Møtrik band brings German-style psychedelic rock to Oregon

The Portland band Møtrik is known for laser lights and fog machines and a driving 4/4 beat. The five piece band pumps out playful, danceable krautrock and has just released its fourth full length album. We talk to Erik Golts, Jonah Nolde, Dave Fulton, Cord Amato and Lee Ritter about their new album “Earth” and hear a live performance.

Disclosure: Several of the band members worked at OPB in the past. Erik Golts worked at OPB from 2007-2015. Lee Ritter worked at OPB from 2007-2010. Dave Fulton worked at OPB from 1989-2014.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. About a dozen years ago, a group of Portlanders who loved the driving beat of so-called krautrock got together. They called their band Møtrik.

They take their music seriously, but not so much themselves. Their performances feature laser goggles and a fog machine connected to a traffic cone. Their fourth album came out in November, and they came by our studios recently for a performance and interview. With Erik Golts on bass and vocals, Cord Amato on guitar and synth, Dave Fulton on synthesizers, Lee Ritter on drums, and Jonah Nolde on guitar and backing vocals. They started with the song “Road Sound.”

[“Road Sound” plays]

Miller: That is “Road Sound” from Møtrik’s new album, “Earth,” with Cord Amato on guitar and synth, Erik Golts on bass and vocals and smoke machine – an important piece of this to mention – Lee Ritter on drums, Jonah Nolde on guitar and backing vocals, and Dave Fulton on synth. Lee, I read a great line you said about this band once. You said that you have a lot of bad ideas with excellent follow-through. I feel like we should take those two things one at a time. What are the bad ideas?

Lee Ritter: I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily bad ideas, but kind of harebrained and things that most people would joke about and then never execute on. In this group of musicians we actually have to follow through to make some of those things happen, some things like shooting fog out of a traffic cone, using a collapsible trash can as a fog cannon. It revolves around fog a lot.

Miller: Dave, would you rather be a band with great ideas and poor follow-through, or bad ideas and excellent follow-through?

Dave Fulton: I like what I have right now. This is perfect. The whole great ideas but bad follow-through. No, no. Bad ideas, yeah, with great follow-through.

Miller: What does follow-through take in a band? Erik?

Erik Golts: I think it takes everyone being on board with the bad idea or good idea or whatever. I think everyone being an advocate for Møtrik. I feel like everyone’s excited about being in Møtrik and hanging out and coming up with weird things to do, and that includes both stagecraft or atmospherics as well as song ideas, and I think we all enjoy the process of bouncing ideas around. And then we’re supportive of each other, like, “Yeah, let’s do it, let’s try it.”

Miller: Cord, what is the origin story of the band?

Cord Amato: I think it was Dave and Lee who wanted to start a krautrock band. This is 13, 14 years ago, and their guitarist at the time didn’t make the first practice, or jam sesh. I lived very close to where they practiced, so Dave called me up and said, “Bring your guitar over here, we’ve got a project.” I came over, I think maybe with a bass or something, and they were all there and 14 years later, here we are. Luckily that other guitarist never did materialize.

Miller: And you could stay.

Amato: Yeah I could stay.

Miller: Lee, was there a moment when you remember gelling as a band? There’s tons of folks who get together, sometimes with shared musical interests, and they play for a week or two or a month and then things fall apart for any number of reasons. Was there a moment when you said, this is actually going to be a band?

Ritter: Yeah, we gelled immediately. I think there was a cohesive… everybody was on the same page as soon as we started jamming and writing songs together, not with any real plan to turn it into a band that would play shows, make records and tour. I think probably around, I don’t know, maybe it was just six months in, after maybe like our first or second show, we were all having a really good time and people who came out to the shows were digging it. We thought, hey, you know, this might have legs.

Miller: Can we hear another song from the new album?

Ritter: Yeah, absolutely.

[“Blaupunkt” plays]

Miller: That’s “Blaupunkt” from their new album “Earth,” the new album by Møtrik. Jonah, I haven’t talked to you yet. How long had the band been together when you joined?

Jonah Nolde: I joined probably in like 2021. I think that was the first show I played with Møtrik.

Miller: So a while in, like seven or so years into it. What was it like to mesh with an existing quartet?

Nolde: I’ve known these guys for a long time. I’ve known Dave and Cord probably the longest, maybe close to over 20 years. During the pandemic they wanted to record an album, so I helped them record “Moon,” and when shows were opening up and people were getting out again after the pandemic started, I think they wanted to fill out the sound from the album, so I started playing percussion and conga and shaker. We’ve never stopped since then.

Miller: There you are. You mentioned krautrock earlier. For folks who aren’t familiar with the music that you’re paying homage to and taking deep into the 21st century, what’s krautrock?

Golts: I think each of us probably has a different answer. Personally, krautrock revolves around the beat, this motoric beat, which also inspires our name. Motoric is the beat after, like a car engine driving down the autobahn, and it’s two kicks followed by a snare, followed by three kicks, followed by a snare, by one kick, and if you loop that you get… [vocalizes music sounds] … and you’re off to the races, and I love that beat.

There’s this band called Neu! that pretty much invented that, at least in its long form, I feel. To me that’s like the essence of krautrock. I think historically it arose out of this whole music in Germany post-war called Schlager, which was very, very straight-laced, very loungy, and I think it’s similar to what happened in the U.S. in the ‘60’s, people started freeing their minds and they came up with new forms of music.

Miller: Let’s hear another song. This is gonna be “Still Life.”

Golts: Yeah. I’m gonna slow it down for you, for you rave kids.

[“Still Life” plays]

Miller: That is “Still Life.” In some of your earlier albums, you had a song that was 21 minutes long. You have some in your previous album that were 13 minutes long. This one, the new album, they’re like pop song-length, some of them, two minutes and change, three minutes and change, some that are in the 5-minute range, but they’re tighter songs, just in terms of length. Why go shorter this time?

Norde: Because we already did the long ones.

Ritter: An experiment.

Miller: An experiment. It’s a conscious experiment.

Ritter: Conscious, yeah.

Miller: Let’s make these shorter. How does it feel different to do a 3-minute song versus a 21-minute song? Obviously there’s just the length itself, but I guess the feel of making music, how does it change?

Golt: I’ll speak to the 21-minute. That was an improvisation that we cut down, so that was a very different process, to make that one. I think the 13-minute ones, that’s more where someone came in with an idea, and then we fleshed it out and played it as a song, and we’d play them live and they’d go 15 minutes or so. In my mind, they don’t feel that different to play. It’s just we’re getting to the point quicker with the shorter ones, I think. A lot of those longer ones, there wasn’t that much room for improvisation. It was like a set structure, we’re just playing it a longer time.

So you could almost think about these, like the song we just played, “Still Life,” you could just stretch out those changes and come up with a 15 minute song and you know, money in the bank. We decided to get a little more to the point a little more quickly, and I think it, yeah, personally I feel like it feels similar. I don’t know. What do you think, Cord?

Amato: I think I agree with that. There’s a little less, like, we get to drift off in our own little world and then spend some time and then look around and go OK, and then come back to it. There’s a little less of that with this more focused. I think if Dave had it his way, they’d all be 20 minute songs.

Fulton: Absolutely.

Amato: He loves going out into that world, and we’re not done with that formula at all.

Miller: Are we partly also talking about the difference between recording and performing? I mean, is there more space even for these shorter songs on the new album, to breathe live, or are they also three, four, five minutes in performances?

Nolde: We’ve been performing them like the album for this whole record release aspect of it, but I think there is room for that at some point. I think we’re getting through a bunch of shows and trying to be as true to the album as possible, but I think as we continue to play, there will be opportunities to improvise.

Amato: That’s kinda the fun part.The fun part is getting them so tight that you can just kind of...

Nolde: Break it back…

Amato: …mess with it and then bring it back.

Golts: I feel like we’ve learned, I don’t wanna jinx it, but I feel like we’ve learned the material now, and now we can start to play with it a bit more. Like the next song we’re gonna play has a spot in there that Cord mentioned he wanted to like crack open a little bit, so I think that’d be fun.

Nolde: I think one of the differences, going back to the recording process versus playing live, like with all of these songs – well, with most of them, each one of us came to the band with a demo, and the demos were either 80% there, or some of them 100% there, and we learned them as they were. And some of them are really short, so they stayed.

Miller: It’s not every band where every member brings a demo, brings their songs to the band. I think that’s maybe increasingly uncommon. Often bands are just one person with some name attached to that person, and then there are folks who play with that person. Here all of you are songwriters, all of you are song creators.

Golts: None of us are that good.

Miller: That’s the reason?

Golts: And it isn’t all of us, either. I think what happens is, we bring in ideas and then it gets run through the Møtrik machine and so we all become songwriters for them, but the initial kernels of ideas or riffs, someone will bring that in, and then it definitely gets run through.

Miller: The Møtrik machine.

Golts: The Autobahn, yeah.

Miller: Dave, what is it about long jams and improvisation that you love?

Fulton: I like the ability to just drift off and lose myself in the music. With the shorter songs, you actually have to pay more attention to what’s going on. With the longer songs, you get a chance to just breathe and look over at your friend doing that and go oh, I want to do something that compliments that.

Or I love that interweaving of like, Cord and I have been playing together for 20 years or more, and I can’t think of anybody else I’d rather improvise with than Cord because we just know how to go back and forth.

Amato: Yeah, and while he’s going off, I can go get a beer and come back and he’s still doing the same thing. It’s great.

Miller: It does remind me that, you were talking earlier about people dancing at your shows. There’s a lot of music – not that this is only for dancing – but a lot of music that people dance to now is not made with guitars and synths primarily, it’s made with folks, often alone, on a computer. And not to take anything away from that, there’s amazing music that can be made on a computer, but you all are playing together, you’re playing instruments, listening to each other and making music with all kinds of technology, but you’re still humans making music on instruments together. What does it mean to you just to play instruments?

Nolde: I don’t see another way. I think so many of us have jobs where we sit in front of computers all the time, and for me it’s like, I don’t wanna just sit in front of a computer and make music after sitting in front of the computer all day. So playing instruments is, I think, part of all of our growing up. It’s just a part of us, so it’s more fun. Also, the dance thing has a lot to do with bpm. We try to keep it up for the most part. What we just played is probably the slowest song we’ve ever played.

Miller: It’s a ballad.

Amato: It’s a slow dance.

Nolde: Most of it has this, again, like what Erik was talking about, the driving beat. It’s kind of infectious at some point, and people just start to move, so it works.

Miller: All right. Well, Møtrik, it’s fantastic having you guys here. We’re gonna hear one more song, but let me just remind folks one last time, we’ve been hearing Dave Fulton on synthesizers, Jonah Nolde on guitar and backing vocals, Lee Ritter on drums, Erik Golts on bass and vocals, Cord Amato on guitar and synth.

I also should say that Dave, Lee and Erik used to work at OPB, and it’s been a pleasure having the three of you back and all five of you here, to hear you guys. You’re gonna go out on “Mask,” from the new album “Earth.”

Amato: Thanks for having us, Dave. Real quick, for anyone that doesn’t know what the motoric beat is, Lee, will you just give a quick sample of the motoric beat?

[motoric beat plays]

Amato: So that’s it. Loop that at home and pick up a bass.

Golts: How can you not play along with that?

Amato: Exactly.

Golts: It was hard just now.

Amato: Yeah.

[“Mask” plays]

Miller: Møtrik is Dave Fulton, Jonah Nolde, Cord Amato, Erik Golts, and Lee Ritter. Their new album is called “Earth.”

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