Justice For Dead Baby Head: Octant

There is favorite music, and then there is secret music. The kind of music that no one you know knows (or cares to know) about. and that you keep to yourself. The kind of music that you find in a used record store or pawn shop, priced to move, that you've never even heard of. But for some reason, you buy it. and because it is secret, it's all the more precious.

Though sort of false, this is the sort of relationship I've always had with Octant, one of the only glimmers of hope in Seattle's very dim, very late '90s. False because, as mastermind Matthew Steinke (who, incidentally, my ex-girlfriend affectionately referred to as "Dead Baby Head," on account of his strangely infant-like facial features and generally lifeless pallor, a likeness not fully represented in the photo to the left) is something of a Northwest staple, the frontman for two notable should-have-beens Satisfact and Mocket, the band is of some abstract notoriety. But in the three-plus years since the band essentially pulled the plug, a pun that will soon make HILARIOUS sense, Octant seems to have sort of disappeared from the public psyche.

Octant began as side project to Steinke's full-time Mocket, as an outlet for his motorized experimentations. A collaboration with girlfriend Tassy Zimmerman (who, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the few notable people to come out of my hometown), Octant was something of an elaborate gimmick; a master of simple mechanics, Steinke applied his knowledge to a mountain of homemade instruments, the centerpiece of which being the ad3, a clunky drum kit that through a series of motors and flashing lights and other junk essentially played itself. the list of instruments also included (here comes that pun pay-off) circuit bent toys and keyboards, the electrified stringboard (a three string atonal instrument with a built-in mini keyboard and a row of "ambient" metal bars with drone and sweep effects), light modulated samplers, and the random tone generator (an old plastic bowling ball with ten miscellaneous light-modulated sound buttons, affected by a light bulb affixed on top of the ball). But for all of the elaborate contraptions, Octant's music was essentially pop-based: a sterile, scientific synth-pop that saw them through two very compelling records (1999's Shock-No-Par and 2000's Car Alarms and Crickets) before they split for Chicago in search of a more "like-minded" scene. That was the last that the world heard of Octant before they fell into the void, Steinke is currently earning his masters from the Art Institute of Chicago where he is focusing his mechanical inclinations on archaic art installations, with apparently no future plans for the band.

Regardless, limited output and public indifference cannot reduce Octant's status as The Greatest Band of All Time.