We Are Parasols

We Are Parasols is technically a band and mostly from Portland, Oregon. We make experimental electronic pop music. We make music videos and clips we call propaganda films. We were originally a shoe-gaze band, with swirling guitars and floating female vocals, but over time we’ve developed a more industrial sound.
The first version of We Are Parasols was just Parasols. It was me being worn out from being in band after band for 20 years and just wanting to make some kind of sound, some kind of music that was just for me. It was a solo project for exactly one weekend and one EP. As soon as that first EP was released D and I started dating and we wrote and recorded the next single together. After that came a couple more EPs and then things slowly fell apart musically and personally.
Then it was 2015 and we’d found our way back together again. We decided to make a record, a sort of foundation to establish ourselves and define the sort of music we wanted to make. My old friend, Alec, from my previous band underwater, flew out from Atlanta to visit and starting contributing to the record In September of 2015 D and I were married and we released a new single, “re:Union”. By the summer of 2016 we released the album, Infrastructure, a compilation of songs re:Worked, re:Recorded, and re:Assembled from our past with a few new tracks added. The three of us decided to expand Parasols into We Are Parasols, a name that signified that we’d become a group, a project, a partnership, a pact, maybe even a band.
I play guitar, synthesizers, and piano. I also record and mix our songs. Alec plays and programs drums and synthesizers. D sings, plays bass and synthesizers. After Infrastructure was released we spent several months learning how to be a live band and in the process learned how to write together, conceptualize together, and started working on a new record, Inertia.
Inertia is an industrial-gaze concept record about an android sex worker who, with the help of a human lover gains free will. The entire album’s story was expanded from the lyrics to “No Movement”, a song from Infrastructure. The album’s protagonist/antagonist is only known as “ss.tab” (sexual synthetic tasked android body). ss.tab, once free from her human captors, starts an android revolution which quickly becomes a human extinction, and in the final chapter, “bloodvoice (a violent choir)” she evolves into a fascist overlord.
While working on Inertia we developed in the opposite direction of our anti-hero. We Are Parasols became the most equal and democratic project I’ve ever been involved in. We write all of our music together. Usually, but not always, Alec’s beats and loops are the foundation which inspire D and I. D writes vocal melodies and then I write lyrics to match her melodies.
Since Inertia was released in 2017 we have continued to develop as a live band playing shows and touring with bands like Bloody Knives, Soft Kill, and Actors.
In 2018 we recorded and released another conceptual EP, No Center Line, about a witch traveling between life and death seeking revenge against those who had murdered her. No Center Line was conceived in the dead of winter, in a hotel room, on the Oregon coast, with the entire first song, “At the Edge of the End” being recorded there.
Since No Center Line we’ve recorded and released another EP of re:Worked versions of our own songs called re:Mixtape and a new single, “Feel Machine”. We’re currently working on our next album, Body Horror.

Jeremy (02/04/2020)