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Music Features

Mystic wanderings

Andrew Lam
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0
Mystic wanderings

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund is, more or less, the story of man who wanders Medieval Germany after leaving the monastery in search of the meaning of life. He finds organic pleasures like art and the empowering touch of beautiful women. Eventually given the choice of joining an artists guild, he bows out, instead favoring the freedom of the road less traveled.

“[The book] talks about his travails, breaking away from conformity and living life like a gypsy,” says Shane McKillop, bassist of Santa Barbara, Calif. band Gardens &Villa, as the van curves through the New Jersey Turnpike midway through a U.S. tour.

The book — which was passed to McKillop by Gardens & Villa’s enigmatic guitarist/flute-dabbling lead singer Chris Lynch (the flute can be heard on tracks such as “Orange Blossoms”) — inspired the band’s song “Spacetime” off its self-titled debut LP (Secretly Canadian, 2011). The song, which stretches Lynch’s distinctive yet malleable vocals high and wide, brings to mind flickering psychedelic images of star-filled skies, inkblot tests, bearded wizards, ghostly creatures, turbaned swamis — but that might just be due to the track’s mind-blowing video.

“There’s a line in the song ‘You found a reason to abandon the monastic life /I found a lover who would always elevate my mind’ — it’s living the life of art and experiencing women who are really powerful,” says McKillop. “When you have those moments in life that give you that awakening that there’s something more than you thought there was.”

With mystic musings and springy synths, the song is at once organic and synthetic, like Gardens & Villa itself. The band’s name plays on the street name (Villa) where McKillop, Lynch, drummer Levi Hayden, and keyboardist Adam Rasmussen once shared a rambling 1920s Westside Santa Barbara house and studio, paired with the crop-share the musicians inspired with their own lush garden (Gardens) — where they grew “sunflowers and corn and peppers and kale.” Sounds real hippie-like.

Yet despite the idyllic, breezy So Cal. tableau, there’s a tripped out, wide-eyed darkness lurking in the band’s sound on tracks such as “Black Hills”; this is perhaps due in part to the tweaked synthesizers Rasmussen employs, or the wobbly tape-delay tricks by newest member, Dusty Ineman, who was brought in to supplement the “bells and whistles” the album’s producer, Richard Swift, added

The band recorded with Swift (The Mynabirds, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier) last summer after driving up to his home in the small town of Cottage Grove, Oregon. They spent two weeks living in tents in Swift’s backyard “amongst chickens, but no showers,” McKillop laughs, adding “It was June, the perfect time to be in Oregon.”

While the album was lauded by the taste-makers that be, and Gardens & Villa is in the midst of a rather momentous season — currently on yet another U.S. tour, about to kick off its first ever tour through Europe — it still seems a band in transition, not yet ready to simply settle with the sound it’s cultivated. In the van they’ve been listening to the audiobook of Keith Richards autobiography, Life, which has been drawing McKillop to the roots of rock and roll, and blues, but they also have been watching the pavement fly by listening to Little Dragon’s latest, Ritual Union.

“I’m a huge Little Dragon fan, their new record has more organic synthesizers — organic meaning real transistors. Real old school equipment in a modern setting sounds so much more warm, there’s a lot of equipment nowadays that’s very flat, not really three-dimensional,” says McKillop.

He and the rest of the band were awestruck by the vintage equipment they got to mess with during their Daytrotter Session — vintage Fender Rhodes keyboards and the like. Explains McKillop, “Just more ’60s, ’70s tones mixed in with newer technology is what we’re hoping for once get a little more money to buy these things.”

And so the van keeps on rolling.

GARDENS & VILLA

With Young Man and Waterstrider

Thurs/13, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

Classic style

Andrew Lam
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1
Classic style

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “We were listening to these old [Jamaican]records that were just incredibly psychedelic and very alive — breathing and pumping with groovy consciousness,” says Alex deLanda, bassist of San Franciscan outfit, Extra Classic. “But they were recorded on four-tracks.”

As deLanda gushes about this style of music, vocalist-keyboardist  Adrianne “Dri” Verhoeven (formerly of emo-pop’s the Anniversary) nods in agreement, stroking the couple’s tangerine-colored cat, Carol. Their other cat, King Jonezers, circles as they sit in the living room of their Richmond District apartment.

To simulate the sonic texture on old recordings of Jamaican music, Verhoeven and deLanda made a conscious decision to record Extra Classic’s full-length, Your Light Like White Lightning, Your Light Like a Laser Beam (Manimal Vinyl), all-analog on eight-track tape with equipment from the ’60s and ’70s. To celebrate the album’s vinyl release, Extra Classic will play the Make-Out Room with King Tuff and Audacity on Oct. 26; but first, a gig opening for Moonface at the Independent this Tuesday, Oct. 18.

Working on old cars and working on vintage recording equipment is basically the same thing, deLanda says recalling memories of working on his father’s Chevys from the ’40s and ’50s. “I’m underneath [the recording equipment], cussing, and trying to solder some wires together — trying to make it work,” deLanda laughs. “It just made sense [to record all-analog].” Vanhoeven joins in the laughter, her pants now blanketed in cat fur.

The technological limitations of analog exaggerated the interconnectedness of Extra Classic’s songwriting process and recording method, rendering it challenging at times. “[We had] to think inside of eight tracks,” Verhoeven says. DeLanda (formerly of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone and the Papercuts) adds, “If we weren’t able to express ourselves with eight tracks, then we needed to go back to the drawing board.”

The absence of ProTools notwithstanding, Extra Classic masterfully braids elements of Jamaican music, which include dub, reggae, Caribbean music, and American R&B/soul/pop — among others — into its own brand of multidimensional grooves. Despite technical constraints, they were able to create a kaleidoscopic album that impeccably honors the style of music that they love dearly.

Borrowing its moniker from the eponymous album by reggae legend, Gregory Issacs, Extra Classic was also inspired by Jamaican music thematically. “I drew inspiration, as a singer, from the amount of feeling and soul in [this] whole genre of music,” Verhoeven says. “Times are tough. You got a lot of shit stacked up against you, but [you find] some sort of way out and hope.”

This is strikingly evident in “You Can’t Bring Me Down,” an anthem of strength, resilience, and empowerment. Upon a cursory listen, it’d be understandable if someone was to categorize Extra Classic as a reggae band. But in songs such as “Angel Eyes,” Verhoeven’s vocals gently hover above an airy arrangement, recalling ’50s American pop, à la Patti Page. In the closer, “Give Me Your Love,” her richly nuanced and soulful voice emanates more of an R&B vibe.

Verhoeven attests to the band’s inherently eclectic sound, “I’d say we’re influenced by reggae music. But, I wouldn’t say that’s the kind of band we are. I would say we’re psychedelic dub rock.”

Petting King Jonezers, deLanda interjects, “It’s like the rock and roll’ers think we’re reggae. And the reggae guys think we’re rock and roll.” 

EXTRA CLASSIC

With Moonface Tues/18, 8 p.m., $15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 

With King Tuff and Audacity

Oct. 26, 10 p.m., $10

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2886

www.makeoutroom.com

Don’t say CANT

Andrew Lam
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0
Don’t say CANT

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It’s tough to pin down a busy bee like Chris Taylor — Grizzly Bear’s bassist, an in-demand producer, and now the leader of his own pack called CANT — but once you manage to, he’s as disarmingly engaging as his new dispatch from a darkling, excruciatingly personal plain, Dreams Come True, released on his own Terrible Records.

So it shocks him when he hears critics describe his music as cold, even chilly. “When people say it’s impersonal, it’s like, wow, man,” Taylor marvels from Portland, Ore. “If anything, you should be saying, ‘This record is too emo.’ That was what I was expecting, that people would say, ‘This guy is way too emotional. Go see a therapist and cool out.’

“I was intentionally trying to figure out the worst kind of fears, fears of falling in love and not being able to let go, or fears of losing it when you think you have it. Scary, unpleasant realities.”

But realities rendered far from heartlessly. A probing soulfulness runs throughout Dreams Come True, which often sounds more like a wrenching, pitch-black nightmare than a blissful reverie. Yet the LP teems with pleasures, and the deeper you penetrate, the harder its pull. It’s in the way that Taylor beautifully couples gristly, screeching scads of industrial noise, reminiscent of both Nine Inch Nails and horror-movie violins, with celestial synth in the title track and “Rises Silent.” Skittish electronic beats bang up against gamelan-like percussion in the echoey, prog-pop opening track, “Too Late, Too Far,” while Satie-esque (and Thom Yorke/Radiohead-like) impressionism is paired with an undercurrent of ’90s-era post-punk dissonance in “Bericht.” Brass that cues wee-hours soul bounces off elastic bass notes in “The Edge,” and a softly insinuating Velvet Underground-ish guitar vamp adds menace to “She Found a Way Out” — a song that makes one wonder if that way out was, akin to Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control Again,” something like a permanent check-out.

“It’s about the sort of feeling you feel when the biggest love of your life walks out the door, and you deserve it, and she’s better off for it — it makes you want to scream,” explains Taylor with a rueful chuckle. “No, she didn’t die! She went to grad school. She’s getting smarter by the day.”

Taylor’s education into solo music-making began with his forays into singing with Grizzly Bear — CANT’s name plays off that definition, among angles. After completing production on Twin Shadow’s Forget (4AD/Terrible, 2010), he sat down with TS’s George Lewis Jr. for about two weeks to work on Dreams, playing most of the instruments themselves. Work continued after Lewis departed, contributing to the music’s sense of ratcheted-up intimacy. “I was by myself, and it’s just the worst, especially not having written lyrics before,” says Taylor. “You’re like, does this suck? And it’s just crickets.”

Songs such as “Answer” — with its pacing synth line, moodily ascending string sounds, and brooding refrain, “It’s been a while since you needed me / It’s been a while since I needed you, too” — spoke directly to old demons. “It’s about my ongoing and often difficult relationship with my dad — one of the more trying relationships in my life,” confesses Taylor, whose parents divorced when he was 5.

“It’s about feeling loved, and at the same time, there’s so much, like, meanness. It’s really confusing when a kid is told they’re loved and then treated so badly…” And it’s mystifying, and maybe a relief, that the track’s inspiration has no idea what role he played in its making — and that pain can be transformed so completely into pop. “I think,” says Taylor with disbelief, “when the song premiered on Pitchfork, [my dad] said, ‘I like that!'” CANT With Mirror Mirror and Blood Orange Wed/5, 8 p.m., $15 Independent 628 Divisadero, SF (415) 771-1422 www.theindependentsf.com

Guerrilla jazz

Andrew Lam
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2
Guerrilla jazz

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When John Steven Morgan and John “Thatcher” Boomer III — who make up the John Brothers Piano Company — finished their last set at the 54th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival last month, my eyes weren’t watering alone. It wasn’t the barbecue smoke from the nearby food tents, or the too-bright afternoon fairgrounds sun. The John Brothers shake their listeners to the soul, because these piano-playing souls are shaking too. And MJF was their formal music venue debut.

Most other days, the John Brothers work together electrifying SF street corner audiences with skillful, joyous frenzies on one of their Craigslist-freebie upright Wurlitzer pianos. And they hope to soon bring their music to new cities. Over the course of the last year, they’ve compelled perhaps hundreds of local passersby to stop and watch. That’s gold for Morgan and Boomer, who say they want to give the listener the most visceral possible reaction. “I’d like to trigger a miscarriage,” Boomer deadpans.

The John Brothers put their own bodies into their art, hefting their piano to locations on a custom dolly, in and out of “the Contender,” a crumbling 1991 Jeep Cherokee. It’s not clear how much longer they’ll be hulking piano for a living. While their plan is to save up for a giant cargo van and tour around the U.S. just the two of them, by the end of the MJF they were in talks with a potential manager. “It’s just too much stress,” says Boomer of managing themselves, alluding to the CDs they forgot in Oakland on the trip to Monterey.

The CDs, which they sell out of a top hat, are filled with just one example of their repertoire. Morgan and Boomer’s original compositions are often mistaken for ragtime, but Morgan explains, “It’s not ragtime. Our influence comes mainly from the ’20s and the ’30s: Fats Waller, James B. Johnson, Art Tatum.” The two self-taught musicians have distinct styles, producing together a wild, organic, often playful mashup of classical, Morgan’s “gypsy stride,” Boomer’s blues, and a little jazz. Their ever-morphing reinterpretations oscillate from tender to eviscerating, raunchy to prim, mad to whimsical.

Local filmmaker Dan Reed of NextBooth.com, who accompanied the band to document their MJF appearance, met the John Brothers on the street, and asked immediately if he could use their music in his short films. “Other [musicians’] songs capture moments — their songs are full narratives,” he says. Reed used the John Brothers’ track “Computer Duster” as the soundtrack to his short Curious Chris, about an innocent man who gets bamboozled. The duo’s music both enlivens and takes new meaning from the film, as Morgan carries the listener from an expansive, melancholic opening, an unpopulated landscape with the delicate curiosity of a child, which blends into apprehension mixed with determination, building seamlessly to a swaggering, gypsy caravan staccato finale. Morgan says he’s eager to score future Reed films.

As the opening number for their first set at the jazz festival, Morgan, his broad shoulders bending over the keys, tore “Computer Duster” apart to create a novel Frankenstein of madness, thick shoulder-length hair swinging in his face, dissolving into chaos and in a moment resolving to the melody, the crowd simultaneously alienated and mesmerized; they were cheering by the end.

The John Brothers Piano Company perform regularly in San Francisco’s Union Square on Friday afternoons and evenings. 

THE JOHN BROTHERS PIANO COMPANY Fri/7, 5-8 p.m., free

Union Square, O’Farrell and Geary, SF

www.thejohnbrothers.com

 

Playlist

Andrew Lam
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0
Playlist

DUM DUM GIRLS

ONLY IN DREAMS

(SUBPOP)

Midway through a tour with the Vaselines last year, Dum Dum Girls singer-guitarist Dee Dee was summoned home to say goodbye to her ailing mother. “I wrote the majority of the record after she passed away, within a few months. So I can only assume that’s why such a significant portion of the record deals with death,” says Dee Dee. That visceral catharsis comes through in songs like “Teardrops on My Pillow” and the yearning Mazzy Star-esque “Coming Down.” Less blue tracks like “Bedroom Eyes” bridge the gap between the Dum Dum’s upbeat reverence for Wall-of-Sound gems and more now, the Pretenders’ clean rock. What initially began as Dee Dee’s own lo-fi project, has grown into a fully functional band — all four women contributed to Only in Dreams, and the group effort shows, in honey-toned harmonies and crisp guitar lines, along with Dee Dee’s stirring vocals. (Emily Savage)

 

TINARIWEN

TASSILI + 10:1

 (ANTI)

Tinariwen hasn’t released a bad record yet; in fact, everything it has put out reaches levels of transcendence. Soulful desert blues with the ability to hypnotize and sway bodies in ways that most Western psychedelic rock bands want so much to reach. Meditative guitars, sweeping rhythms, hypnotic vocals, chant and response refrains, all the elements that have come to define its sound, yet time and after time it delivers with such a commitment to excellence. This time out some famous folks from bands like TV On The Radio, Wilco, and the Dirty Brass Band appear at moments throughout the record, but its a testament to Tinariwen’s strong influence on these artists that they merely just add subtle touches and blend into its sound, instead of trying to upstage the group. Swaying back and forth has never felt so right on. (Irwin Swirnoff)

 

DOMINANT LEGS

INVITATION

(LEFSE)

The luxurious, vintage-inspired cover of Dominant Legs’ Invitation is fully indicative of the sound within. Reminiscent of retro radio-rock like Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen, these sunny and nostalgic synth-pop jams arrive, fittingly, amidst San Francisco’s warmest stretch of the year. Founding member and Bay Area native Ryan Lynch began recording sincere, approachable songs in 2008 and was later joined by fellow San Franciscan Hannah Hunt on vocals and keys. Now a fully formed five-piece, Dominant Legs serves up lush, shimmering feel-good music with a melancholic undertone courtesy of Lynch’s delicate falsetto. Invitation has some bubbly dance tracks, a few smooth ballads, and a whole lot of reasons to fall in love with Dominant Legs. (Frances Capell)

 

HTRK

WORK (WORK, WORK)

(GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL)

There’s been no shortage of groups tapping into undeniably pleasurable sounds over the last few years, but for every cool-sounding witch house and glow-core record, the one thing that has been missing is a true sense of human emotion. On Work (Work, Work), HTRK channels the severe loss it experienced into an album that slowly and subtly glides you into a floating and mournful state of mind. Losing their bassist to suicide last year, and the producer of their last album to cancer, this is a group in the midst of severe tragedy who have channeled their heartache into a mesmerizing work of airy melancholy. Stripped down electronics, shoe-gazed and dazed vocals, secret melodies, and that indescribable sensation of closing your eyes and freezing time when the world around you is moving in miserable ways. This is sensual goth. (Swirnoff)

Musical alchemy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Musical alchemy

MUSIC I’ve never defended the idea of a “best of” record. Some anonymous curator is typically given the task of sifting out a musician’s hits from the misses, of establishing an artist’s definitive compilation once and for all. A fairly daunting project for judging something as fickle and varied as musical taste. So I have to admit I was skeptical when I picked up The Best of Quantic album put out by the British imprint Tru Thoughts earlier this month.

Best of? Quantic, a.k.a. William Holland, is only 31-years-old. And the talented producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist is hardly through with making music. Quantic has completed eleven records on Tru Thoughts in the span of a decade, ever since the label flipped his demo into The 5th Exotic, a fluid recording of instrumental grooves crafted from the percussive roots of hip-hop and the beat experiments of Brighton’s downtempo electronic scene. A track culled from that record, “Time is the Enemy,” launches the new retrospective into a geography of sound that Quantic has persistently navigated in unexpected ways — between the contemplative and the effusion of the dance floor.

Few musicians are as prodigious as Quantic, as methodical, as ready to throw away conventional formulas and risk leaping into the wandering spirit of rhythm. A couple years after his solid debut, Quantic abandoned strict sampling techniques in favor of forming a break driven funk group: the Quantic Soul Orchestra. Powerhouse songs like “Pushin’ On” and “Don’t Joke with a Hungry Man,” respectively featuring vocalists Alice Russell and Spanky Wilson, stamps The Best Of with the frenetic pulse of deep-in-the-pocket soul.

With a crate digger’s fervor, Quantic traveled to Ethiopia and throughout the Caribbean, absorbing and researching and translating the diaspora of the polyrhthm. Four years ago, he relocated to Santiago de Cali, Colombia — a city built from second wave 1950s Art Deco and the more typical mass concrete structures of the ’60s — where the radio still broadcasts Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, and the boogaloo of 1968 saturates the air.

“I see Cali as a crossroads, almost like a test tube, or a gateway from the Pacific Coast [of Colombia] to Bogota,” Quantic tells me from his home, trucks rumbling in the background. “It’s a very creative place, although fairly unbeknown to the outside world.”

Once settled in Cali, Quantic reforged his orchestra into his Combo Bárbaro. In 2009, Quantic and his group released perhaps his most exhilarating album yet, Tradition in Transition, a testament to the vitality of percussive heritage on the fringes and yet in the subterranean core of the Americas.

“I wanted to really explore the side of music from Barranquilla and Panama City where you have bands playing soul, funk, salsa, cumbia, boogaloo … not necessarily one genre,” Quantic says. “What I appreciate in this music is that there’s tremendous diversity — culturally, ethnically, racially — and so many different rhythm experimentations.”

For his Combo Bárbaro, Quantic tried to synthesize precisely this kind of musical alchemy. He paired British drummer Malcolm Catto with frenetic Colombian percussionist Freddie Colorado; Peruvian pianist Alfredo Linares weaved the melodies, and folklore singer, Nidia Góngora, from the Afro-Colombian region of the Pacific Coast, wrote and delivered the lyrics. What comes out of these creative tensions is a brilliant and resonating song like “The Dreaming Mind,” which also features lush string arrangements from the often overlooked Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai.

After a few rotations, the best of record won me over. It’s more of a stitched together mapping of Quantic’s rhythmic wanderings — musically and physically — than a set of highlights towards a destination. “The traveling of my own life as a musician is intertwined with the music I make,” he says. “It’s like looking at the rings on the tree; there’s a pattern to it, but it just develops naturally without so much of a plan.”

Quantic hopes to redraw a bit of that map during his performance this Friday at SOM. Without his bárbaros on tour, he’ll spin some 45s to chart out influences, and then bring the studio on stage, mixing recorded sessions live while adding dubbing and keys. 

Quantic

With Guillermo and Wonway

Fri. 9/30, 10 p.m., $10–$15

SOM

2925 16th, SF

www.som-bar.com

Time and space pilot

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Time and space pilot

MUSIC Pioneering electronic composer Pierre Schaeffer used a specific word to describe his work, which took ‘common’ noises and manipulated them into music — acousmatic: “referring to sounds that one hears without seeing the causes behind it.”

Every sound on genre-defying musician Amon Tobin’s latest album is a mystery. The 2007 album Foley Room utilized cinematic studio techniques, reaching back to the roots of electronic music. Now Tobin has shot that line of inquiry into the other direction, seemingly returning from the future with ISAM, an album as alien as it is familiar. “As technology develops, you can go one of two ways,” Tobin says in a phone interview. “You can do the same things that people did ten years ago just with less stress involved, or you can take that tech and try to get more out of what it was designed to do — things other people haven’t figured out yet.”

Tobin occasionally lets people peak behind the curtain. A video earlier in the year showed his hands at work, recording light bulbs (they make sounds, if you know how to play them), plugging them into a high-end, triple axis, pressure sensitive MIDI controller. This last instrument, a Haken Continuum, comes with enough of a learning curve to exclude most people from duplicating what Tobin does with it: morph conventional sounds into conceptual instruments that only exist in the artist’s mind. When it came time to post ISAM online, Tobin annotated the album, revealing sonic origins. The enchanting female vocals that appear on tracks like “Wooden Toy,” for instance, are his own, gender-modified.

There was also a warning: “anyone looking for jazzy brks [sic] should look elsewhere at this point or earlier :). it’s 2011 folks, welcome to the future.” A clear statement, breaking away from the sample heavy style that Tobin was once known for, material tailored for DJ sets, in a club. With ISAM, that’s not the whole story. “Electronic music isn’t always dance music, in fact dance music is just a section of electronic music,” Tobin says. “This record isn’t dance music, its not about raving or any of that stuff.” It’s the kind of album that might make you want to put on headphones and let the mind run wild. For all its meditative qualities, though, it’s hard on the bass and expressive, with a range that begs to be heard in a louder arena.

Thinking of a tour, Tobin “had the problem that all electronic musicians have, which is how the fuck do you present electronic music, which is so not to do with performance, as a live thing that’s engaging?” The solution, a next-level stage set created by L.A.’s V Squared Labs, Chicago’s Leviathan, and S.F.’s Blasthaus, has Tobin cast as the pilot of a space-going vessel in a narrative that the artist admits is “not War and Peace, not a brilliant epic thing, but it’s enough to give meaning and direction to the visual content.”

A 25-foot-long, multi-dimensional structure of giant pixel cubes resembling a game of Tetris going very badly, the ISAM installation comes to life via a system that allows multiple projectors to transform every surface into a screen. It’s effectively 3D without the need for dorky glasses and eye strain. (A promo video released on YouTube surely sold more tickets than a hundred articles like this.) Tobin’s place on stage is within the piece, positioned like a magician or contortionist: inside a box. Which, perhaps, is just where he’d like to be. “I always kind of put myself in the corner of a stage if I can,” Tobin says, “because there’s nothing worse than standing in front of a thousand people who are all staring at my every minute movement and feeling like maybe I should just turn the lights off, because there’s nothing to see here.”

The unconventional choice of positioning the artist more like ghost in the shell than man on a pedestal has its limit. Alex Lazarus, the creative director on the project says in conceptualizing the performance Tobin “wanted people to focus more on the actual music and visual representation as opposed to focusing on him.” But Lazarus says “he can’t just not be seen, so I had to open my big mouth and tell him that we could use this smart glass in his cube, which can be turned on and off to see inside. It’s cool and all, but it’s extremely expensive and every single time we have to touch it I’m petrified that we’re gonna break it.”

Seeing the wizard at work alleviates the creeping possibility of a Milli Vanilli situation, but still, like Brad Pitt in Se7en, I want to know what’s in the box. (What can I say? I’m no fun — I also want to know how magicians do their tricks and how Pepperidge Farms draws the little faces on Goldfish crackers.) Is Tobin manning extra controls to sync the visuals? Is it all automated? Specific details, however, are generally off limits, as both Lazarus and Tobin invoke “proprietary technology.” Which is fair. Considering how many people worked on innovating the project, a trade secret is valuable. (Years after debuting, the similarly impressive LED tech behind Daft Punk’s ‘pyramid’ paid off again when its designers essentially reshaped it into deadmau5’s ‘cube.’)

Tobin says there’s absolutely no compromise musically. Even when he does a more traditional DJ set, he has it all worked out ahead of time. “When I go and see a show I don’t want to see people wanking off on their equipment,” Tobin says. “I love to watch things that have been really well thought out and practiced.” Whatever he’s doing in that box, he’s enjoying it. “I feel like I’m in an Apollo 13 capsule. The whole thing is based on the idea of it being a spaceship and the funny thing is I come into the cube and it literally looks like a cockpit from the inside.”

I ask him if this means he doesn’t have to pretend for the part. “Well,” Tobin says, “if I was pretending I’d probably have a band up there trying to play the record. Kind of a waste of every one’s time.” His voice is deadpan, but sounds like he’s grinning, just a bit. *

 

AMON TOBIN

Sat/1 (sold out) and Sun/2, 8 p.m., $29.50–$39.50

The Warfield

982 Market, SF (415) 345-0900 www.thewarfieldtheater.com

Legends of the underground

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Legends of the underground

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC “There are people like us who decide we no longer want to deal with what is fed to us through commercial forces,” says infamous hardcore singer Mike Apocalypse, “We strive to create new things — if I couldn’t create new music, I would fall apart in a month’s time.”

It’s wretchedly hot on a Sunday afternoon at Mission bar Laszlo when Apocalypse, 37, makes the above statement while ordering a shot and a Red Stripe. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, he orders many more shots and beers, and excitedly bumps into a cadre of fellow music-maker friends.

With a broad grin, his sea-green eyes widen as he recalls the early 90s origins of Gehenna, his longstanding hardcore-black metal band. He folds his tattooed fingers (one reads “83%” in ode to Gehenna’s first song) over a beer with a mention of the upcoming chopped and screwed Gehenna mixtape.

In addition to his role as Gehenna’s singer, Apocalypse is also a respected local DJ. He beams while giving me the rundown on his daily routine: recording music at home in the Excelsior District every morning, DJing at Laszlo, Showdown, or Argus Lounge every late night; recently spinning disparate tracks by the likes of Infest, Stone Roses, and Nipsey Hussle.

This, his openness and agreeable demeanor, are in direct contrast with his fabled persona. Mind you, he’s only a legend in the underground, in small pockets of cities like San Diego, Orange, Calif., and Reno, but within certain crowds, the rumors are alive. If you’ve heard of him — and chances are, you haven’t — than you’ve heard the drama.

The rumor mill: Apocalypse stabbed a guy at a punk show. He punched someone in the face at a record store. He contributed to another musician losing his mind. And so becomes a legend. There have been outsized rumors and half-truths, tattooed cupped hands whispering circles around Apocalypse, also known as Mike Cheese or DJ Apocalypse, for decades.

“You know more of the rumors than I do, and you know more of the falsehoods than I do,” he says. Without addressing any specific incidents he lays it out: “The rumors also come from people who have attacked me physically and they thought they could fuck me up. Fact is, I don’t bullshit. If you think you’re going to fuck me up, unfortunately, I’m pretty good at handling my hands, I’ve got some good fist game because I grew up in Detroit.”

That last part is unquestionably true, he lived in Detroit until age 14, when he moved to San Diego alone. By age 17, he was straight-edge and on a cheeseburger diet (hence the name “Cheese”). He met fellow musicians through the hardcore scene and formed Gehenna. With its pummeling drum beats, black metal riffs, droning breakdowns, and Apocalypse’s tortured, growling vocals, it brought something new to the 1993 hardcore table.

“I brought in some of the more metal elements, Mickey [Rhodes Featherstone] brought in 70s proto-punk and DC [Grave] brought in the really fucking heavy stuff and the straight thrash — we were able to incorporate all the things we liked into one sound.”

Through 17 years, the band has self-released seven-inches, splits, and a few full length LPs — most recently, 2011’s re-issue of Land Of Sodom II/Upon The Gravehill — and moved from San Diego to Phoenix to Orange to Reno. Apocalypse, far from straight edge, settled into San Francisco in 2008, but since the other members are spread elsewhere, Gehenna only plays SF once a year. “San Francisco, is one of the greatest cities in the United States. This is the most open-minded city I’ve ever been in.”

He seems pleased with his current lot in life; it might be the alcohol or recreational drugs talking, but he’s truly inspirational in his takes on art, music, life. Truth to those whispered rumors or not, legend or not, Apocalypse is a man of convictions.

“[Gehenna] is not making money, we’re not going to ever sign with a major label, we’re never going to do anything that’s outside of our realm of control. It’s always been about control.”

 

GEHENNA

With Hoax, Neo Cons, and Neighborhood Brats

Wed/28, 8 p.m., $8

Sub-Mission

2183 Mission, SF www.sf-submission.com

Heart it or hate it

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Heart it or hate it

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The term “emo” has become synonymous with whiny, tight-jeans-wearing 13-year-olds with asymmetrical haircuts. (Thanks, Hot Topic.) But stereotypical B.S. aside, in the beginning, emo — short for “emotional punk rock” — was a compelling music movement in the early 1990s and 2000s typified by melodic guitar, motley rhythms, and expressive, pour-your-heart-out lyrics.

“It went from being this really powerful, emotional movement into, like, the annoying little brother of music,” says Kristopher Hannum who co-runs Diary, an emo, screamo, and pop punk music night held every third Saturday of the month at Pop’s Bar. “But I feel like it’s slowly coming back in a good way — not in a Hot Topic-y, YouTube bands they call emo [way]. There are good things happening and they are slowly bubbling up to the surface, like [San Francisco’s] Clarissa Explains It All.” He adds, “It’s a band I point out to people that is kind of taking that [emo] scene and doing good things with it.”

But ever since the term was coined in the mid-80s Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scene, initially to describe bands such as Rites Of Spring, emo has been considered a four-letter word.

“I have never met a band in what I would consider the emo genre that ever copped to calling themselves ’emo.’ It’s weird. Fans throw that around really easily but you’ll never hear, for the most part, a band describe themselves as emo,” explains Leslie Simon, co-author of Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide To Emo Culture (Harpers, 2007) and former MTV.com editor.

Jim Adkins lead vocalist-guitarist of Jimmy Eat World, which is heralded as a seminal emo band, rejects the label. “I’m pretty much done trying to deflect or change that perception. I don’t really consider us to be [emo]. It’s a long conversation,” Adkins says, curtly. “For me, it’s just flattering that anyone pays attention to what we do. To explain what we do, [I say] guitar-based, melodic rock music.”

Adkins’ sentiment notwithstanding, Jimmy Eat World’s 1999 release Clarity (Capitol) is often lauded as one of the most significant emo albums of the late ’90s, heavily influencing the third wave of emo (2000 — present) which includes bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and All-American Rejects.

In 2001, as emo broke into mainstream media, Jimmy Eat World released its platinum-selling album, Bleed American (Dreamworks/Geffen). In its introductory title track, Adkins wails “I’m not alone ’cause the TV’s on, yeah / I’m not crazy because I take the right pills everyday” — perfectly encapsulating the angst and disillusionment of Gen Y’ers. With its empowering lyrics (“Just do your best / do everything you can /And don’t you worry what the bitter hearts are gonna say”), the anthemic “The Middle,” another track off Bleed American, reached #1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks, galvanizing wallflowers everywhere to stay true to themselves. With its impeccably relatable themes, it is no wonder why the album was the band’s biggest commercial success.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of its release, Jimmy Eat World will play Bleed American in its entirety at the Fillmore on Monday, Sept. 26 and Tuesday, Sept. 27.

“[Bleed American] is a special record for a lot of people. It’s just been kind of a fan request that we do it, so we’re doing it in areas where we’ve always had a good time playing,” Adkins explains.

Coincidentally, Saves The Day released its first studio album in four years, Daybreak, last week. And the once-disbanded-now-reunited Get Up Kids — also wildly popular in the early-2000s — released There Are Rules earlier this year, making a stop on its tour in San Francisco, playing a show with Dashboard Confessional, another iconic emoter, most famous for its single, “Screaming Infidelities.”

Heart it or hate it, in the past year second-wave emo bands seem to be making a comeback. So this begs the question: What is behind the resurgence of this style of music?

“Playing music is an awesome opportunity. Maybe all of these people that are coming back together kind of miss it. We were really lucky that we’ve been able to continually do it,” Adkins says. “The more interesting question is why did they stop?”

“I really like to think that it wasn’t about making money which, I’m sure, half of those bands are doing it just because there are ticket sales in it, you know?” Hannum says with a hint of disillusion in his voice. “[But] I like to think that they are in a position where they can still get back together and tour to give access to these kids that couldn’t access it back then.”

“It does come off sometimes like they’re doing it for the paycheck. But, at the end of the day, who cares?” Simon replies, laughing. “I still love hearing Chris Conley (of Saves The Day) sing “Firefly” and I get a kick out of watching the Get Up Kids play “Don’t Hate Me” because those were songs that meant something to me when I was younger. And I am 22 again. It is wonderful.” 

 

JIMMY EAT WORLD

With Kinch

Mon/26 and Tues/27, 8 p.m., $35

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.thefillmore.com

Earth mover

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Earth mover

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC I didn’t mean to bring the earthquake to Eleanor Friedberger’s Brooklyn — it just felt that way when I rang a few weeks ago, minutes after her ‘hood shivered and shook like it was attempting a weak imitation of, well, San Francisco. “Actually it sounded like someone was stomping on my roof,” she says wryly, phasing in and out over the line as if spirited away by unexplained forces.

A coincidence, too, that she closes her first, wonderful solo long-player, Last Summer (Merge), with a number titled “Early Earthquake,” a minimalist love song that evokes early solo Lou Reed and spins from those ground-bending emotions that hit far too soon, far too hard. “It was an early earthquake and my heart’s trembling just for you / And when the walls came crumbling down / You know I was waiting right here for you,” she sings with her charmingly verbose hipster-priest phrasing, in a feather-light voice.

“Early Earthquake” ends with a sliver of exotica culled from an optigan. “It’s almost like a toy for adults,” Friedberger says of the ’70s-era instrument. Her brother, Matthew, used one on a song for their band, the Fiery Furnaces, and, she adds, “I said if I ever found one I’d buy it.” That she did, from “an expensive music store in Brooklyn — not very cool,” she murmurs.

That brand of disarming, hyper-self-aware honesty — dotted with a dry, playful sense of irony — runs like a startling thread throughout Friedberger’s conversation, making me wanna be instant BFFs. I can see us now: telling the truth about birthdays (“Always bleak,” Friedberger declares of her Sept. 2 birthday, though she’ll be in the Bay Area that week, so bring her a gift), laughing that she’d make the perfect Patti Smith in the film version of Just Kids, scaring ourselves with the spooky effects in “Inn of the Seventh Ray,” pondering the puzzle of Google-ing dates in “Scenes from Bensonhurst,” and cruising through the borough with the rubbery-bass-bumping “Roosevelt Island” blaring. The latter is the closest thing to a genuine summer song on Last Summer; Friedberger agrees — it’s built to be pouring out of “a Buick, definitely an American car, if there are any of those left,” she says.

Last Summer is the solo record she’s always wanted to make — and when she had the time and summoned the confidence that comes with age and experience, she did, writing the songs last summer and recording them that fall, in Brooklyn. “I felt it was now or never. I always thought I’d regret if I didn’t do something myself,” Friedberger says. “There was no lightning bolt of inspiration—I don’t believe in that.

And in contrast to all those who refuse to ‘fess up to the autobiographical nature of their work, Friedberger offers, “All of it is drawn from my personal life — no imagination used. I’m trying to decide if it’s lazy or brave, I don’t know.”

In the same spirit of full disclosure, she opens the album with an infectious ditty called “My Mistakes,” climaxing with a gloriously cheesy tenor sax solo. “I was trying to copy a Van Morrison-sounding saxophone solo,” she freely admits, though it was a fight trying to get sax player Dylan Heaney to agree. “He has a jazz school background and wanted to do something new or original. I don’t believe in that, though — I’m all for copying.”

Yet Friedberger, whether solo or with the Fiery Furnaces, still manages to have one of the most original voices of her generation. Perhaps it stems from the creative support of a sib. “We have this musical language that I just don’t have with anybody else,” she says of Matthew. “But at the same time, we constantly feel like we need an excuse to do something together — because we’re not a normal band. There has to be an elaborate thought process that justifies it.”

“That’s getting tiring. So it’s liberating to make something that’s small and personal. For me, it’s more about expressing my tiny pathetic feelings.” Slight pause. “I’m kidding.”

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER

With the Kills and Mini Mansions

Fri/9, 8:30 p.m., $29.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 302-2277

www.apeconcerts.com

 

Keep it raw

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Keep it raw

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Does the Godfather of Punk really need an introduction? It’s Iggy Pop. He’s been doing this — this meaning spitting out underground ethos in a signature growl and writhing shirtless — for nearly 50 years. With the untimely death of original Stooge guitarist Ron Asheton, Pop regrouped and tapped Raw Power-era player James Williamson to rejoin the band a couple of years back.

I spoke to Pop in Paris over the phone — his current world tour was supposed to land in San Francisco on Sept. 12 and 13. As we were going to press, however, we were informed that the ever-wild Pop broke his foot and his appearance here will be rescheduled, with new dates TBA Dec. 4 and 6 at the Warfield. We wish him a speedy recovery!

SFBG: What songs are you playing this tour?

Iggy Pop: All of Raw Power, some of Funhouse, some songs from the eponymous debut the Stooges, and some stuff that was too hot to handle, too raw for the times — stuff that came out on bootlegs in the ’70s like “Cock in My Pocket,” “Open Up and Bleed,” “Head on the Curve.”

SFBG: And James Williamson is on guitar?

Iggy Pop: Yeah, it’s James. The three principles in the group are James, myself and [drummer] Scott Asheton, — [Scott] had a medical emergency…after our appearance at the Hellfest. He’s now home — he’s benched for the rest of the year. I expect he’ll fully recover and be back next year. His replacement on drums is somebody that grew up listening to our records — Toby Dammit. And Mike Watt is with us, and Steve Mackay. Mike’s there being Mike, you know?

SFBG: I do. At this point in your career do feel pressure to maintain this ‘Wild Child’ image?

Iggy Pop: You mean you’ve noticed my style? [Laughs]. It’s interesting. I feel a desire to — [screams] “still do that, BABY!” — at certain times when it’s going to do me good. And I can’t think of a better time than when the Stooges are cranking, and there are a bunch of people who are sick of this shit-soup that white rock has become and want to see some action. I let some of those elements live and breath, and I always feel good about it.

I don’t think there’s so much an image I have to live up to because one of the beautiful things about being me and about being the Stooges is that we never, ever received any legitimate or uncontested exposure from either the official music industry, when it existed, or the official media. We’re more popular now than we ever were. I’m 64 and I’m just starting to hit a career peak. I consciously try to introduce as many new things as I can into what I do and try to keep moderating it. My hair’s not gray, I haven’t lost interest in life.

SFBG: So what are you looking forward to in the future? The future being later tonight, and six months down the line?

Iggy Pop: [Laughs] well, later tonight, my wife’s with me, and I’m going to open half a bottle of Bordeaux, watch the French news, and practice my French. I’ve made a small album of my own [Existence] that’s along the lines of [2009’s] Préliminaires so I’m working on seeing if I can bamboozle some record company into putting that out. But I’m also working on [Stooges] stuff with James. He’s a real prolific talent, and wasn’t playing music for something like 37 years — he’s got a lot of pent-up energy. It’s funny because he’s an eminently sane, responsible family man who has become a very successful tech executive in San Jose. But he has still reserved his unreasoning, adolescent, spiteful side for our group — so out it comes!

SFBG: How did you end up on American Idol?

Iggy Pop: Well, my agent was begging and threatening — and I’m the sort of person that likes to take a dare. I don’t know how many times I’ve slunk past the television set when that thing was on fuming, “this stinks, what a bunch of shit this is, look at these people — they might as well be parrots!” Yet, behind all that you’re always thinking, “I can do better than that.” I thought of all 102 reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but you’re being offered a chance to do one of your own songs…on the same stage, with the chance to do it your way. I did it for that. To give four minutes of my life and put that on the record in America.

SFBG: On that same note, what was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame experience like for you, finally getting inducted in 2010?

Iggy Pop: It always reminds me of that movie Carrie. She didn’t start out wanting to be homecoming queen, did she? They keep nominating you, and I didn’t ask, nobody asked me if I wanted to be nominated. So then with every nomination comes the rejection, so you start feeling all like, “fuck!” Then you start looking around and think, “well there’s a silly-ass prick and he’s in the Hall of Fame” and “there’s a no-talent weasel and he’s in the Hall of Fame” — why the hell can’t I be in the Hall of Fame?

Shortly after Ron and Scott and I started working together again I said, “are there any specific things you want to accomplish?” And both said, “well, I want to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That would be the big thing.” So at that point I started doing things that would tend to let that happen. I did a couple of Grammy-related events. And then we did Madonna’s [induction]. I figured if the voters for this thing didn’t know who we were before, they’d know now. It’s a shame, Ron was really pissed when they didn’t induct us the next year — he hated doing the Madonna song but I didn’t mind. Hell, we could do “Happy Birthday” and it would sound good, too. It would sound like us. 

Reprogramming the hardware

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Reprogramming the hardware

MUSIC Technology can be so existentially mystifying. One minute you’re a kid in the back seat of your parents’ car with thumbs aimed and eyes glued to the screen of your modern handheld gaming console, the next you’re on stage with blinding lights and an audience, smashing into a modified old-school Gameboy on a snare drum. One second you’re doubled over in bed with the stomach flu, the next you’re in a box on Google+, simultaneously interviewing two band members from their respective Bay Area cities.

It’s enough to melt your mind, and we haven’t even begun to discuss those Gameboy modifications. Chiptune or 8-bit music is nothing new — nerded out musicians have been tinkering with the sounds on gaming consoles since the products hit the shelves in the 1980s — but now the music has the distinction of being both technologically advanced by some standards, and vintage, given its nostalgic sound.

Plus, in these financially-strapped times, it’s an economical way of creating music. “You don’t need anything fancy to make it,” says drummer-synth programmer Matt Payne. “The equipment is dirt cheap and it’s so accessible.”

Chiptune community outreach is big for him, Payne adds from his home in Oakland, holding up a mutant Gameboy with a blinking fuzzed out screen. He and musician-@GAMER magazine associate editor Lizzie Cuevas make up Bay Area-based 8-bit band the Glowing Stars. Cuevas, joining us in the Google+ video chatroom from her office in Daly City, agrees that once people see a live chiptune band, they’re usually inspired to try out the technology themselves. “We always have people who come up at shows and ask, ‘how do you do it?'”

The duo has demonstrated just how they do that at the Maker Faire and Pulse Wave SF — a friendly monthly gathering for chiptune bands. Up next, they play the free CONVERGENCE International Alternative Music and Arts Festival at the Japantown Peace Plaza.

Cuevas and Payne met in 2005, each playing in different punk bands. Payne joined Cuevas’ band (Sputterdoll), which broke up a few years ago. “We knew we wanted to do something video game related, we just didn’t know exactly what,” says Cuevas.

Payne had futzed with a program called LSDJ (LittleSound DJ) when it first came out, but hadn’t been serious about it initially, he says. “There’s a learning curve, it’s one of those easy to learn, difficult to master things.” With the new band starting up in 2010, he began gathering Gameboys and filling them with his own sounds. Given Cuevas’ affinity for early Weezer, the music they make is poppy, but it also has that nostalgic synthesized MIDI sound.

“There’s a misconception about it, that we’re using samples from video game somehow or that we’re doing something using actual songs from video games,” says Payne. “But what we’re actually doing is basically stripping down the console to a little sound making computer and getting it to play back our music.”

The process works like this: Cuevas writes the first skeleton of a song on guitar then sends it to Payne. He then programs it using LSDJ and loads it onto the Gameboy for that 8-bit transformation. They ping it back and forth, adding layers to the song. Payne also just started making music with a Sega Genesis — you can make chiptune on any console — so that might come into play soon.

Live, Cuevas sings and play distorted guitar, and sometimes taps a fresh Gameboy, like in the song “Bounce Bounce” where she solos over the final instrumental part. Payne plays drums and, occasionally, picks up the keytar. He also keeps his modded Gameboy on his snare, which has only once caused significant damage.

“I hit it with the drum stick — it made a loud, awful noise,” he says.

Cuevas smiles and replies, “I think you lost a chunk of your Gameboy.”

 

CONVERGENCE FESTIVAL

The Glowing Stars

With the Bran Flakes, Planet Booty, Teenage Sweater

Sun/4, 12-5 p.m., free

Japantown Peace Plaza Post Street Between Webster and Laguna, SF www.convergencefest.com

Analytics

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Analytics

caitlin@sfbg.com

MUSIC “I know I don’t speak English good, but I make music. So fuck it.”

Half the audience can’t understand a word of her songs, but it hardly seems to matter — Chilean emcee Ana Tijoux is killing it onstage at her recent show at Moe’s Alley in Santa Cruz. The tiny rapper stalks around confidently in an outfit you’d probably read about in M.I.A.’s style book; an oversized blue T-shirt, athletic high-tops, and psychedelic, geometric black-and-white tights that I promise you cannot be found in this country.

The band surges behind her as she launches into her breakout single “1977,” about the year she was born, living with politically exiled Chilean parents in Europe during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. “Todo lo que cambia lo hará diferente,” she chants in the song’s chorus — that was the year that everything changed.

Tijoux’s banter is in English (don’t believe the self-deprecation, she speaks it rather well), but her flow is español puro, tight verses that, when you’re unable to keep up with their meaning, impress anyway with their complex structures. When she slyly throws out that “fuck it,” the crowd kind of freaks out. They love her, they get her.

It doesn’t make sense, really. The power of hip-hop — the most verbal of all musical genres — is in the meaning of the lyrics. How many non-English-speaking emcees make it big in the United States? Even Dizzee Rascal had trouble over crossover appeal and his first language, at least, was English. How do we interpret an emcee like Tijoux appealing to music fans who can’t possibly be tracing the metaphors in her verses? I Skyped Tijoux last week to get her take on things.

“The music industry convinces you that you’ll never be popular [performing] in another language — and in rap, even more,” Tijoux says, sounds of children playing in the background of her phone call. “But it’s about music in the end. Hip-hop is international, it’s the language of flow.” She says she was nervous before her US debut at South By Southwest in 2010, she thought that maybe people wouldn’t have the patience for an emcee that spat in another language.

But experience has calmed her doubts. Tijoux has since played stages from New York to Outside Lands 2011 — not to mention gigs across the world. She says she finds common threads of hip-hop counterculture wherever she goes, but is still surprised by regional variances, like Cuba’s cumbia inflected music.

Tijoux returns to the Bay next Sunday, September 11, a show at the Regency Ballroom with Venezuelan disco rockers Los Amigos Invisibles and members of Tijuana electronica-norteño group Nortec Collective.

“Sometimes it’s frustrating not being able to communicate with some people. It’s not about trying to have more crowd or market, it has to do with the number of people you can share a message with. If that means rapping in Chinese, fuck I will do it.” Sounds good — so when are her verses in English dropping?

“When it’s natural I will do it.” She’s freestyled in English before she says, but it’s not a pretty picture. I guess her monolingual California fans are going to have to wait for the next tour to be able to sing along with Ana.

But in place of new English cuts she’s keen, it turns out, on lending her flair to another crew who could use some help these days, um, communicating. What’s up, United Nations?

“Yeah! Contract me right now,” she laughs. “I’ll do all the translations in rapping.”

ANA TIJOUX

With Los Amigos Invisibles and the Nortec Collective’s Bostich and Fussible

Sun/11 8 p.m., $20

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

The big ones

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The big ones

SEPTEMBER

Handsome Furs Sept. 3, Slim’s

Mi Ami Sept. 3, Public Works

Mummies Sept. 6, Knockout

Givers Sept. 7, Rickshaw Stop

Kills Sept. 9, Fox Theater

Rancid Sept. 10, Warfield

Iggy Pop and the Stooges Sept. 12-13, Warfield

Kylesa Sept. 14, Great American Music Hall

Religious Girls Sept. 15, Hemlock Tavern

Album Leaf Sept. 16, New Parish

Bass Necter Sept. 17, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

Rock Make Street Fest Sept. 17, 18th Street in the Mission

Low Sept. 19, Great American Music Hall

Bush Sept. 20, Great American Music Hall

James Blake Sept. 21, Fillmore

Two Gallants Sept. 23-24, Independent

Lee “Scratch” Perry Sept. 25, Independent

B.B. King Sept. 26, Nob Hill Mason Center

Dominant Legs Sept. 27, Cafe Du Nord

Tyler Ward Sept. 28, Slim’s

Kaiser Cheifs Sept. 29, Fillmore

Nouvelle Vague Sept. 30, Regency Ballroom

Odd Future Sept. 30, Warfield

 

OCTOBER

Amon Tobin Oct. 1 (sold out) and Oct. 2, Warfield

Dum Dum Girls Great American Music Hall, Oct. 4

Why? Great American Music Hall, Oct. 5

CSS Oct. 6, Fillmore

Peter, Bjorn and John Oct. 6, Great American Music Hall; Oct. 7, New Parish; Oct. 8. Slim’s

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart Oct. 7, Slim’s

Girls Oct. 8, Great American Music Hall

Yellowcard Oct. 9, Slim’s

Yelawolf Oct. 10, Independent

Gang Gang Dance Oct. 11, Independent

Zee Avi Oct. 13, Independent

Bryan Ferry Oct. 14, Fox Theater

Naked Aggression Oct 15, 924 Gilman

The Shirelles Oct. 18-23, Rrazz Room

Opeth Oct. 18, Warfield

Lindsey Buckingham Oct. 19, Regency Ballroom

Noothgrush Oct. 22, 924 Gilman

War on Drugs Oct 23, Independent

Yngwie Malmsteen Oct. 26, Fillmore

Anvil Oct. 27, Red Devil Lounge

Skrillex Oct. 28, Warfield

Deadmau5 Oct. 29, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

Dwarves Oct. 30, 924 Gilman

 

NOVEMBER

Zola Jesus Nov. 1, Independent

Yael Naim Nov. 2, Bimbo’s

Shonen Knife Nov. 4, Bottom of the Hill

Mike Doughty and His Band Fantastic Nov. 5-6, Independent

Warbringer Nov. 7, Thee Parkside

Lykke Li Nov. 9, Fox Theater

M83 Nov. 10, Mezzanine

Gwar Nov. 11, Regency Ballroom

We Were Promised Jetpacks Nov. 11, Bimbo’s

Cobra Skulls Nov. 12, Thee Parkside

Feist Nov. 14, Warfield

Budos Band Nov. 19, Mezzanine

Wu Lyf Nov. 21, Independent

tUnE-YarDs Nov. 23, Regency Ballroom

The Weakerthans Nov. 30-Dec. 2, Independent

Bravo, il gato

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Bravo, il gato

FALL ARTS The clouds hang over San Francisco like a brumous, early evening warning sign. It’s late summer on the back patio of popular Mission street bar El Rio. Small pockets of people huddle near outdoor heaters, and vintage pop songs come pumping through the speakers. Three men dressed neatly in sweaters and hoodies sit at a long picnic table clutching cheap beers.

This is the story of il gato, a San Francisco band that describes itself as indie-baroque-folk. Its music is baroque in the sense that it’s melancholic yet upbeat, lyric-heavy yet leans towards the classical, and highly decorated with a wide array of instrumentation. The band’s 2010 long-player, All These Slippery Things (self-released), and similarly-named followup EP All Those Slippery Things (released last month) feature banjo, mandolin, piano, a string quartet, and trumpets, along with aggressive acoustic folk guitar, looping pedal, upright and electric bass, and complex drumming.

After years of dutiful practice in tiny apartment kitchens, labored songwriting, and intimate live shows, the group finally recorded (thanks to a grant from the Bay Bridged blog) in 2009 at legendary studio Tiny Telephone, owned by revered local musician John Vanderslice. “I…remember how eclectic and fresh their instrumentation and arrangements were,” says Vanderslice. “They were a blast to have in the studio.” But this all came a decade after the first seedling of the il gato concept. Fittingly, the band’s journey — a mildly operatic one, given the twists and bumps along the way — began in Italy.

THE PROLOGUE: Daimian Holiday Scott is studying architecture abroad in Vicenza, Italy. The year is 1999; he hasn’t picked up an instrument since middle school. All of those niggling emotions involved with overseas travel had led to an outburst of emotions, which, naturally, led to buying a guitar. The initial concept was performance art: he’d speak with a fake Italian accent but sing cover songs in English. That never actually happened. “It’s the story before the story,” says il gato drummer, Johnny Major, “the prelude.”

THE FIRST ACT: fast forward five years. Scott shuts the door to the bedroom and asks his girlfriend to listen to the songs he’s been working on from a safe distance in the living room. “It took a long time for me to break free of being super shy and inhibited,” Scott says.

Scott was in his native Gainsville, Fla. writing songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica, learning that to be a songwriter, one must evolve out of the bedroom. He moved to the Bay Area in 2001, first to Berkeley and later, the Mission District of San Francisco, playing as il gato with a rotating cast of talented musicians friends. Years later, when he longed for consistency, he put up an ad on Craigslist seeking musicians.

Major, a San Francisco native who had recently returned from a two-year stay in Chile, answered it. “I liked the name,” says Major, “And of course, I really liked the music. I thought he sounded like a combination of Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse and Doug Martsch from Built to Spill, two of my favorite bands.”

Major — who has played in a variety of other bands including Sang Matiz and his new solo project, Adios Amigo — listened to Scott’s first album Conversation Music, which didn’t have drums, and heard some interesting potential for percussion. During this time, in 2008, Scott, Major and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Souther (who left the band a few months ago) would play in Major’s street-level Lower Haight apartment. The band next gained bassist Andrew Thomas, a Dallas, Tex.-born musician who had recently moved to SF with his girlfriend after a stint in college and other touring bands in Los Angeles. Scott and Thomas had been introduced by their girlfriends one night at the Latin American Club. “He came over the next week to my apartment in North Beach, we just played guitar and upright bass in my kitchen,” says Thomas of Scott.

ACT TWO: the end of an era. Scott’s aria, his solo work in effect, officially comes to an end. He’s part of a band now, all equal parts. “It was no longer just my project,” he says, taking a sip of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Over the course of four short days in February of 2010, the band essentially recorded two albums (the full-length and E.P.), 17 songs in total. The guitar, bass, vocals, and drums were all recorded live at Tiny Telephone. The overdubs of horns and string sections were recorded in Thomas’ home, to save time and money. “I can’t believe it turned out as well as it did,” Major says.

And it did turn out well. The songs are striking and wholly unique. That said, there are hints at the groups’ influences like Neutral Milk Hotel, Beirut, Modest Mouse, even Violent Femmes. But there are other elements, even hip-hop tucked in some parts as Major points out, especially in the mouthful of talk-sung lyrics in brassy folk single, “On Feathers and Arrows.” Major and Scott then discuss Scott’s predilection toward reggae beats, a holdover from his childhood with hippie parents. “That’s the nature of trying to describe your music to someone, it’s always difficult,” Scott says.

He adds that he is also influenced by the non-musical: acerbic, witty writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, along with films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The band was recently featured on the soundtrack for the documentary Crime After Crime, something Scott is hoping to do more in the future.

ACT THREE: that future. The band has a handful of shows lined up this fall, including Cafe du Nord this week and Andrew Bird’s “Rock for Kids” fundraiser Sept. 19 at the Make-Out Room, along with some brief tours planned. Then, in January 2012, il gato wants to go back to Tiny Telephone to record a followup. Sitting in the back patio, chatting about the projects to come, the group’s goals are clear. Right now, all three are primarily focused on the band itself. In 2009, Scott was laid off from his job as an architect and Major was laid off six months ago. “I’m hopefully looking to break in to something else,” Major says. “Ideally, I’ll have a career as a performing musician, it’s difficult but that’s the dream for all of us. That’s why we’re here right now.”

CURTAIN CALL: take a bow. Crush the cans. 

Check out il gato’s favorite local eats here. They’ve got some good ones!

IL GATO

With Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside

Thurs/25, 9 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Drag me from hell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Drag me from hell

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Noah “DJ Dials” Bennett Cunningham wants to galvanize your pleasure center.

“You know how you can think back to that one night? That punk show or cool house party or the first time you saw Björk, and it’s just, the night you’ll never forget? I want to do that for other people. I want to make lasting memories,” he says from his perch in Four Barrel Coffee as he grabs Rosamunde french fries from his bag.

A DJ since age 12, the 27-year-old also works as a producer and video artist. His next big gig, in collaboration with Tri Angle Records and 120 Minutes club night, is an event likely to stir brain waves: it’s a showcase of witch house — a controversial genre also known, interchangeably, as grave rave, based goth, drag, or “pop music for the unconscious,” as San Francisco producer oOoOO has been known to describe his own sound.

It’s contentious because it’s all over the map. At its most basic, a combination of hip-hop and goth cultures, many music snobs and bloggers declared it dead on arrival. Even those associated with it seem to at least avoid using the term “witch house” itself. It’s said with an apologetic shoulder shrug.

This may be due to its murky origins. Essentially, it was coined by Denver’s Travis Egedy, a.k.a Pictureplane, sometime around 2009, partially as a joke, to describe his own music. Years later, the name remains and the scene is still burgeoning. There are some skilled musicians and producers creating this sound, including a smattering of national acts, and, locally, oOoOO (pronounced “oh”).

The August 19 showcase at 103 Harriet marks the first local live show (not just DJ set) for oOoOO — newly returned from an international tour — along with Clams Casino, White Ring, Shlohmo, Babe Rainbow, Water Borders, and D33J.

For this particularly significant event, Cunningham is working behind the scenes as the producer and co-host along with Marco De La Vega, the mastermind behind year-old witch house club night 120 Minutes at Elbo Room. Both agree that the biggest misconception about this type of music is that it’s already dead.

“It’s still new, it’s what’s happening right now,” says De La Vega. “The goth scene has a tendency to focus very strongly on the past, so all this music was the first kind of stuff where I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually happening, this makes sense for now. This is contemporary.'”

This much we know: those associated with witch house often make use of darker rhythms with creepy melodies over top, chopped and screwed hip-hop or slowed-down pop music samples, along with hypnotic and dark droning synths and howling, reverberated female vocals.

And yet, many musicians identified with this mutating, nearly indefinable genre wage battle against it. They, understandably, eschew the label for fear of pigeonholing.

“The way we look at it is that there are a few bands that were doing stuff independently and have been grouped by people trying to make it in to one cohesive term,” says Bryan Kurkimilis, one half of New York’s White Ring. “It’s nice and flattering to be part of something like that, but we had no genre in our head when we started. We’re consistently trying to evolve our sound.”

The music itself, of course, varies greatly, especially in this particular showcase. While oOoOO samples sputtering pop vocals, Shlohmo is more associated with L.A’s avant-garde beat scene, and Clams Casino’s repertoire includes making beats for based god Lil B. Toronto’s Babe Rainbow creates dark chopped and screwed hip-hop; White Ring bleeds more toward 80s synth and includes the lush, eerie voice of singer Kendra Malia.

“What motivates me, is putting Shlohmo and Babe Rainbow — who aren’t really considered witch house — next to oOoOO, White Ring, and Water Borders even, to show that it doesn’t really matter what the genre is; it’s that feeling, it’s the mood. It’s the place where it comes from,” Cunningham says. *

 

TRI ANGLE RECORDS SHOWCASE: 2011 REALITY TOUR

With oOoOO, White Ring, Clams Casino, Shlohmo, Babe Rainbow , Water Borders, D33j

Fri/19, 10 p.m., $15

103 Harriet at 1015 Folsom

1015 Folsom, SF

1015.com

‘West’-ward ho

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
‘West’-ward ho

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC There’s a certain irony to the fact that Wooden Shjips’ forthcoming Thrill Jockey long-player is titled West, considering the once firmly SF-based foursome has started to scatter across this storied region. Guitarist-vocalist Ripley Johnson has resettled in Colorado — when he isn’t touring the globe with wife Sanae Yamada as Moon Duo — and drummer Omar Ahsanuddin recently relocated to LA. All of this gives West — its cover art depicting the symbolically loaded Golden Gate Bridge — a particularly powerful charge for this band of musicians who grew up in the East Coast and Midwest and share a fascination with Left Coast mythology, culture, and music.

“Looking at the bridge, I don’t look at it as ‘goodbye’— I see it as ‘hello,'” explains organist Nash Whalen, paging through Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and sunning himself on an Astroturf-clad parklet, in front of Farley’s on Potrero Hill. “Being from San Francisco certainly means something to people in the rest of the world — because of the mystique of California and the San Francisco music scene in particular. We all found our way to California — it’s the land of opportunity that I wasn’t going to experience in Vermont. Those are just some of the themes touched on in the songs.”

Those songs are transmitted with amplified immediacy and in-yo’-ear clarity on West —much like the cover image’s picture-postcard familiarity is imbued with a surreal strangeness. Notably, West signifies the first time the combo had worked in a studio with an engineer, a contrast to previous recordings, which were documented on eight-track in the outfit’s practice space. “We didn’t necessarily have good mics, and the room doesn’t necessarily sound good,” Whalen offers. “So there were a lot of elements to our recordings that frustrated us after a while.”

On West, the heavily distorted crunch of opening track “Black Smoke Rise” is beautifully separated from the shaker death-rattle, textures that seemed inextricably entangled in the past. Through the headphones, the effect is less lo-fi garage grind than a well-defined, clear shot of a speedway toward Wooden Shjips’ crossroads of hip-bobbing psychedelia, dream-drone, and charging Krautrock. The dance floor cleared, you hear the Leslie speaker tremelo, tripindicular echo, and spacey backward masking that the Shjips got to use for the first time in the studio, as well as Johnson’s airy vocals, more discernable than ever before and bidding you to take him on a nightmarish ride on the high-propulsion “Lazy Bones.” “Now when you hear a shaker, you don’t just think of it as a shaker,” says Whalen. “You hear it as a shaker in space, it’s going some place, and it’s more dynamic.”

Farley’s was a place Wooden Shjips would regularly sail into when recording West in February with Phil Manley (Trans Am, the Fucking Champs). The base of operations was Lucky Cat Studios, perched at the foot of Potrero’s slope, just steps away from the Guardian.”Yeah, the hardest thing about it was that the studio is at the bottom of the hill, so if we wanted to come up and get some coffee, it was ‘Oh, we have to walk up the hill…,'” quips Whalen, a former engineering geologist who has switched from studying rocks to rocking out full time.

Now, on this seemingly carefree sunny day, Whalen is most concerned with the fires in London: last week, flames consumed the distribution warehouse that housed the new LP. It’s uncertain how many, if any, were lost —”it’s a huge blow to all these businesses, not only bands and labels, but stores and everyone involved,” worries Whalen, who adds that the album will be available at this week’s SF show, ahead of the Sept. 13 release date. “It might be a small inconvenience for us, getting our record out on time, but for a lot of other people, it could be a lot bigger hassle — and devastating.”

WOODEN SHJIPS

With Night Beats

Thurs/18, 9:30 p.m., free (RSVP at tour.sailorjerrypresents.com)

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF.

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Foxy saves

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Foxy saves

arts@sfbg.com

SOUND TO SPARE Sweating in that crevice behind your knee? Notice more mesh tops in the Castro than usual? Or maybe you’re like me, pretending it’s Wimbledon but really just stinking up the tennis courts at Dolores Park. It seems the Bay Area is actually being blessed with some unusually above-average temperatures this summer. But even when the fog inevitably rolls back in, sticky-hot summer jams don’t necessarily have to be about weather. They can be a mentality. So allow me to stroll down Memory Lane with a fitting album for these should-be-sizzling times.

Chock-full of lyrical wit and endless one-liners, 1999’s Chyna Doll (Def Jam) by Foxy Brown is the downright filthiest album of all time. Brown (only 19 at the time) had me inappropriately quoting her ill flows all summer long. Stuff like “MCs wanna eat me, but it’s Ramadan” or “Gimmie some room, all I need is some dick up in my womb” are among the most graphic, but rate as some of my favorites. I probably appreciated them even more back then, when I was equally as young, angsty, closeted, and still living at my parents’.

The Brooklynite’s brazen delivery of FCC-unfriendly rhymes (every track drops the F-bomb) was probably a combination of marketing brilliance and dumb luck that made for her best-sounding album. On this sophomore effort, she received solid reviews from mainstream press. Even the British magazine Q weighed in saying, “There’s more to her than simply showing off and swearing.” And boy does she love swearing. On the track “4-5-6” she rhymes the word “shit” with “shit” 15 times.

Admittedly a huge part of the appeal for me was that such raw content was coming from a female. (Note: Jay-Z contributed heavily as did many other male hip-hop notables on writing and production). I guess I ignorantly found novelty in the manifestation of a female feeling need to prove herself to the industry. Sure, women curse — and there were other femcees before her. In fact, it was an era of stiff competition with the likes of Missy Elliot, Jean Grae and Brown’s legendary rival and cohort Lil’ Kim. But it was Brown who titillated me with her confidence and cockiness, asking, “Do you know how many words I’ve flown past?” She was the undisputed queen of hardcore.

The song “My Life” explains this black girl’s ordeal, struggling with the price of fame while explicitly chronicling the falling out between her and former friend Lil’ Kim. Here we get the depth that Q must have been referencing with lines like “I ain’t asked to be born.” Whether she intended it or not, she reveals an existential vulnerability, one that queer youth could certainly relate to. Her descent turns darker, more chilling, and profoundly plain to see with the line, “Sometimes I wanna slit my wrists and end my life y’all.” It’s clear she had a lot more on her plate than her beef with Kim.

Foxy also calls out gender’s double standards when she raps, “If I was a dude, they’d all be amused. But I’m a woman, so I’m a bitch — simple as that,” pointing out how femininity can be a hindrance to achieving success in hip-hop. With clever wordplay she takes on the theme of inequality, sometimes through simple metaphor (“My bullets hurt same as yours”), other times with more lyrical prowess (“Talk slick, suck dick for money in ya hand, I’m like bitch …I got mo’ money than yo man!”)

This isn’t to say that Chyna Doll isn’t littered with the materialistic clichés common in mainstream hip-hop. But there’s a refreshing air of entitlement involved that is unapologetic. After all, it was released at a time when rap reigned supreme and MP3 downloading hadn’t yet collapsed the industry’s marketing model. There was plenty of money to be made. Brown tells us exactly what she wants written on the license plate of her Lexus as she rides in a decade later to light up another summer.

Life at 45 r.p.m.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Life at 45 r.p.m.

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Hunter Mack is many things — visual artist, U.C. Berkeley mechanical engineering PhD, new dad — but music fans know him best as the owner and president of Oakland-based, 7-inch-centric Gold Robot Records. The indie label’s releases include the now-disbanded Volunteer Pioneer, San Francisco’s Man/Miracle, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy of Drag City Records, among others.

Thirty-two-year-old Mack, an avid concert-goer and audiophile, became disheartened when bands he saw perform only had their music available on CDRs. And he would continually hear these musicians express their want and longing to do a vinyl record. His close friend, Graham Hill, drummer for Beach House and Papercuts who records solo under the moniker Roman Ruins also had a few tracks that had not been released. “[Hill] is one of the reasons [I started the label]. His music needed to be preserved on something archival,” Mack explains.

Early on, Mack resolved to physically release GRR’s music on vinyl only (through its website, gold-robot.com/records, the label also distributes digital downloads). “I like the active listening experience that a 7-inch forces you into. You listen to things on one side; you have a song; if you want to listen to that song you have to actively flip it over,” he says. “Instead of setting your music on shuffle and not knowing where it came from or not making an actual choice, a 7-inch makes you — forces you — to make a choice.”

Thus GRR’s inaugural release was “Releasing Me/Your House,” a 7-inch by Roman Ruins, in 2007. “It was wonderful. I worked with [Hill] since and continue to work with him now,” Mack says.

Since its inception, GRR has grown to include a very diverse array of artists who have produced more than 30 releases, from Ned Oldham’s simple guitar songs, to the 1990s hip-hop of Meanest Man Contest, to the experimental noise rock of Railcars. “There’s something vain about being able to choose all the music that goes onto [the label]. I’m essentially the decider on what comes out,” he says. “For that reason, it ends up being an extremely eclectic collection of music because I listen to extremely eclectic music.”

An older version of GRR’s website explained that the only requirement for music to be considered for the label was that it “inspired space travel.” This, of course, was a joke — but it stuck and has become the label’s tagline throughout the years. In selecting artists to work with, Mack exclusively seeks out musicians who are as excited, motivated, and invested in the project as he is. “I’m just looking for stuff that I’m listening to and that I’m loving. I’m looking for somebody who needs my support,” he explains.

Mack enjoys working with artists in different stages in their careers: emerging artists like Monster Rally; well-established musicians doing a unique project (Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Gold Robot Release featured poetry set to music); or a solo side project of an artist already in a band, like Roman Ruins. Mack’s openness to work with artists at different points in their professional careers reflects his commitment to providing musicians with several avenues to showcase their art.

This philosophy extends to designers too. While Mack has created album art for different releases — including the abstract cover for “Pastor/al,” a Roman Ruins 7-inch on orange vinyl — most of the artwork is done by other artists. “I know when I was just starting my visual arts career, I would have jumped at any chance to make art for a release. And so I’m trying to give people that opportunity,” Mack says. This year, Mack anticipates the release of five new GRR releases, from Not the 1s, Primary Structures, Seamonster, Monster Rally, and Roman Ruins. He acknowledges that this release schedule is very ambitious. “[It’s] a lot for me,” he says. Despite his mild apprehension, his passion for and love of music is palatable. “I’m not making any money off this,” Mack says. “It’s solely a project of getting music out and giving music back to the musicians.”

Cryptic cave wave

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Cryptic cave wave

SOUND TO SPARE “What show are you here for?” asked what looked like a curious 10-year-old as I took care of business at the urinal. “I’m here to see Uzi Rash,” I answered matter-of-factly. But I wasn’t so sure he was curious about the bands by the way he stared at what makes it the men’s room. Apparently Oakland’s the New Parish (www.thenewparish.com) took the phrase “all ages show” to heart.

After that somewhat disturbing run-in, I settled into the bar excited for a night of firsts. It would be my first time at the venue, as well as my first time seeing openers Terry Malts. They were fine, but like I told the tiny Peeping Tom, I wanted to check out the East Bay’s Uzi Rash (www.myspace.com/uzirash). I hadn’t seen them since they did a memorable night of Monks’ covers on Halloween, where their performance included theatrical embellishments like shaved monk-like heads and makeshift robes.

This night’s scene was different. The onset of a rare heat wave was kicking in while the murky, cave-wave sounds of the mutable band — these days, a seven-piece stage outfit — took charge with a commanding and cacophonous presence. The Rash seems to be sitting on a backlog of sludgy, lo-fi treasure: current LP Palmwine Rumpus Vol. 2 (Party Ngg! Records) precedes a September release on Volar Records titled I Was 30 in 2012. Next month the band plans to start recording another full-length album, Whyte Rash Time — not a play on “white trash,” but a reference to the Monks’ Black Monk Time — which will hopefully see the light of day before the year’s end and they embark on a West Coast tour.

I caught up with Max Nordlie, the band’s toenail-painted, jorts-wearing guitarist and vocalist. He gave me a peek into his philosophy on degeneration and premonitions. (With song titles like “Bag of Dirt” and “I’m a Trashbag,” it’s tempting to see Uzi Rash as emblematic of the self-deprecating sounds I often notice oozing out of Oakland.)

Nordlie directly references 2012 as the year of the band’s apocalyptic demise, and explains how the Rash players were “born grown” four years ago. “The band sound was much more the same of itself than it could possibly be now,” Nordlie says cryptically, going on to cite a permanent need for regression. I hear that yearning for regression in the music — at times it reminds me of an unpolished version of Devo’s de-evolution.

That night, the ensemble’s delivery of what Nordlie calls “beach party squelch and shimmy” included electro-sax, keys, and cool-looking guitars. The band looked sort of like a low-budget version of Sly and the Family Stone: keyboardist Thee Whyte Bitch in her long white wig hammering out some discord and bassist Mateo Luv looking svelte in his long johns.

Their performance is raw and charged, and while the front man looks as if he’s working out some serious emotion, Nordlie assures me that he’s aiming at “getting it right” in an expressive sense — he just wants a playfully spirited “twist-and-shout-up.”

I asked Nordlie if the constant revolving door of musicians in the band dizzies him. “Stability, much like ability, is overrated,” he replied. “We seek to compensate for the traditional rock spectacle of ritual with monstrous unpredictability — even to ourselves,” he said, before quipping that the forthcoming Volar record is simultaneously “sophisticated and appalling.” That sounds like a great introduction to 2012, end times or no.

There will be a few more local opportunities to catch Uzi Rash this summer — most notably the 1-2-3-4 Go! Records 10-year anniversary show July 22 at Oakland Metro Operahouse (www.oaklandmetro.org) — before it goes on tour with Unnatural Helpers.

Go with the flow

Andrew Lam
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2
Go with the flow

arts@sfbg.com

QUEER “I don’t like titles. I’m an open-minded person. I’m not going to shoot anybody down based on gender or color,” Kreayshawn told me over the phone. “I’ve dated girls. I’ve dated guys. And I’ve felt the same way for both.”

It’s only been about a month since the 21-year-old East Oakland native’s “Gucci Gucci” video blew-up, gaining both props and criticism for her label-bashing, be-yourself approach — designer-addicted “basic bitches” are her favorite target, and everyone from college-campus Adderall addicts to crass Barbie wannabes gets a dig. She’s generated a lot of hype and the immediate backlash has been harsh, but Kreayshawn’s rambunctious persona has kept things fresh. She’s an adorable little stoner with mad style, a naughty mouth, and a cartoonish sexual vibe. Her “White Girl Mob” is a swagged-out version of the Spice Girls and her collection of work (including a hilariously over-the-top, girl-on-girl makeout session in the video for “Online Fantasy”) immediately gave the press a reason to cry “lez.”

That’s usually the story when a woman steps up in the rap game, though — in a genre marked by macho preening and degrading insults, most women in hip-hop usually play the boys’ game and highlight their masculine side or market a hypersexed sluttiness, both of which can easily play into stereotypes of lesbianism. (Recently, rap — and pop — women have found one escape hatch: straight-up out-of-body weirdness, à la early Nicki Minaj.)

For actual gay or bi ladies who want a piece of big-time rap’s pie, the odds so far have been stacked against them — out lesbian rappers like super-talented Yo Majesty only seem to get so far, although there is, at least, a still-flickering homo-hop circuit that promotes queer talent. Major label artists are pressured to stay in the closet, despite all the rumors and paparazzi shots of “companions.” This last approach can be psychologically disastrous, as I found out one night in Minneapolis when a devastated and drunk Lady Sovereign, who had repeatedly rejected the lesbian label at her management’s request, crashed on my futon after her ex-girlfriend refused to let her stay over. Sov finally came out last summer. You could tell that her bottled-up feelings had taken their toll, however.

But hey, it’s 2011 and it’s nice to think the rap game has matured along with the rest of pop culture. Ellen is wifed up. Lohan dated Ronson. Lambert should’ve won American Idol. Everybody seems “Born This Way.” As celebrity homos become more visible, the “openly gay” tag seems old-fashioned. But that doesn’t mean we still aren’t curious — and if you don’t tell, people will keep asking.

Yet while Kreayshawn hasn’t denied being a lady-lover, questions regarding her sexuality have garnered a wash of fuzzy responses, only fueling curiosity and more sound-bites. My personal favorite was her quote in Complex Magazine, in which she stated she isn’t a “raging lesbian” but an “occasional lesbian.” Should I be insulted? This needed some clarification.

“I say occasional because I go with the flow,” Kreayshawn told me over the phone, while relaxing on what she considers a “chill day:” hours of interviews and business related to her recent $1 million deal with Columbia Records.

She could easily claim the “B” in LGBT, but says she’s not comfortable with that label either. If anything, she’d go for an “A.”

“Sometimes I tell my friends I’m asexual because I don’t feel like I seek out guys or girls.” Kreayshawn lets interested parties approach her and would just rather let things happen organically. “A girl and I could start talking and I could think, ‘Hey, she’s cool, we should be friends’ or I could think ‘This girl is hot, we should hang out on another kind of hype.’ And it’s the same with guys.”

She’s like the indie-rap version of Lady Gaga — another young woman in the public eye who isn’t afraid to declare her undeclared sexual status. This isn’t a phase and she’s not on the fence. Nor is she checking just one box. She could be the poster child for that nebulous term, “post-gay,” if we’re at a point in our culture where we can move beyond the importance of mainstream representation. (Many would say we’re not.)

“I wish everybody was open-minded so we wouldn’t have to have any labels — no bi, straight, gay. We wouldn’t have to have these titles that separate people.”

Her spirited musician mother helped shape Kreayshawn’s flexible ideas on sexuality. Mom even worked in the warehouse of Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s sex-positive one-stop shop.

“I’d go visit my mom and bring my homework. That place is really diverse, you know what I’m sayin’? I saw some crazy dildos and shit, but I was taught that it’s normal. That’s why I’m open and accepting of everything.”

She admits her lyrics are consistently more lez-oriented, but not necessarily raging. “It’s not like I say I’m gonna eat this girl’s koochie — it’s on a different hype.” This way, she says, guys can sing along too.

It’s appropriate that Kreayshawn keep one eye toward her male audience and supporters — she rolls with a lot of buzz-worthy industry dudes, most notably the guys of Odd Future. As nice as their beats may be, members like Tyler, the Creator have been known to deliver some nasty, homophobic lines. Does she just bite her tongue?

“I know those guys personally, but I’m also not someone who goes off and listens to their music every day. I don’t like homophobe stuff, not in music and not in my friends,” she says, maybe hinting that the Odd Future guys just like to ruffle rainbow feathers for effect. Kreayshawn herself is no stranger to playing dirty, although she often takes on a mocking male persona when doing so — calling other girls hos and Twittering lines like “I need a bitch on my lap.”

“Growing up in the hood and shit, I would hear all kinds of that shit walking down the street,” she explains. Now she wants to turn sexist speech on its head and play with it. “When guys say that stuff in music, like, uh girl, your pussy is so wet — what? Ew — nasty!” She wants girls to be able to sing along and participate instead of feeling attacked or uncomfortable.

“But I wouldn’t say you should read into every single lyric,” she says. With all the attention she’s receiving, she may yet turn her girl-love outward with some solid lyrics. She’s already hard at work on a mixtape and her first full-length, which she hopes will be released by the end of the year. Predicting where Kreayshawn will be by next summer isn’t so easy.

“I’ll probably be touring like something crazy. Maybe directing a music video. Or maybe I’ll be knitting socks. You never know with me. It could get completely out of control.”

And as for advice at this year’s Pride: “Everyone be safe. Have fun. And just make sure you have fun and be safe while doing it.”

I told her she sounded like a mom. “I know,” she giggles in her squeakiest voice. “I just care about my people.”

The ol’ Vic-trola

Andrew Lam
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0
The ol’ Vic-trola

arts@sfbg.com

SOUND TO SPARE The potential closing of Haight Street’s Red Vic Theater has unsettled me. With one less place to go out and enjoy, what’s a shut-in-prone type like me to do?

Fortunately, when I spoke to Sam Sharkey, one of the co-op’s managing partners, he offered a ray of hope by saying that the Red Vic Movie House is here, organized — it just partnered with the Haight Street Fair and the California Jug Band Association for a benefit — and best of all, still screening movies, some of them music-related.

Let me take a breath for a minute to reflect and appreciate some of the carefully curated films I’ve encountered at this fine establishment. I’ve transcended the mundane through Ziggy Stardust’s gender-bending, screwed-up-eyes stage persona in Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Director D.A. Pennebaker, better known for documenting Bob Dylan in the 1960s, tried his hand at capturing the Bowie in full glam garb during a 1973 tour. Mick Ronson shreds on guitar to undeniably comical proportions. I recall the audience cracking up, something you just don’t get when you’ve opted to Netflix at home.

The less acclaimed — but equally gorgeous — somber sounds of a pop-star- turned-recluse proved to be quite a treat. Scott Walker: 30th Century Man (2006) was one of those films I didn’t know I needed to see, until the rainy day someone sent me a YouTube link to his song “It’s Raining Today.” The opening atmospheric sounds alone on this track are enough to captivate, but as it moves forward into Walker’s commanding crooning voice, you realize that he has the ability to convey dread and beauty at once. The film is a concrete testament to his influence on contemporary musicians.

Later I was given the soundtrack to boxing’s “Rumble in the Jungle,” set in early 1970s Zaire, where a showcase of mostly familiar soul artists pulled off a hugely successful stadium concert. Soul Power (2008) sort of serves as a musical counterpart to 1996’s When We Were Kings, which was the cinematic predecessor dealing with the same Ali vs. George fight. The symbolic implications of the event for African and African American pride are brought to the fore, and the concept of power is examined, whether it is achieved physically, politically or even musically.

Sharkey said that declining attendance was the Red Vic’s main obstacle. Single-screen theaters aren’t as much of a sustainable business anymore, as evidenced by the number that have closed in the last 10 to 20 years. The Castro Theatre and the Roxie in the Mission seem to be surviving, though — I wondered why people weren’t coming out for movies in the Haight anymore. Was it a bad rap from all the sit-lie buzz? Sharkey didn’t seem convinced on that argument, trusting that his patrons wouldn’t buy into that hype. He leaned toward more technology, calling this an age of competition and noting that the accessibility of movies via broadband Internet is just too convenient.

If you’re a music fan who wants to help curb the trend against local establishments falling by the wayside, then the no-brainer is to hit the Red Vic for the following music films. Rock out for the cause — or you may end up drowning in a sea of Whole Foods.

June 26-28, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune. The unsung 1960s antiwar folksinger (who doesn’t mind taking a backseat to Dylan) gets the full doc treatment.

July 14, The Hippie Temptation. Vintage 1967 footage of the Haight-Ashbury scene in its glorious heyday as seen through the eyes of CBS News. Originally aired on TV, this “hilariously biased” take on flower power should have you craving the street peddlers’ wares immediately after the show.

July 15-16, Stop Making Sense. Classic Talking Heads circa 1984 at L.A.’s Pantages Theatre. Watching a jittery David Byrne working the crowd in his oversized boxy white suit should be worth the price of admission alone.

July 19-20, The Last Waltz. This one’s cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s directed by Martin Scorsese and, second, it captures The Band’s final show at San Francisco’s old Winterland Ballroom, a place I’ve often dreamed of seeing a show.

Schizoid trickster

Andrew Lam
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Schizoid trickster

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Tyler, the Creator makes schizophrenic music. At least four entangled voices riddle his latest effort on XL Recordings, Goblin, the follow-up to his self-produced, rapped, and designed debut, Bastard, which he released on Tumblr.com in late 2009. One of those voices is some sort of inner conscience or demon, a pitched down grumble of bass, that doubles as Tyler’s obsequious therapist. But it also takes on the roll of ethical advisor and spiritual consultant: Tyler, you’re right to feel that way; people do like you; you shouldn’t kill all your friends. Even Tyler’s conscience disintegrates into corroded delusions and anxiety. Meanwhile, Tyler, at 20 years old, is an uncompromising, violent, self-hating, offensive, sexually repressed, obnoxious, yet sometime charming and funny protagonist who growls and spews partially digested rhymes over off-syncopated drum programming and synthetic keyboard washes.

The therapist conscience is a foil for Tyler’s caustic self-reflection in Goblin. This dynamic allows for multiple layers of inner dialogue, which subside only when other members of Los Angeles’ Odd Future collective (short for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) give Tyler’s disturbed and heavily claustrophobic mental space some breathing room. Frank Ocean, the only member of the crew above the drinking age, waxes sincere R&B verses in “She,” bringing into contrast how Tyler’s unfulfilled desire for his lust interest degenerates into anger, voyeurism, and eventually, fantasies of possession. With Hodgy Beats, Tyler is hungriest on “Sandwitches.” Who the fuck invited ‘Mr. I Don’t Give a Fuck’/ Who cries about his daddy and a blog because his music sucks, he raps, before flipping the chorus of “Wolf Gang” into a call to arms for all who feel slighted by the establishment, any establishment.

In response to the rapid escalation of media attention circling Odd Future since last winter (which perhaps recently climaxed in a lengthy New Yorker article on the mysterious disappearance of member Earl Sweatshirt), Tyler negates excessively: the hip-hop blogs that gave him no love, kids with comfortable homes and families, music critics, moralists who accuse him of homophobia and misogyny. Tyler stands for defiance and offensiveness, rejection and swag, bastards and goblins, skateboards, skating apparel, and the simple joys of juvenile delinquency.

Another voice in Goblin is a rare appearance: some sort of helium-intoxicated creature. It slightly echoes Madlib’s incarnation of gratuitous violence in the Quasimoto character, culled straight from a Melvin Van Peebles’ film trailing a black man’s escape and redemption from the systematic violence brought to bear on his body in America’s inner city. But there’s not much of a redeeming light in Goblin. And the source of Tyler’s frustration and belligerent lashing out is all the more obscure. The record is thoroughly dystopian, despite its pretensions to comedy — a lonely soul trying to find its way in a desolate and often antagonistic world.

Tyler shares as much in spirit with the paranoid hallucinations of the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” minus the lighthearted melody, as with Eminem’s confessional tirades. Moments of vulnerability seem to, if not justify the violent outrage, then at least make it bearable (and for a certain listener, endearing). The critique in Goblin, if there is any critique, might be one of taking the system more seriously than it takes itself. The record is neither ironic nor detached, but a head-on dive into the gluttony of indulgences that comprise popular culture and much of everyday life today, as well as the psychological pain and alienation that the system manufactures in its wayside.

Goblin is not much of a crossover album, either. There aren’t many hooks to hold onto since much of the schizoid discourse replaces formal pop structures. It’s a sprawling record, some songs inching toward 10 minutes. The most memorable hook is the anarchic anthem of “Radicals” in which “Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck school!” is yelled in a repetitive chant. It’s hackneyed and silly enough to make you cringe. But the chant makes more sense when Odd Future performs live (let me tell you, shit is wild), where a sea of teenagers, and those of teen spirit, tap into the sort of rebellious energy you thought had dispersed into the dust of musical archives. This seduction also comes through in the recording. The beat fumbles sickly and the distorted melodic slime falls away to empty pockets of sound where Tyler calls to the listener: “Odd future, wolf gang. We came together cause we had nobody else. Do you? You just might be one of us. Are you?”

ODD FUTURE

Tues/21, 8 p.m., $20

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness Ave., SF

(415) 673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

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