I've been chasing Automatic through nebulae for years, and in September I finally caught them again.
This LA trio has become one of my all-time favorites, which makes it wild that I've only photographed them twice. Being based in the WC, their shows are rare treats when they tour Midwestern crop circles. They're Phantoms, ghosting through the ether and never in plain sight. Their online posts read as intercepted transmissions full of cryptic teases and anticipation.
They're definitely always at arms length and elusive by parsecs, seemingly by their choice, and by art-rock design.
Art-rock.
I'm obsessed with how bands are described these days. The nuanced creativity required to coin a Wikipedia-worthy new genre could be a full-time job. The specificity of genres has exploded into this beautiful taxonomy of sound, and Automatic might be the best at it. Their 2022 album Excess was themed around "apocapop": apocalypse plus pop, heralding end times set to new wave beats. Then they pivot and label their style "sci-fi post-punk" and suddenly there are too many words, all of them correct. Their whole aesthetic screams art school cool. The music, the videos, the retro-futurist fashion. Spacey synth journeys that have a language of their own.
On stage, Automatic delivers that same dark energy. The fog at The Outset rolled in thick from the start, with starlight breaking into dispersed shafts as the artists stayed obscured. I spent the night trying to see past the haze, but then I stopped fighting it. I squinted into the Oort Cloud's murk and started looking for moments when colored lights would catch them just right. Ultimately they emerged, but only when I arrived home and saw what I captured.
In the end, they emerged as time travelers stepping out of their vessels. Figures materializing on our earthly stages. The haze and darkness that challenged me became what made the photos work and more importantly, sustained their mystery.
That's Automatic. Elusive, even when they're right in front of you.