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The title of this post isn’t a typo. I’m not posting a piece on the Travel Channel. My rickety fingers actually typed Travel By Channel, which is a young Tacoma band scheduled to fill urbanXchange with melodic rock tomorrow with the Headbangs and Makeup Monsters. The quartet of Kyle Gootkin (vocals, guitar), Eli Massey (lead guitar), Brittany White (bass) and Mike Pa (drums) created Travel By Channel through friendship in middle school.  They’re a band that alternates between the beautiful and the disarray.

I caught up with Gootkin before tomorrow’s show.

WEEKLY VOLCANO: Travel By Channel? What the hell?
KYLE GOOTKIN: It was seriously just one of those things that I think is easier to do nowadays than even 15 years ago. I hit “random article” on Wikipedia and came up with a combination of words. I started with Air Travel, then Travel by Air, and finally Travel By Channel.

If I'm going to inject any meaning into it, I will say that people are constantly plugging themselves into channels of thought, whether on YouTube, cable news, American entertainment â€" with each new advance, individuality paradoxically decreases. But in reality I came up with the name because I like the assonance in the “travel” and “channel,” and the others liked it fine. Originally, we were going to call ourselves Prepare To Use Explosives ... so anything was an improvement.

VOLCANO: Describe your sound.
GOOTKIN: Bottom line, Travel By Channel plays rock. In my opinion, it's too easy to get hung up on the different sub-genres, and limiting yourself to a very specific style limits the experimentation in songwriting. With that said, and I hate to speak for the rest of the band, our influences include Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, Radiohead, Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Tokyo Police Club. Those are the ones that come to mind for me, but everyone in the band is listening to different stuff at any given time. The multiple influences are usually a good thing when we sit down to write songs.

VOLCANO: Through what channel did you four meet?
GOOTKIN: We all knew each other in middle school. After finding out that we both played guitar, Eli and I started hanging out and writing songs in the eighth grade. After a while we realized the music wasn't going anywhere without drums and we called up Mike, he brought over his set and things just clicked. Brittney was the only person we knew who would play bass with us, but it was complicated by the fact that Eli had dated her and they had a messy break up. I bitched and moaned at Eli until he called Brittney up, and they got over the awkwardness pretty quick. We've all known each other the better part of 10 years, so it's always been a band made up of friends.

VOLCANO: How long have you been traveling by channel?
GOOTKIN: We’ve been together for two to three year. We started getting serious between freshman and sophomore year. I can't remember the date, but our first show was at Hell's Kitchen for BigTime Entertainment.

VOLCANO: BigTime Entertainment? How do you feel about pay to play?
GOOTKIN: I want to go on record as saying that these organizations that pray on aspiring musicians with pre-sell tickets need to be boycotted. Any band that's just starting up needs to avoid these production companies and start learning how to promote themselves and make actual connections.

Travel By Channel will perform inside the hip, urban retail store urbanXchange with Headbangs and Makeup Monsters. Even with a threat of snow, this show’s worth the travel.

[urbanXchange, Saturday, April 19, 7 p.m., all ages, no cover, 1934 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, 253.572.2280]

LINK: Travel By Channel MySpace page.
LINK: Discover urbanXchange.