Website * Facebook * Instagram * Twitter * TikTok * YouTube * IMDB * Spotify * Apple * Hypnotic Bridge Records
“With a buzzsaw psychedelic urgency, the Portland, Oregon-based instrumental surf-garage-psych project Trabants never relents into cruise control. With soft passages crashing into abrasively hypnotic squawls, along with guitar pyrotechnics, Trabants recalls the work of Russian Circles, Explosions in the Sky, and Allah-Las’.” – Glide Magazine
“Exquisite and mesmerising… a fuzzy guitar-driven rolling ball of psychedelia… The guitars are hypnotic and intoxicating, weaving and punching, with percussion that drives it along and adds colour… will leave you wanting much much more.” – The AU Review
“Straddles the lines between surf, garage-rock and psychedelia… a frantic urgency, with biting guitar tones playing silk road psych over rumbling bass and drums. Think Dick Dale with a heavy lysergic dose. Drive on boys, this is quite the ride.” – Shindig! Magazine
“Two slabs of surfy psych-rock instrumentals from a group that’s been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, probably.” – Bandcamp
“Penna’s expressive, commanding playing sometimes evokes Peter Green, while his acoustic 12-string is reminiscent of Hendrix’ rare forays on the instrument.” – Vintage Guitar
“A captivating blend of Eastern-influenced psychedelic music and classic surf.” – Last Day Deaf
“Trabants cull a mood from something like a spaghetti western or a Frankie-and-Annette flick, establish a riff to serve as its appropriate avatar, and blow it up with solo freakouts and slow-burning crescendos.” – The Boston Phoenix
“Chill on the beach in the sun and listen to the crashing waves, gaze upon the beautifully barren landscape of Sergio Leone’s brutal westerns, dance all night to the fuzzed out guitars of the 1960’s sunset strip, dine with class on the coast of capri… Trabants will take you there.” – Grateful Web
” ‘Mantra’ channels the raw energy of the ’60s with intense fuzz effects, setting the tone for a vivid auditory experience that invites listeners to embark on their own psychedelic journey.” – Psychedelic Underground Generation
“The guitar’s primordial fuzz harmonizes with glockenspiels and bells, hypnotically guiding you through your inner mind like a repeated mantra… will remind you of La Luz, Dick Dale, Tame Impala, Ty Segall, The Doors… Trabants continues to captivate with its retro-modern sound and unique visual experiences.” – lacaverna.net
“The time has come to travel to other dimensions aboard the music of Trabants and its psychedelic song ‘Mantra’ … elements of surf, garage and psychedelia, distinguished by its meditative vibes, a reverse guitar and a catchy chorus… generates a hypnotic environment… paints a mental landscapes of beautiful and flourishing nature… transforming our way of seeing reality… This gem is perfect for listening alone if you want to find meaning in your existence.” – End Sessions
“Penna’s guitar shines throughout. His background in film and TV music comes to the fore… Hot stuff.” – Vintage Rock Magazine
—
Trabants – 7-inch vinyl “Mantra” b/w “Surfers On Acid”
Portland, Oregon-based instrumental surf-garage-psych project Trabants is orchestrated by musical auteur Eric Penna and a rotating cast of ‘60s-psych-loving ringers that he assembles like the ensemble cast of a Sergio Leone film. Trabants’ latest fuzzed-out, visceral, psychedelic surf experience is a two-track, 7-inch, 45-rpm vinyl containing the songs “Mantra” b/w “Surfers On Acid” (out via Hypnotic Bridge Records).
Trabants (pronounced Truh-bonts) have shared bills with Dick Dale, Charlie Megira, Mark Sultan of The King Khan & BBQ Show, Yonatan Gat of Monotonix, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, La Luz, Messer Chups, The Sloths and more. They’ve played festivals across the world including the Surfer Joe Festival (Italy), Tiki Kon (Portland, Ore.) and Surf Guitar 101 Festival (Los Angeles). The roster of Trabants contributors include Pete Curry (Los Straitjackets / Nick Lowe), Samira Winter (Winter), Bryan Murphy (Man Man), Glenn Brigman (Triptides) and members/sidemen of bands as diverse as The Pharcyde, The Monkees, World/Inferno Friendship Society and many more.
Penna’s songs can be heard in Netflix’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Hulu’s Shut Eye, CBS’ Undercover Boss, Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back, films like Surf Noir and T-Rex, and ad campaigns for Mountain Dew, Yeti and others. He was nominated for an Independent Music Award for best instrumental album alongside a placement on the show Becoming featuring Johnny Knoxville.
“These two songs are more deliberate than anything else we’ve done before,” says Penna. “Being an instrumental band, we create a mood. Often times it evokes a place, from Maui to Madrid, from Paris to Tangiers, or from the 1960s’ Sunset Strip to the spaghetti Western landscapes of the Almerían desert. However, these songs serve more as a voyage inside the listener themselves. It’s a record in two parts, side-A and side-B, mind and body represented by each.”
This 7-inch is a mind and body sonic trip to other worlds, where fuzz is the primary alchemical ingredient for life. “Mantra” takes on the aspect of mind as the ultimate psych-rock instrumental. It fuses the best elements of Eastern-influenced psychedelic music and classic surf with its meditative drones, trippy backwards guitar and big expansive chorus. The primal fuzz of the guitar harmonizes with glockenspiels and chimes as its hypnotic core guides you through your inner mind like a repeating mantra. It’s a personal journey inward to the root of existence.
“There’s a heartbeat to the whole thing,” says Penna. “It’s malleable to be whatever you need it to be. To find whatever that source of energy is within yourself. I love exploring music in this way when I’m recording with others. With these particular people. In this particular room. At this particular time. Making this song. Exploring music like that helps me find my mantra, but it’s also a way for you to find your own mantra too.”
The video for “Mantra” was shot over a hot weekend in Palm Springs. The video mirrors an hallucinogenic trip where the protagonist goes on a spiritual desert journey in her mind, and returns in a different form. It blends psychedelic imagery of nature, art and mysticism as she travels through a mid-century modern chic motel and stunning mountain vistas, all through a retro-cool lens.
“I’m Brazilian and loved that Palm Springs heat; I thrive creatively in it.” says Penna, “‘Mantra’ existed in my mind before it was recorded so I shot the whole video to the song in my head. I knew the pace I wanted, and that it should be a journey that could happen in any order. A journey with no start or end. That’s actually my wife in the video. We just loaded up a bag of ‘60s dresses we picked up in weird vintage L.A. shops over the years, with the intention that she’d go film this psychedelic journey with me.”
“Surfers on Acid” takes on the aspect of the body. There’s a sense of urgency in this instrumental surf song’s push and pull. Notes will hesitate, precariously holding on, riding this psychedelic wave of color to its improvised backwards guitar ending. It was recorded to tape, embracing the bleed, not doing punch-ins, and riding full takes to their completion. Penna’s expert guitar mastery is on full display as we’re hit with his groovy labyrinthine melodies and solos.
“On my album Freakout,” says Penna, “we had ‘Mecca,’ which I recorded with an electric sitar/guitar hybrid. This song is a sequel to that. I wanted to flip surf concepts on its head by utilizing my original Tychobrahe Octavia fuzz pedal rather than a clean, reverb surf sound. There’s something primal about that original pedal. The modern version ‘fixes’ the little things I love about the pedal. It’s finicky, but I like that. That pedal really sang with its super dense fuzz, especially through the classic Fender Showman amp that I borrowed from legendary Portland instrumentalists Satan’s Pilgrims.”
Penna grew up in the not-very-rockin’, Edgar Allan Poe creepy meets John Waters weird, city of Baltimore. He started playing music as a teenager, and early on met Andy Bopp of the Interscope Records’ power pop band Love Nut. Bopp took him under his wing to teach him songwriting and recording. He brought Penna on tour to give him an education on the road.
“Andy would take me to record stores while we were on tour,” says Penna. “He’d go through the dollar record bin with me. He liked ‘60s stuff. He’d break down how the modern music that I liked used techniques from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I learned to write songs with these records by methodically studying the forgotten songwriting conventions of past masters of their craft.”
Penna recorded his first album with Bopp producing, a power pop project called Dyslexic Crush. The night they finished, Penna and a bandmate drove overnight to Plymouth, Massachusetts to play it for prospective manager John Lay. They listened to it all day, and he pushed for it to be included in the horror-comedy spoof film Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. This was the first of a lifetime of Penna’s music being used in film, TV and ads.
Penna moved to Boston when he was 18, just as Baltimore began to swell with a cool indie scene with bands like Beach House, Dan Deacon and Future Islands. He was in talks with Big Deal Records to put out the album, but they folded. But, not before they helped include Dyslexic Crush on a Rhino Records ‘90s teen bands compilation. Penna kept up Dyslexic Crush as he attended Boston University. After an internship at Capital Records in Los Angeles, Penna returned to Boston and opened his first recording studio where he honed his chops recording twelve hours a day.
During this time he helped form the indie/punk band Ketman, who became popular in Boston’s rock scene. They toured Brazil and the U.S.A. They played shows with legends like Mike Watt and Silver Jews. The Boston Phoenix chose them as the best band in Massachusetts in their “50 states 50 bands” article. Their first full-length record El Topo did really well, and their next record Ketman A Go Go did just as well, but didn’t raise them to the next level.
“We were practicing everyday,” says Penna. “The stagnation of that second record was like the kiss of death. I was very much like a workhorse. That music required a lot of agility. I kept in-practice, seven days a week, for a long time. The strict regiment led me crave laid back and mysterious surf instrumentals so I started another band to take gigs Ketman wasn’t right for. I booked the first show with no band or songs and had to build it right away.”
Trabants, named after an Eastern European car made of compressed cotton, was born with Penna at the helm and a rotating cast of musicians, a different Boston supergroup at each show. They played a mixed repertoire of obscure movie soundtrack songs and original surf instrumentals.
“The name Trabants was as random as the concept,” says Penna. “It’s the car everyone was getting around in when I visited Eastern Europe. They’re from another universe. It felt apt. We were this ragtag group of musicians trying to make a living playing music, doing it in an inhospitable environment. Later I found out it means a naturally occurring satellite in German. I always thought there’s something beautiful and lonely about that metaphor. How we, as musicians, were orbiting this strange, undulating group of songs that we picked from all these different places.”
Penna was enamored with the book Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums by Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, when he recorded the first Trabants album Highwire Surfing (2011). He recorded in mono, using all vintage gear and techniques at his studio in Boston. Penna wanted to push into the world of music for movies/TV, so he packed up and moved to Los Angeles before releasing Highwire Surfing into the world.
After a couple hard-fought L.A. years of going out every night to make friends and connections, Penna became a go-to soundtrack person for getting vintage sounds. He wrote and recorded everyday, building a catalog of music that can be heard in shows like MTV’s Catfish, Shark Week and multiple Vice documentaries. He scored the film Surf Noir, featuring a version of the classic track “Sea of Love” with vocals from actress Troian Bellasario (of Pretty Little Liars).
He went back to Boston for a summer to record Cinematic (2013), a spaghetti Western-surf album with horns, where every song could be its own movie. Standout track “Dead Men Tell No Lies” would feel right at home in a Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaboration and landed placements in both NFL defensive end Simeon Rice’s directorial debut Unsullied and the romantic comedy In Stereo, both in 2015.
“Trabants encompasses the vintage aspect of my music. Eric Penna could do anything: produce a modern album, write modern pop music, engineer, compose for TV and film, play guitar in someone else’s band, etc… but Trabants is the temple where I hone my ability to capture sounds from the ’50s and ’60s,” Penna says.
Los Angeles saw a surge of retro-psychedelic rock projects in the mid-2010’s, and Penna recorded many of them, including Winter, Basement Babies, So Many Wizards, and the first two Easy Love albums (which includes one of the sisters of Summer Twins). Penna recorded the Trabants album Freakout (2015) during the 50th anniversary of 1965’s psychedelic boom.
“Psych bands were getting big,” says Penna. “Tame Impala went from being a super-weird unknown band to gaining mainstream popularity. Freakout felt like the world was catching up with how cool the ‘60s were.”
Penna recorded Nel Cuore Di Una Terra Selvaggia (2018) over three and a half years, a David Lynchian spaghetti Western album with a heavy reliance on harpsichord, horns and orchestral arrangements. Penna teamed up with singer Prom Queen for “Daddy’s Got a Big Gun,” a slinky, Nancy Sinatra meets James Bond track that breaks up all the bolero gunfight action of this album.
“I couldn’t find a harpsichord that would stay in tune,” says Penna. “I eventually found this guy in Skid Row who had a warehouse of harpsichords. He tuned harpsichords by ear. He let me set up and I recorded for ten hours in that warehouse.”
An avid record collector, Penna produced and compiled a CD for London-based reissue label Ace Records called CYCLONE! -GALLIC GUITARS A GO GO of never before reissued European ‘60s garage music first heard as part of Mukta Mohan’s morning radio show and the Molotov Cocktail Hour, both on L.A.’s KXLU. Also, The Mary Pickford Foundation enlisted Penna’s help in creating modern soundtracks to silent films being restored in their massive archive for rerelease.
Penna was looking to expand when COVID hit. He moved to Portland, Oregon and set up a larger, more comprehensive studio. He immediately started building his stable of players in Portland including Dave Berkham (bass), and his pal Anthony Brisson (drums). There he recorded Lockdown (2020) & Lockdown (part II) (2023), a collection of fuzzy, blues songs that he’d been working on for nearly a decade, that he now had the time to complete. He recorded Lockdown with a previous lineup that included Pete Curry (Los Straitjackets / Nick Lowe), and Lockdown (part II) with Berkham and Brisson—which was their proving grounds for this new 7-inch.
“I’m getting better at my instrument everyday,” says Penna. “It used to be hard to write a song when I was younger. Now it’s akin to snatching ideas out of the air, like fish out of water. Different songs are passing by me all the time. I write a song almost every day and add them to sync libraries. The diligence of writing a lot does pay off eventually. I write a lot of songs for these records, initially, and I hold onto the ideas that stick around for a while. Eventually, I’ve only held onto the best stuff.”
Penna is currently working on the soundtrack for the documentary Blackangelcity which focuses on the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and celebrates the life of jazz singer Barbara Morrison. Penna also tours as the guitarist with “Planet Earth’s Longest-Running Modern Surf Band,” The Insect Surfers.
The two songs of this 7-inch are harbingers for Trabants next full length LP—recorded with the same lineup, and at the same time as “Mantra” and “Surfers On Acid,” two songs that are built to twist your mind and mutate your body’s third eye open. So, we have more exotica-tinged, fuzzed-out, psychedelic surf guitar instrumentals to look forward to from Penna and his mind-expanding band of psych-rock misfits.
ALBUM CREDITS:
Written, recorded and mixed by Eric Penna at Hemstreet Sound in Portland, OR
Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East
Eric Penna – Guitars, percussion
Dave Berkham – bass
Anthony Brisson (coordination) – drums
