Sid Vicious would be proud of the scrappy music beginnings of the nascent Denver prog-rock band Peña.
Guitar player Aaron Ray is self-taught. He teamed up with one music overachiever, bassist Nick Sullivan, and one drumming newbie, Michael Scarano, to craft meandering rock songs that can be as long as 11 minutes and often feature chords that build on each other like the pieces in a Jenga game over spacey sound effects.
Ray met one of his bandmates while working at Gart Sports, and the other while attending the Art Institute of Colorado. We caught up with this staffer for the Denver indie music label Suburban Home to learn more about Peña’s avant-garde aesthetic.
Q: The band is named Peña, but no one in the band is named Peña. What’s up with that?
A: When we first started out, we actually came up with the name Kodiak but after a little research we found out that name was taken by a band in the U.K. I think they’re a progressive rock band. So we were throwing around names one day and Nick, our bass player, threw out Peña, I think based on the road by the (Denver) airport. It’s random but simple and easy to remember.
We’re not really the type of people to come up with a deep meaning for everything. We just liked the sound of the name. I’m also a graphic designer, so a lot of the time I make decisions based on how I imagine things might look. It was easy to imagine how “Peña” would look on paper.
Q: Music cynics might refer to your sound as “indie jam.” Would you agree or disagree with that characterization?
A: That’s actually accurate. But the thing that comes to mind when people hear the word “jam” is some sort of hippie thing. I don’t agree with that. We come from more of an indie rock (world). There have been a lot of bands recently I’ve enjoyed that are instrumental and progressive, but not necessarily jam, like Mogwai and Pelican. That’s what my influence is: indie rock bands that are different, progressive and somewhat technical. … We don’t have a verse/chorus structure, and that’s the way we like to do things.
Q: The song “First Outer Inner Last” sounds like an ode to bellybuttons. Is it?
A: “First Outer Inner Last” is an algebra term. It’s kind of a joke on the genre known as “math rock,” which is something people might use to classify us. The way that we write is one of us will come up with some sort of riff, then everybody puts their heads together and adds stuff. Our songs are less about concrete things as they are about feelings and emotion. I hate using those words, but the music is about everything that’s happening around you.
Peña opens for Tenebre and The Autumn Project on July 31 at The Larimer Lounge.
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
