ARTISTS

PRESS
"Loop-based music--the next craze? Not likely, but Portland's Modernstate gives the one-man band a little sonic breadth that is worth investigating."
- Chico News and Review

feature - PSU Daily Vanguard 03.02.05
feature - Oregon Music Guide 02.03.05

"On the first few listens, Schauer's pop sensibilities are pronounced. His melancholic recitations over flower-picked guitar parts dominate much of the album. But Schauer, formerly of the Dutch Flat, employs a looping device as the foundation for his guitar-driven songs, using it as a rail as he explores winding melodic passages with a series oflayered electronic and guitar parts.

While Schauer's experimentation does tread some simply joyful ground, songs like the 11 minute-31 second slow burner "Rat the Automatic" can be irritatingly exhausting. The strongest parts of Schauer's work are his lyrical observations. On "Magnetic North" Schauer steps away from his looper and laments in a grainy voice the time he discovered "that magnetic north and true north were not the same," and then, as he does with his instrumentation, Schauer stretches it, expounding on that small moment."
- Mark Baumgarten, Willamette Week
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"...the show was opened by Modernstate, a one-man, loop-based "band" that was surprisingly interesting given the limitations of loop-based music. Modernstate is at the forefront of a burgeoning movement of one-man bands in the Pacific Northwest. With a little luck, perhaps it all will be known one day as the "Modernstate sound." The band (his name is Sam Schauer) will be back in Sacramento in March and is worth a listen."
- Christian Kiefer, Sacramento News & Review
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STORY
I was seven years old at the time I received my first and only pair of moonboots, and I fell immediately in love. They were shiny silver with dark blue stripes, and even being a tall kid, they came up nearly to my knees. One afternoon, while driving in the foothills of central California with my mother, the faith I placed in my moonboots was shaken to its core.

It had been raining hard for several days, but today was finally clear. Driving Highway 4 near the old mining town of Copperopolis, the dilapidated road rose and fell with the late afternoon California landscape, making for a scenic if a bit hazardous drive on the best of days. Today, however, the spring rains had turned every dip in the road into a pool of standing water, some several feet deep.

The drive was slow but beautiful, so I spent my time staring out the window, day-dreaming of my future exploits in the Big Leagues alongside such Oakland Athletics greats as the Daves: Kingman and Henderson. At one point my gaze wandered to the floor and on my feet I beheld the wonder that was my beloved moonboots. How wonderful were they, I asked myself? So wonderful that they could walk on the moon! So wonderful that I could do anything! So of course they were waterproof.

The idea took hold in my young brain and would not let go. My boots are so great that I could just get out of the car and walk through those puddles to make sure they weren't too deep for the car. It wouldn't cause me any harm and this way I'd be making sure it was safe for the car and my mother, as there was some concern that a pool too deep would cause us to stall. Pretty soon these thoughts were no longer happy being confined to my head, and I began to speak them aloud. And I would not stop.

For an hour or more every time we would slow down to either go around or through a standing pool of cold California rain water, I would not miss the opportunity to comment on the amazingness of my moonboots. On how I would be more than happy to ford the waters ahead of the car, because my moonboots were so rad that I could walk right through those big puddles with no trouble at all.

Finally, I believe, my mother had had enough. I was in the middle of one of my odes to the moonboot when mother, slowing down to go around some water, actually stopped the car. "Ok, do it," she said, looking me straight in the eye. This was the moment of truth. A moment that I had never for one moment expected to actually come. "Really?" was all the reply I was able to manage, to which mother shook her head in the affirmative and inched the car even closer to the water.

Opening the door I stood before a puddle that must have been 15 feet long and who knows how deep. I cast a tentative glance back at mom behind the wheel, who just smiled and urged me along. I strode into the water slowly at first. After a few inches of depth I found that my feet did to this point remain dry, but the realization set in that there was no going back. Having committed myself to this course of action, I was now honor and duty bound to follow through, consequences be damned.

I strode ever deeper into the puddle. My feet grew cold, but not yet wet. The water level rose the further I went, but so far so good. Then, somewhere in the middle of that treacherous pool of rain my luck changed, and with one last step the water level rose above that of my moonboots. Before I new what was happening, my boots had been breached. Water poured over the top, turning the sacred moonboots into canteens with feet inside. I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I'm pretty sure I cried.

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