Portland's Swahili navigate the sonic and rhythmic with songs that are equally as fit for crowded dancefloors as they are for solo bedroom listening. Part of that is ode to the way the band's music pulsates between genres for an alluring sound that is all their own. Their enigmatic songs fit together like pieces of a puzzle, but one that keeps building, rather than revealing an answer. Frontwoman Van Pham is a kinetic force onstage, commanding the audience's attention with ease (often while artfully entangled in the cord of the microphone) and acting as shepherd into the world of Swahili. Now onto their sophomore effort, Swahili release their new album AMOVREVX via Translinguistic on March 24.

Hometown: Reno, Nevada

Homebase: Portland, Oregon

Swahili: Van Pham, vocalist. Troy Micheau, guitar. Xua, synthesizers. John Griffin, Bass. Ryan Schofield, drums. 

How did you come together?

Xua: Ryan and I started working on our first home studio project together in 2003. Troy had moved to Reno recently (Ryan and Troy were in a hardcore band on high school together in Las Vegas), Ryan traveled to Spain for a year and right after he got back, there was the first of our Reno scene's Halloween show, where musicians form cover bands for one night. Troy and Ryan performed in "Joy Division" and Van fronted "The Slits." She was very entertaining. After a few line-ups, Jonny and Troy and Van got on board by 2007. 

What's the most important thing about your music and/or making it together?

Van: Transformation, flow, and rhythms are key—in many senses of the words: the groove of a song, the allowance for growth and development in skill and in personality, and the desire to keep moving (the mind and the body). We enjoy taking in a lot of influences and experiences (some shared and some diverse), and synthesizing them, taking a left turn, with the hopes of crafting something new or striking from that base. 

The album's title is a nod to tarot. Is that something you pay attention to? 

Xua: We enjoy and take part in the esoteric. The tarot is an interesting source of esoteric thought and knowledge. I've been constructing my own version of the deck for several years. Included in the vinyl version of the record are two of from that deck—one based on the lover's tarot and another that Van's lyrics are printed with.

The rhythms you create seem to be distinctive to the band. What are some of your favorite rhythms either in your record collection or out in the world at large?

Xua: Aurally, I tend to gravitate toward old rhythm machines, skin drums and single oscillator bleeps and bloops. My favorite rhythms in my record collection are almost always '70s and '80s stuff. Kraftwerk and Marvin Gaye stand way out. The way Michael Jackson uses the melodies to inform the rhythm always gets me thinking, the bass line on "Billy Jean" is a great example of how to flirt with every element of the song rhythmically, melodically and harmonically. 

Van: I follow the beats of environmental sound: bus rides, bustling bars, walks in the city, and eavesdropping. In music, hands in many pots: campy pop, thoughtful ambience, harsh electronics, Modern composers, among others, and somewhere, tucked away in my upbringing, Vietnamese ballads my parents used to make me listen to. My training is in more classical vocal, some opera, so I’m just as happy listening to Laurie Spiegel as I am Blood Orange, Persian chorale music, Prince, or Erik Satie. 

How would you describe your song-writing process? How long does it take a song to come to fruition?

Xua: The rhythms come first when we write then we'll search for the melodies, if the rhythm is cool enough to withstand the process of exploration, we know it'll be a good basis to start solidifying over. Even a recorded song is really never finished, there are always new noises to find. 

What do you count as your non-musical influences?

Van: Adventures great and small. Storytelling and language, translations. Science and technology and their resulting fictions. Shared meals. Reading one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction at such a start-stop pace that they begin to morph into one amalgams work in my own mind.

Xua: Travel is key. I think we are all also interested in stories. The stranger, the better. Anything that acts as a way to see things anew. 

What's the best catalyst for creativity?

Xua: Novelty is the best catalyst for creativity. Going out of your way experience something or someplace or someone. unfamiliar. It gets the nervous system fired up. 

What are your goals as a band?

Xua: We would love to to take Swahili to Europe and Asia but our "goal" is to humbly subsist and make better and better records. If things go really well, there is a fantastic stage experience to create in our future and perhaps a film.