The Pulsars are an innovative multi-genre Rock duo consisting of brothers Dave and Harry Trumfio who grew up in suburban Chicago and came to prominence in the mid to late-90s with a wide swath of live performances and two very solid albums. Having been signed to Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’s post-A&M label, Almo Sounds, later label woes and the vagaries of fate brought The Pulsars’ release schedule to a close, and the brothers moved on to other projects.
Over time, their self-titled album, The Pulsars, has become recognized as ground-breaking for its combination of guitar-driven Rock combined with synth elements, among other hints at multi-genre experimentation. Now, almost 20 years after its release, The Pulsars have regained rights to their album and are going to be releasing it again on September 13th, and today Glide is excited to offer an early listen. This also marks the first time the album will appear on vinyl. Alongside this release, they will be making festival appearances and performing East Coast tour dates. I spoke with Dave Trumfio, who is also a Producer, about the life and times of The Pulsars, their sound, and how their live performances and albums were received by critics and peers.
It seems like you’re someone who’s into technological innovation. Have you always been that way?
Dave Trumfio: Me and Harry, who’s the drummer in The Pulsars, and my brother, grew up always wanting the future to be now. It was always, “When are we going to have flying cars?” [Laughs] We were part of that generation in the 80s and 90s when everything was changing kind of slow, but kind of fast. Then 2000 hit, and everything went crazy. I don’t deal with bleeding edge technology.
I feel like there was a huge optimism about technology then. Growing up, I was always told that things were going to get better and better, and that felt exciting. Later, I was more skeptical. Not using bleeding edge tech means that you don’t have to deal with the glitches.
That’s right. I learned that pretty early-on. I’m update programs and they would have made changes that just didn’t work with my work-flow. I let other people beta-test things! [Laughs] I’m pretty busy. I don’t have time for that.
What were you all dealing with, in terms of files and materials, in getting the music for the self-titled album back? What form were they in? Did you have everything that you needed.
It’s been a journey that’s been going on for almost 20 years, since this record came out. Speaking of bleeding edge, as far as the multi-track masters for the record went, that was a double-edged sword, because it was half-analog two-inch tape, and then half digital in the first wave of ProTools. When we got our record deal, we basically used the advance that we got from the record company to really beef up our studio. We were one of the first studios in Chicago to have ProTools. The way that everything worked then is that we had removable drives. It was really limited storage, with only one or two songs per drive. We’d have to be constantly backing up to a tape storage system, and those tapes just didn’t survive. They got sticky and they ran on antiquated computer systems.
We still had them about 10 years ago, when we started pushing to get the rights back to the music. Universal had copies, but they had a huge fire in 2006 or 2007, which meant they were lost. The stuff we had, we were trying to pool together, and it just wasn’t happening. We had partial masters. But the one thing that we were able to get were the original mixes, which were done to a Tascam-D88, which was a popular digital 8-track back in the 90s. We were able to get an adapter to help us make higher resolution mixes. So we remastered from the original mixes and we chose mixes that kind of got voted out because they were a little too adventurous.
Making record by committee kind of sucked back then. We wanted more fuzzed out electric bass that sounded ridiculous, which we tried to put on every song, but A&R and radio people said, “That’s a little extreme, guys.” Now that we’re in charge, we’re doing the record we wanted! It’s all the same exact songs, and I don’t know that other people will be able to tell the difference, but it’s the director’s cut of the record.
This version does feel very textured to me. And I could see how a label might be in there with a machete, cutting some of that out.
Yes! I was obsessed with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless when it came out, just the sonic assault of it, but I always thought it was a little too thin-sounding. That Shoegaze stuff is a little too brittle for me. But we definitely had an influence of that era on Pulsars. I just wanted a fatter sound, so I would push the envelope on that. But in the mid-90s, a lot of people weren’t used to hearing bass. They asked to take that “fuzzy, low-end thing” out.
I think there’s also a very guitar-driven feel to a lot of these tracks, though.
That’s the funny thing. The lore around us was always that we were this New Wave Synthpop band, but I never got that. We have a lot of guitars in our music. There’s definitely a synthpop angle. I’m a bass player in most of the other bands that I’ve ever played in, but this was the first band where I actually played guitar.
When Harry and I started Pulsars, it was just going to the two of us, and we were going to play live as a two-piece, which had kind of not happened a lot back then. We needed synth bass, since it was just the two of us, which gives a sound like a synth band. We weren’t afraid of using synths, even though it was not a popular thing in 1993 or 1994. Back then, you were a guitar band, or a rave, Electronic band, or an Industrial band. There wasn’t a blended guitar and synth sound. We were definitely not cool! [Laughs] It was indie Rock guitar chords with synth bass.
There is quite a muscular and formed skeleton to these songs which feels more analog, and then there’s this texture that you don’t let up on. I can see how people might have said then, “Come on, pick a lane!”
Exactly. Especially nowadays, when things are so genre-based, it’s obvious that we never really fit in a genre, and still don’t. All the songs I write start on a guitar, or I might pick up a bass. Very rarely do I sit at a piano or a synth and write a song. My whole thing is that if it can’t be played on a Folk level, it’s not a song. I want to be able to sit down and convey the song to someone on a guitar. I’m not super-competent at other instruments, but I do enough to be able to write songs.
You are hitting on the live performance side of things just a little bit, and that’s a big part of your history with Pulsars. By being a duo, and creating this kind of music, you and Harry set yourselves up to climb a big mountain. You had a very active live performance life and that worked for you. How did you set up all these elements live?
We didn’t ever really think about it being hard. We did ask, “How are we going to do this live?” At the beginning, we just literally had a DAT machine, where the synth, and the synth bass, and everything was in mono on one side. The other side was a click track. This was before laptops and the modern backing track phenomenon. Then we graduated up to digital 8-tracks. I was always really into the synth bands of the 80s and I realized when going to see Depeche Mode that they had 24-tracks off to the side playing backing tracks. They had the budget to do that. So in The Pulsars, as we got record deals and better gigs, we went to digital 8-tracks and we would sync to video tracks as well. We’d have videos on screens of a hand on a tambourine, or a background vocal.
In the early days, we had a very minimal set-up, but we were lucky enough to be in Chicago, which was really taking off as a music city in the Indie world, and some promoters stumbled upon some early shows of ours. They said, “This is cool! What’s going on? Would you guys want to open for Blur next week?” So we said, “Yeah, we would like to open for Blur.” Then, “Do you want to play with Oasis?” And we said, “I think we want to play with Oasis.” [Laughs] The whole idea was that Harry would set the drums up at the front of the stage with me, and for an opening band, that’s killer, because we don’t have to disturb the backline. We lucked out that way early-on. We could just jump on tours. We had a good live run. We even opened for Weezer. But our sound man was a behind-the-scenes member of the band.
And that’s a lot more common now. There’s a lot of planning that goes into the electronic elements these days.
Yes, and right now, I’m getting ready since we’re going to be playing some shows this Fall. I’m in the process of planning shows, and it’s going to be much, much easier with modern technology. I don’t need to bring out racks of 8-tracks and VHS decks. I can do it all from a mac mini with tons of RAM. Boom, I’m done!
Did you get a sense, back then, of how other musicians were reacting to your music during that time when you were touring? Were they interested and asking questions?
Absolutely, they were asking questions. Most of the bands that we toured with were saying, “Whoah! What’s going on here?” I know that Sean Lennon was playing with Cibo Matto at the time, and we did three tours with them. They were all over it, and saying, “This is cool! Maybe we should do this!” They were really enthusiastic about what we were doing. We toured with Man or Astro-man?, and we were kind of in the same vein as those guys in terms of the kitschy futurism. Though they were a totally different kind of band, a surf band. But they used TV screens, like we did. We used the TVs together! There was fun stuff like that.
I would have to say, on the ground level, people didn’t really know what to make of us. We were either way too early or way too late. I’d like to think that we were way too early. On the kind of snobby Indie Rock side, which was a huge thing back in the 90s, we weren’t cool, and I think that affected the outcome. The New Wave revival was kind of starting to happen, but it was Post-Grunge, and people were wondering what the next big thing would be. People were asking about us, “Could this be the next big thing?” Spin Magazine used to have this double-page feature on what the next big thing was, called “Exposure.” One month, it was us, then the month before us, it was Limp Biskit, then the month after us was The Spice Girls. I like to say, “The rest is history.” [Laughs] Rap-Rock and formulated groups were the next big thing, not us, not a New Wave revival.
Preformed groups really were next, which was unfortunate for the world. What do you think made you open to those sounds that were so uncool, rather than following what was cool?
A lot of music was just in our DNA. When the late 80s hit, and there were bands like The Pixies, Pavement, and Sonic Youth, I loved that stuff. I was really into it. For about four or five years, I was in guitar bands, and not a synthesizer in sight. Then people said, “It’s not cool to repeat a phrase, or have a hook.” That was a thing, too. It would be “too poppy.” At that point, I took a step back and said, “You know what? No way. You’re all screwed. I’m starting a new band with my brother.” We were just going to make disposable Pop music and have fun. And that’s The Pulsars. We did our own thing and didn’t really care. I guess that’s what it comes down to, too. We did not give a shit what anybody thought, we just went and did it.
