Submitted photo: Portland electronica band Yak Attack 

The genre name “electronica” will often summon images of a lonely DJ onstage scratching records and setting off loops for crowds of sweaty, dancing teens and 20-somethings.

Portland-based four-piece Yak Attack, Oregon’s answer to the “livetronica” trend popularized by such bands as Disco Biscuits and STS9, are out to change that perception.

“I think a lot of times there’s some perceived friction between strict electronica DJs versus the band scene where people are all playing instruments,” keyboardist Dave Dernovsek said via conference call with bandmates Rowan Cobb and Nick Werth at Cobb’s home in Southeast Portland. “That’s one thing we all feel strongly about: It’s all music. It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from a turntable and a laptop, or a keyboard and bass.”

Since forming in 2013, the band — Dernovsek, bassist Cobb, percussionist and xylosynth player Werth and drummer Devin Weston — has walked the musical line between Portland’s live performance and electronica scenes. Its mix of looped passages and samples with jam- and jazz-inspired improvisation and grooves is starting to gain attention outside the city, as well. The band will make its first out-of-state festival appearance when it plays the 10th-annual Joshua Tree Music Festival tonight.

The festival is the halfway point of a West Coast tour that will take the band down through California and then back up to Portland. It includes a return trip Wednesday night to the Volcanic Theatre Pub, where the band played one of the afterparty shows for Phish’s two-night stand at the Les Schwab Amphitheater in July.

“That was one of the best, most well attended shows we’ve had in our history as a band, and then also (the venue) had a similar vibe to The Goodfoot (Pub and Lounge), one of the places we play in Portland where we kind of got our start,” Cobb said. “I think it was a really great scene for us. I’m kind of curious to see how many of those people (who were at the afterparty) were actually from Bend.”

The members of Yak Attack are old hands on the Portland music scene, having played in such jam-based groups as Alpaca!, Manimalhouse and Planetjackers before joining together. All four have studied either jazz or classical music (or both) in the past.

Still, adding in the loop-based electronic elements proved challenging to the band at first. Dernovsek had the Yak Attack concept in mind for a few years before he began jamming some of his ideas with Weston, but the band didn’t really take off until Cobb came on board, adding the live bass element.

“I was jamming with Devin, our drummer, for about a year before the band actually got started, figuring out how to perform something that was somewhat electronica based,” Dernovsek said. “We could never really get the sound off the ground; it didn’t really pop. I decided we needed a live bass player.”

Cobb brought his experience working with Alpaca!, which experimented with “electronic sensibilities” in its music. Only now, he and the rest of Yak Attack were syncing up live instruments to computer-generated loops and samples.

“We never used computers or loops or anything in Alpaca!,” Cobb said. “When we started doing the Yak Attack project, there was kind of a learning curve, for sure, when it came to learning all the hardware, how to sync everything up to a click track and whatnot. It was a little challenging, but once we started locking into it, it opened up the possibilities of our sound.”

Werth, a fan of the band from the beginning, began sitting in on shows about a year ago. Soon, he was sitting in on every show.

“I absolutely loved them, and when I got an opportunity to sit in on my first show, I had such a blast and it felt like I already knew a lot of the music,” he said. “I feel like being the percussionist, I have one foot in the rhythmic world and one foot in the melodic side of things. What I was drawn to in Yak Attack was just that deep sense of groove coupled with strong melodic content — there’s so much melody going on in that music, layers and layers and layers of melodies.”

That sense of melody can be heard throughout the eight tracks on the band’s debut album, “Real World Conditions,” released late last year. Between humorous non sequitur dialog samples and vocals from Portland artist Aniana Hough, the band weaves a dense tapestry of instrumentation across lengthy jams, most of which clock in at just under 10 minutes.

“The vast majority of our material has been created spontaneously and created over time,” Dernovsek said. “The cores of the songs came out of 100 percent improvisation.”

This leads to a lot of evolution onstage. Two of the songs on the album, opening tracks “Nebra Skydisk” and “Fibulator,” were written in-studio, offering an embryonic look at the songs before the band had a chance to hammer at them live.

“It’s kind of a shame to put them down on recordings right away before they’ve really had a chance to fully develop,” Cobb said. “Then again, we usually have a pretty good sense of where we want to develop them to when we’re jamming live. We improvise quite a bit, but then we always generally know where we’re coming back to, even in a live setting.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com