Rollerball

Rollerball hails from Portland, Oregon, yet resists straightforward classification by shifting between subdued yet somber pop material and outright abrasive free-form playing. The ensemble incorporates both male and female voices, an array of instruments, and electronics that further enrich its inventive approach.

The four musicians who launched the project in the early 1990s—Mae Starr on vocals, Mini Wagonwheel on bass, Herman Jolly on guitar and vocals, and drummer Gilles—had all grown up in Montana. Starr, Wagonwheel, and Jolly relocated to Portland in 1994 and persuaded Gilles to follow. Their early work stayed within conventional power-pop boundaries, yielding a pair of cassettes during the ensuing years. Growing dissatisfaction with those constraints eventually led the members other than Jolly to remove him in 1997. The remaining trio issued the CD Garlic later that year.

Trumpeter, vocalist, and clarinetist S. De Leon S, another Montana acquaintance who had moved from San Diego to Portland, soon completed the lineup once more. This quartet captured the one-sided 12-inch Schizherue inside the studios of KBOO, Portland’s community radio station. In 1998 the group tracked the LP We Owned Lions, which marked a decisive turn toward extended experimental improvisation and away from tightly composed material. Both releases carried hand-screened covers conceived and produced by the musicians themselves, whose pursuits also encompass painting and printing.

Saxophonist Amanda Mason Miles came aboard in 1999, expanding the ensemble to a quintet and steering it deeper into avant-garde improvisation. Signing with Portland’s Road Cone label in 2000 enabled the release of multiple CDs thereafter. The band records and mixes these later projects inside the basement of the communal house where the members reside. Extensive live appearances throughout the Northwest and across the country have taken place over the intervening years as well.