sound check

 THE OREGONIAN

Friday, June 18, 2004

By MARTY HUGHLEY

SOLOVOX: OF SPACE AND SONICS -- If not for his grandmother, Carlton Tietze might have become an astronomer.

At age 9, the Texas native was so fascinated with Carl Sagan's TV science series "Cosmos," he decided he wanted to study the stars. Not long afterward, though, he went to live with Grandma, and a different seed was planted.

"She had a dual manual Yamaha organ," he recalls. "She had The Beatles songbook with the big notes. She showed me where middle C was. I started out playing 'Nowhere Man.' But I also just assumed that you were supposed to make up your own stuff, so I started doing that from the beginning."

It took a few more years, but Tietze eventually realized that what had moved him so about "Cosmos" wasn't space, but sound -- the "huge, orchestral, cinematic" electronic music of Vangelis, which he now calls a Rosetta stone for his own work as the one-man band Solovox.

Tietze will celebrate the release of his new album, "Break Out of Prism," with a Friday night show at Ohm. But the musical route the 33-year-old keyboardist and producer has taken from the inspiration of such early Vangelis albums as "Albedo 0.39" to where he is now has been circuitous.

When he was 15, Tietze got his first synthesizer, a Korg Poly-800. "I cried, I was so happy," he says, talking recently in a downtown cafe. But electronic music didn't maintain his interest.

"I bought a few Tangerine Dream records," he says. "But then classic rock took over." He immersed himself in Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Jeff Beck. He experimented with electronic composition during a stint as a music major at the University of Georgia, but found music school wasn't for him and instead became a part of the burgeoning Southern jam-band scene. Later he'd move to Portland and work with such bands as Imogene, Diggabone and King Black Acid.

"I learned more in six weeks sitting in with bands than in all that time looking at a piece of Bach," he says. "I'm a rocker at heart.

"But there's this other part of me, a different part of my brain, that's fed by 'Albedo 0.39' and all that. It's this only child's dream of being in control of every note."

That early dream was rekindled a few years ago at the Burning Man festival, where Tietze, who'd paid little attention to electronics in the 1990s, heard a performer with a much more developed electronic sound. "I realized that technology had caught up to where I'd dreamed it could be when I was 15."

With a stage rig that includes four keyboards and two laptops, Tietze creates thick, hard-charging tracks that ring with a kind of anthemic grandeur yet maintain the gritty sonic texture and funky rhythmic feel of a sweaty jam session. Like the Crystal Method and the Chemical Brothers, he melds the heat and hooks of rock with the indefatigable motion of club music.

With 21st-century technology he can layer and control the music himself, but he still likes a little human interaction. So "Break Out of Prism" features cameos by Portland singers including Jen Folker (Dahlia, Imogene) and Lea Krueger and drums on a couple of tracks by ex-White Zombie member Ivan DePrume, whom Tietze met through an impromptu jam on a bus at Burning Man.

For Friday's show at Ohm, Krueger and vocalist Benjamin Rader will help out, but it'll be about Tietze's assertive chops and musical vision -- part classic rock, part boundless space. It should be a breakout event.