Nite Jewel programs a sound of her own

By Beverly Bryan
Published: March 17th, 2009 | 4:50am

Ramona Gonzalez played in rock bands for years before starting Nite Jewel, her ethereal-yet-funky, synth-pop project. It was an act of self-defense, she explains, after enduring the break up of so many of her other bands. “I was sort of sick of working with people, honestly. I’d just had a lot of bands break up, and I decided it would be easier to work on my own,” she says.

Independent of anyone else’s schedule, Nite Jewel began with Gonzalez working solo. She recorded an EP, My CD, put out burnt copies, then recorded a single, “What Did He Say,” before originally releasing Good Evening, her first full-length, in December 2008. She did it all using an 8-track recorder, an old drum machine, and a collection of synthesizers.

Along the way, Gonzalez has been recording on what she could find — trading and selling instruments as she went along — but she prefers using keyboards from the 1980s. Her favorite is a Juno 60. Older keyboards, with their combination of analog and digital components, are the ones she favors the most, finding them easier to program with her own sounds. “It’s partially sound and texture choices, just feeling comfortable with a certain keyboards because of what sounds they can give you. I just felt most comfortable with the Juno [an Analog polysynth made by Roland in the ’80s] and a few others from that era. I don’t work well with digital equipment. I’m a Luddite in that sense,” she says.

It’s an interesting confession coming from someone who makes electronic music, but her instruments come from a time when electronic-music technology was in its early stages, and her music — with its buried vocals and quirky keyboard sounds — hearkens back to those days. While Gonzalez doesn’t try to make music that sounds vintage, she doesn’t fight it if an old-school sound suits her purposes, saying, “There are definitely times when I’m programming a sound and I laugh to myself because it reminds me of music from a previous era. But I don’t make a point of trying to sound vintage,” she says.

“I didn’t get into that kind of music like synth-pop until later,” she adds. “Any sort of reference to it would be forced for me. I’m not trying to consciously invoke it in that way. If it comes through, it’s a textural idea but I’m not sure where it’s coming from.”

Talk to Gonzalez about her taste in music and it becomes clear that it could be coming from a lot of places. She says she feels heavily influenced by the hip hop and R&B she grew up listening to in the ’90s but also runs down a list of new age and experimental electronic groups, including German group Cluster and Italian group Sensations Fix. She adds on Brian Eno and Bill Nelson for good measure. Nite Jewel is named after a song by California’s Nimbus Obi, which she describes as “’80s synth madness.”

It may be a challenge for Gonzalez to sum up her inspirations because she spent years soaking up some serious record-collecting culture. She doesn’t collect records, so much as record-collecting friends. Among her most beloved collectors are her husband Cole M.G.N. (he also plays guitar in Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti), who helped produce Good Evening and co-wrote a couple of songs and friend Jason Darrah, who put out the original release of Good Evening on the Gloriette label before its current Human Ear Records’ re-release this March. “L.A. is full of collectors,” Gonzalez says. “So is the Bay area. I guess I just gravitated to those kinds of people because I never really felt that there was any sort of monolithic thing that was going to influence me. I’m pretty scatter-brained.”

If so, this scattered approach has developed into something of substance. In between the releases of Good Evening, Gonzalez sped off on tours with Glass Candy and Deerhunter. For recent performances, she’s enlisted her friend Emily Jane to play keyboards and trigger samples and will soon have another friend, veteran tour musician Corey Lee Granet, on guitar and bass.

With them, she is building a fuller live show and preparing to tour Europe in September. Although her band will expand from its solo origins by two while touring, it’s still an intimate project for Gonzalez, though audiences may be surprised. “They come to see a real band with guitars and drums, and then they see two tiny girls onstage with electronic equipment and weird songs with a lot of hiss on them. I think they’re just a little bit taken aback by the contrast.”

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