spells On Turtlehead came out on Spared Flesh last year, but that label shut down almost immediately afterwards. Was that part of signing to Julia’s War?
SK: Yeah, that’s my buddy Sebastian who runs Spared Flesh. He put that first Guitar tape out. So, Casting Spells was a collaboration release with Spared Flesh and Julia’s War. Sebastian told me once I sent him Casting Spells that it’d be their last release. It was because he had a kid, so he was not able to put as much time and money into it anymore. But it was all good. He was excited about the tape, and he wanted it to be the last one. End on something we were all stoked on.
It was great. That label was really cool. I just liked how Sebastian was picking out stuff. You could tell looking through his catalogue, it was all stuff that resonated with him. Even if sometimes stuff didn’t make sense to me, I would listen to it and be like, “That’s totally Sebastian’s vibe.”
Glab: So, did Julia’s War hit you up before that then?
SK: I actually sent it to them. I had met Doug once; it was on their tour called “The Trip,” I don’t know if you saw that.
Glab: I remember that it was with like Hotline TNT, Toner, and Sword II.
SK: I thought it was kind of a sick move that it was just five touring bands, no locals. It was a great show, and my friend Nikhil had met Doug because he had used to play in the band Fib, so he wanted to introduce me when they came to town. We were just leaving the venue, and Doug popped out of a door with a bunch of gear, and so Nikhil introduced me, and he said he had listened to our song “dream$ come true” and really liked it. I told him, “I’m making a tape, I’ll send it to.” So, I sent it to them, and they were just down to put it out.
Doug’s so chill, and just like a down guy. It’s great having him as like the label head. He’s a busy guy, got a lot of moving pieces to juggle, but I can really tell he’s putting his all into everything he’s doing.
Glab: Going off of Spared Flesh, are there plenty of other labels around Portland, or other things that have filled the void after they decided to stop?
SK: Topshelf Records is one of the big ones. I know the guy who runs it, Kevin, he’s a really chill guy too. They do a lot of emo. They’ve put out a lot of really cool stuff. Then Pleasure Tapes, I think is the big very DIY label. They did a run of our first tape pretty recently. Kayla at Pleasure Tapes really puts in a lot of work. Those tapes sound fantastic, they look awesome, she does a lot of the design with the J-cards and stuff. They’re really great, they have a lot of good bands on there. I’d say those are the two that come to mind that are really active, and doing a lot to keep the scene alive in Portland, for sure.
Glab: Also going back a little bit, I just wanted to ask some of your favorites on egg punk and stuff like that.
SK: Oh yeah, I feel like the Coneheads; they had such a big influence on the way I play guitar. They sounded like Devo and ‘70s punk, just like sped up. I love watching live videos of them cause they look just like a punk hardcore band when you hear it with full distortion. Then you go to the recording, and it sounds like little aliens playing clean guitars into a four-track. It’s funny and where I think a lot of the sound generated from. They are for sure one of my favorites.
Also, RMFC: Rock Music Fan Club, they’re a really awesome band from Australia that started in the egg punk circuit, but now I say they’re more post-punk, but they keep a thread of that alive. Their record last year Club Hits was one of my favorites, I play it all the time. Are you familiar with them?
Glab: There’s some other Australian egg punk bands I’m familiar with but not them. There’s this guy Billiam that released one last year, and that one I really liked, it was crazy chaotic. I feel like Australia just like as a country really hits the egg punk vibe.
SK: They love their guitar music down there for sure.
Glab: Maybe I’m associating it with some sort of Outback type of vibe, or hitting all the Australian stereotypes, and I’m just like, “Yeah it seems they’d really like egg punk.”
SK: Yeah, I get that. I feel like Australia, they haven’t really taken onto shoegaze, or the ‘90s revival stuff as much. They’re still doing all kinds of crazy garage and egg punk. I think that’s kinda cool. They got their own thing going, and it seems like they have a strong identity to the sound.
One of my favorite records of this year, actually, is by an Australian band. I think there’s some overlap with the Billiam band and Gee Tee, it’s called Dumbells. I really love it, it’s like very Big Star and Teenage Fanclub influenced. Just like big rock riffs. Great tunes and great songwriting.
Glab: Like you said, they haven’t picked up on shoegaze. I feel like a lot of Australian music, it is really fast, but they like their sharp articulation.
SK: Yeah, like staccato, and clean guitars. I feel that.
Glab: Or at most a fuzz they can control. It’s interesting specific tastes in different regions.
SK: Yeah, I love stuff like that, like regional sounds and stuff that turns up in a scene versus stuff that doesn’t. It’s interesting, in Portland, I feel like we weren’t on that shoegaze wave. I was into it, but people around me weren’t into it. I’d say the West Coast is more skramz and power pop stuff, and not as much shoegaze stuff. Now there are more bands coming up now that are like shoegaze-slowcore, but it seemed like there was a bit of a lag, like people weren’t as into that stuff until more recently.
Glab: Kind of the same in the Midwest. I’m from Iowa City. The only city around here you can say is shoegaze heavy is Minneapolis. Chicago feels like it’s still very much into its post-punk type of stuff. Of course, hardcore and screamo and some embers of emo are really big around here.
SK: Oh yeah, that’s cool. I’m out here fangirling about the Midwest, and you’re living it.
Glab: With We’re Headed To The Lake, there are similarities, but it feels sonically different than Casting Spells On Turtlehead. The main thing I noticed was it intentionally feels less lo-fi, but even then higher fidelity parts are weaved in with these fuzzier sounds. What changed in the recording and creative process that got it there?
SK: I think the main thing when I set out was just try my best to do everything right. Cause on Casting Spells and before, I was in the mindset of doing it as fast and as cheap as possible, and just being lazy honestly. I was just chopping it up. If I mess up a guitar part I would just smooth it over in Ableton, or loop something else. I wouldn’t record actual guitar amps, I would just use a plug-in that would emulate an amp. Instead of playing an actual bass, I would just play guitar and then pitch it down. All of that just because I hardly have any musical gear, and I was working as fast as possible to get it out. I found that interesting, to write the song and then almost finish it soon after, which was really exciting to me, and helped keep me stoked on it.
This time around I worked with my friend Morgan Snook, who co-produced it with me. He’s a very “dotting i's and crossing t’s,” and doing things the right way kind of person. I knew that about him because we had been friends since we were little. He had some more gear and a home bedroom studio, so I played his bass and some of his guitars, used his amps, and he has a couple mics we used, so I could get a better sounding thing that was more accurate to what it sounds live. Also, he was like, “You have to play everything as a full take, you can’t be cutting it up.” So, him holding me accountable helped me to not cheat, and do my lazy tactics that I built up over the years. I really appreciated working with him. It’s still on a budget for sure, and a lot of it is mid-fi. It did take a lot longer, but I’m happy with how it turned out. I think that was the main difference. Also, my friend Nikhil recorded the drums and leveled up his little home studio.
Glab: Do you prefer how it sounds now, after being held accountable and going through the more professional processes, or how it sounded before?
SK: I love it and I’m happy with it, but I’m also ready to just go back. I kind of want to make the next thing the old-fashioned way, maybe a mix of the two strategies, like I’ll do half of it more professionally with my cousin. We’ll do some there, and then some at home, because that’s my favorite stuff, lo-fi DIY stuff. I think it might work better for some songs than other songs, so I’d like to go back to that. I did my experiment and I’m ready to go back to doing stuff quick and dirty.
Glab: Have you started writing the music for a next release, or have you started thinking about it? If you are, does it sound more like the old way you did it?
SK: I would say I have written quite a bit of like parts of songs. I’ve done a couple full demos of songs, but I haven’t fleshed out ten songs for a 30-mintue album yet. I would say the newer stuff is more suited for a lo-fi approach. I’ve been listening to more British stuff from the ‘70s and ‘80s, like Cleaners From Venus, Young Marble Giants, and Dolly Mixture. So, I think those kinda things are gonna be suited to like my style of four-track rock and pop.
So yeah, I think it’s gonna be kind of a mix. I think it’s gonna be leaning more pop and jangle pop, but yeah I’m excited for it. I love just writing songs. It’s the main thing I do. It’s like my own hobby really. I’m just always writing songs and demoing stuff. I feel like I can’t turn it off really, I’m always playing around on guitar and writing pop songs.
I would like to work on a hardcore demo I recorded with a band. I think I wanna maybe finish that first before I go onto the next Guitar thing because it’s been on my bucket for a really long time. So, I’d probably so that first, but then I’ll be back to demoing things in my garage and see what happens with it.
Glab: What made you start writing hardcore type of things?
SK: That hardcore project was actually like the proto-Guitar. I used to play in Nick Normal for a number of years, another Portland post-punk/egg punk band. So, when I started wanting to do my own things, I wanted to do hardcore, just because it’s a big part of the scene here. Also, Olympia, because growing up they’d have some big hardcore fests, and a lot of cool bands coming out of there. That’s kind of what influenced me to start making hardcore. The live aspect is just so cool. I think that’s partially where my DIY mindedness comes from. Seeing shows in that scene and seeing how bands operated, I liked that a lot. It kinda informs my writing a little bit, structure wise.
I’m saying hardcore, I say that kinda loosely. It’s very punk, its very Mission of Burma related. Like more late ‘70s punk.
Glab: It’s not like capital-H 1990s hardcore. You’re not buying into the idea of this is made to beat other people up.
SK: Yeah, definitely not. I’m still singing in a lot of it. There are d-beats and stuff, but it’s like if Guitar was a bit more dissonant and fast. That’s what the tape sounds like.
Glab: Does that band or tape have a name yet?
SK: That band was called Kuli, which is just my Tongan side of the family’s last name. I don’t know if I’ll still call it that, but I might.
Glab: I read that you described your songs as patchwork before. With the We’re Headed To The Lake, it feels that way. I guess what kinds of sounds and feelings were you trying to stitch together on this record?
SK: On this record, it kinda had to do a lot with the bands I was listening to. I was listening to a lot more Teenage Fanclub. I was trying to do more classic rock and pop structures, bring that into my music more. I still have odd riffs. My friend Morgan said what he thought I was doing was write fucked up riffs and then try to write a pop song over the top of that. I think that’s sorta accurate.
Another thing was going on tour off of Casting Spells On Turtlehead, that record was so cobbled together. I used to make beats, so I kind of approached song writing like that. I would workshop different things in Ableton and put different parts together. On this record, I was trying to write it mostly just playing and singing it myself. I was trying to avoid smashing stuff together and see how it works. I still did that a good amount, but I was trying to approach it from a more classic songwriting style. I think that shines through a bit.
I was also thinking way more about how it would sound live with the band, cause sometimes we’d play stuff off Casting Spells that was really difficult to play live, or harder to pull off because of how quick the changes were. So this one I was trying to make it a lot more friendly for a live band to learn and play at shows.
Glab: The songs still flow really well between parts.
SK: I do spend a lot of time trying to imagine how it should go together and keep an organic flow, so I appreciate that. I think the songwriting, I feel like I definitely matured a little bit. Thematically, I think I was trying to be more positive I guess. I think on the last one, I remember reading back the lyrics after a couple months, and I was like, “Damn, this guy sounds like he’s got problems.” A lot of it is non-sequitur.
I don’t think We’re Headed To The Lake is 100% positive, I think there’s still like themes of being anxious, jealous, or overly vindictive in the characters, but overall, I tried to make the theme more positive and triumphant. I just felt like that’s what I needed to make this record. A sense of moving forward and moving through things. That was my goal, and I hope people listening to it get the same boost out of it. I was just trying to be more uplifting, I guess.
Glab: With Casting Spells I’ve never been able to find the lyrics, and it is a little hard to hear, but I got some of that vindictiveness. Like the title track has that, “Why were you alone in the first place?” accusing line to it. Vibe wise it does feel very searing, like you’re leaving slashes in something, while this one is more playful.
SK: Yeah, it is kinda caustic at times. I like to think that I’m not afraid to lean into stuff like that. Maybe it’s because I don’t see it represented all the time. My favorite artists are like a well-rounded spectrum of feeling that I like to try to aim for. I don’t think I went too crazy with that, but I like it to be there just to represent a broader spectrum of what I’m thinking and feeling, or like what’s going on around me. It’s still very non-sequitur and obtuse just for the heck of it, you know? Like Guided By Voices as one of my favorite artists, sometimes just random, stupid lyrics, they just slap sometimes or really resonate for me.
Glab: Were there specific images you were trying to conjure with the new album?
SK: Yeah, I think even though it’s called We’re Headed To The Lake, I wasn’t really trying to make it a summer vibe, or have that be taken too literally. I think the song “Pizza For Everyone” is a good representation or blueprint for the whole album with where it goes. But yeah, some of the ideas on that song, it was like a rally cry, try to get people hyped, and then it kinda snaps into the mundane, like with looking for money in the couch and just watching TV. Just juxtaposing those two things. I feel like there are a lot of moments throughout the record that have larger than life, karate kick vibes, but then something simple or boring. Snapping back and forth between those two things.
Glab: What draws you towards the mundane?
SK: I don’t know, I guess I’m a kinda mundane person. Yeah, I have like an appreciation, even on tour, for really regular stuff, like going into a grocery store in different city, and seeing what that is like. How people are moving about their day to day is cool to me.
I think a lot of music just comes from a place of being bored. I think I’m like on the couch playing guitar bored and then that’s when the songs spring to me. Then I’m imaging making arena rock from my bedroom studio, and then lightning strikes and I have to have big lyrics for a moment that I think is really epic, and then it just goes back to the regular.
Glab: I watched the music video for “Everyday Without Fail.” I was interested in the end with you walking into the river in front of the bridge. What were your thoughts behind that?
SK: My friend Noah Porter directed that. I described to him what the song was about, and he stitched the whole idea for the music video together from that. It’s kinda funny, that motorcycle is something that I’ve had for ten years, and was supposed to work on it, but I never did. It was kinda funny, it embodied that process of trying to work on it and failing. It was representative of the song.
That beach that we’re on at the end – I think the music video went through a lot of parts of the city that are important to me, like riding the bus and the sandwich shop is just down the main street that I live off of. That beach is where they throw DIY and punk shows there, Anarchy Beach. So, we kinda hit on different areas that had different meaning to me, just places that I grew up going to.
Glab: What are Anarchy Beach shows like?
SK: They’re cool, they’re sandy. I remember getting sand all over my beer and pedals multiple times. It’s also just like really dark, because they don’t have lighting. They bring a generator out there, hook up some amps. You’re playing in the sand, people are moshing in the sand, it’s pretty crazy.
Glab: This is a very broad general question, but what other ideas do you have outside of music?
SK: I would say I used to be a lot more into sports, but I’ve had several injuries. I used to play rugby and basketball, but I don’t really anymore just because of back injuries and stuff. I’m really into leftist politics. I read a lot, and I used to do more activist stuff. I would say my favorite book—and I reread this book a lot—is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, that one’s a really big one for me. I was a lot more active during like Covid. I helped out with this organization called Generational Resistance, it was more of an anarchist organization.
Another big thing for me is doing things with the Tongan community in town. I have a lot of cousins and relatives here. I hang out with my cousins. We drink Kava, it’s a traditional drink. It’s now becoming kind of gentrified a little bit. It’s showing up at weird tea bars, which is cool, I respect it. The thing that is weird to me, is that they’re making Kratom shots at the gas station with Kava in it. It’s just getting further and further removed from the traditional ceremony that goes into it. But, you know that’s just kind of a capitalism thing.
Glab: Mixing it with Kratom sounds wack.
SK: I know, it’s crazy. I remember my wife was telling me about a video she watched where people were getting addicted to that specific one called “Feel Free,” and they’re in like small $8 bottles, and they were having like eight of them a day because they became so addicted. I think Kratom is pretty addictive because Kava isn’t addictive as far as I’m aware. But yeah, I spend a lot of time doing stuff in that community, and I also have Kava with friends. That’s what I’m doing with the rest of my time I’d say.
Glab: Besides the new album, what other things are coming up that you’re excited for?
SK: We’re gonna go on a tour supporting TAGABOW for a few dates in the Midwest. Aside from that, my friend Nikhil is getting married soon, so I’m excited to go to Philly and see them and hang out for that. I’m planning on going back to New Zealand and Tonga with my wife for my cousin’s wedding. It’s a little way out in 2027, but I’ve been thinking a lot about that a lot.
I’m kinda excited for this album to be out there, and I can wash my hands of it. Work on some new stuff. I think that’ll be a lot of fun to just write again, cause I feel like I’ve been doing a lot, I’ve been doing basically all the graphic design things for the CDs, tapes, and flyers, along with answering all the questions the label has for the rollout. It feels like that’s what my whole summer has been, but I’m excited for the album to be out, and I can relax and find a new appreciation for the music. Just work on other stuff, have fun, go to more shows, friends’ shows.
Glab: More time for the little mundane things.
SK: Yeah, for sure. Maybe I might be back at the leftist meeting, chiming in on things, doing minutes. Just do more of what I was doing before music, more random side quests and stuff. I’m excited for that.