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This time it’s personal

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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This time it’s personal

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The wee small hours of the a.m., when the rest of the world is deep in z’s, is magic time for Tim Cohen. “Most of my profound musical moments have come very early in the morning, not being able to sleep and being woken up by a weird dream or nightmare,” verifies the leader of the now-defunct Black Fiction, co-songwriter of the Fresh and Onlys, and proud papa of Magic Trick (Captured Tracks). He casts clear gray eyes — taking everything in like fully open apertures — out the front window of Cafe Abir, pint on hand and orange cap squashed over his brow while sunlight brushes away gray, stormy skies.

One such sonic turning point came in about 2002, when Cohen was visiting his parents in Richmond, Va. After buying a clutch of John Fahey LPs from a thrift store that day, he dreamt of driving through the “spiderweb-like complex” of a suburban business park. All around him women standing at the tops of the buildings were jumping to their death. Startled awake, he put on the first album he saw — Fahey’s Vol. 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday (Takoma, 1966) — and, with his headphones on, drifted back to sleep to the sound of acoustic fingerpicking and then the backwards guitar of “Knott’s Berry Farm Molly.” This time he was driving the dream in reverse, cruising backward as the suicides jumped back onto the buildings.

“I woke up and swore off playing with a pick,” Cohen declares today. “I went on this several-year run of writing fingerpicked acoustic songs, waking up and realizing there are so many possibilities to this guitar.”

Those sorts of dawn revelations are the reason Cohen says he bolted awake in his Left Coast bed for no explicable reason on the morning of 9/11 — and why he advises susceptible listeners, in the notes for his third solo album and its accompanying double 7-inch EP, Bad Blood (also on Captured Tracks), that they should listen to the music in the comfort and terror of morning darkness. And it may be the reason why he ever-so-sweetly wails on Magic Trick‘s “Sweetheart,” “Don’t be afraid of my heart/ I’m not afraid of the dark.”

“That’s the time of day when you’re most like a sponge,” Cohen explains, as busy Divisadero Street bustles outside. “Every experience you have, whether it’s ecstatic or traumatic, it’s going to stick with you.”

There’s more than a bit of a seer in Cohen, who says he’s making a practice of being open to collaborations with, say, bassist Shayde Sartin in the Fresh and Onlys (note: Cohen refuses to cop to being either Fresh or Only) and to inspiration when it hits him, which is often. “I have a lot of songs coming out me,” he says matter-of-factly.

Fortunately, Cohen has iPhone’s voice memo at the ready to capture scraps of melody and a Tascam 388 in his amazingly tidy bedroom studio to record with, high in the gnome’s-cap fairytale tower of his Western Addition Victorian, surrounded by 360-degree bird’s-eye windows overlooking SF. Cohen’s own intriguing, intricately detailed drawings decorate the walls of the flat, much as they do the covers of his solo LPs, coexisting easily alongside Cubs memorabilia. He’s recorded much of his music here — and it’s legion, including hip-hop projects the Latter, Hattattack, Feller Quentin, and the semi-active Forest Fires Collective; psych combo 3 Leafs; and the “druggy” Window Twins, which will release a full-length this year.

With the help of bassist-keyboardist Alicia Vanden Huevel (Aislers Set), drummer James Kim (Kelley Stoltz), and Noelle Cahill, Magic Trick may be Cohen’s most refined, effortlessly endearing recording to date. His dark, pretty, strangely exhilarating lovestruck songs dip deliciously into cockeyed folk ruminations (“I Am Never Going to Die”), curious psychedelia (“New House in Heaven”), throwback 1960s pop with a three-way wink (“Don’t Give Up”‘s whimsical “When three people lie down together/ They’re trying to make a good thing better/ Good things happen all the time”), and scorched-earth country (“The Flower,” based on the songwriter’s real-life experience of eating a poisonous lily in mid-flirt), with Cohen hitting new almost-heartbreaking highs with his disarmingly rough-hewn vocals and wiseacre-y wise-fool wordplay.

Modern lovers, take heed. This time it’s personal for Cohen, who enjoys a nice, sturdy alias as much as the next MC. That’s why his name is on it. 

TIM COHEN

With Holy Shit, Puro Instinct, Sam Flax and Higher Color, DJ Jimi Hey

Thurs/24, 9 p.m., $5–$8

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(888) 233-0449

www.gamh.com

 

Mad science

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Mad science

Is the Bay Area’s experimental beat scene finally coming together? After a few years of lagging behind the explosion of beat conductor talent in Los Angeles, and suffering a steady exodus of potential down south, the Bay Area’s time for creating a forward leaning psychedelia — composed from the bass-infused backbone of instrumental hip-hop — might have arrived.

This week, San Francisco’s DJ veteran Mophono releases his debut full-length, Cut Form Crush, on his upstart CB Records. It’s a colossal experiment in deconstructed percussive patterns and warped synth keys, washed with distorted textures, panning effects, and field recordings. Since 2006, Mophono has hosted the weekly party Change the Beat, guided by only one principle: blow up the soundsystem with unlikely combinations of sounds.

Last week, Change the Beat resident and SF mainstay Salva also dropped his first full-length effort, Complex Housing (Friends of Friends), an excellent dance record that glides across an array of genres infatuated with the interplay of bass, groove, and melody: hip-hop, house, UK funky, Chicago juke, and ghetto-tech all get equal treatment.

Here’s the rub: Although Salva insists that the Bay is still home, especially through his SF-grounded imprint Frite Nite, which supports bubbling acts like Ana Sia and B.Bravo, he was practically unpacking boxes in his new L.A. crib when I spoke to him on the phone before writing this article. On the other hand, another L.A. force of sonic gravity, Low End Theory — Daddy Kev’s acclaimed weekly, which helped form the social fabric that pushed Flying Lotus, the Gaslamp Killer, and Daedalus, among many others, to international attention — has kicked off a monthly residence in San Francisco. Ultimately, both cities can benefit from creative exchange, so let’s just say that California’s got it going on.

Born Benji Illgen, Mophono has been rocking parties in the Bay Area for nearly 20 years as DJ Centipede. His early obsession with digging for records — one that’s amassed a vinyl vault of around 6,000 records — defied genre and era for a love of percussion in all its forms, including conspicuous absence. “I’m drawn to rhythm, both as a DJ and as this metronome-carrier-guy who maintains turntables,” Illgen tells me over the phone, as raucous noise and strange bangs reverberate in the background.

Cut Form Crush could be called a study of drums: percussive patterns unfold and disappear, giving rise to new formations set on their own uneasy path toward self-dissolution. While the drums, crunchy and multilayered, degenerate, a barrage of synth noise and warped textures dance frenetically around the pockets of space jarred open by the percussive momentum. This record alarms as much it disorients.

In many ways, Cut is the product of all the music Illgen has absorbed over the course of the past two decades. From closely following the development of hip-hop and U.K. electronic genres and digging into psychedelic rock, musique concrète, jazz-funk, Kosmische, and post-punk, Illgen became interested in the way imaginative music is made through improvisation. “Bands in the ’60s would get in these zones, really rhythmic areas, and they would tap into a minimal expression,” says Illgen. “I’m interested in those minimal, odd breakdowns, when these cats just jam out on some craziness.”

Rather than just sampling loops and bits from these sources, Illgen decided to reproduce the creative environments that shaped their genesis. “I’d get groups and musicians together in my little studio who aren’t necessarily band mates but are involved in the same sort of music community,” says Illgen. “Then we’d just vibe out. We’d create these recordings that later I’d access and reconfigure the sounds.”

One of the outcomes of this recording process is the dizzying song “Cut Form Crunch,” extracted from multiple sessions with Flying Lotus and later edited into a condensed can of musical psychosis. Thick-bodied synth keys vibrate over muddled bass thumps and compressed percussive claps as if dubstep’s basic components were thrown together into a washing machine, cycling in rotation. “Electric Kingdom” maneuvers through dubstep’s signature helicopter wobble, curdling an off-kilter rhythm with sequenced claps and blips. In “Cut Form Crush Groove,” Illgen reworks the early disco breaks that established the basic framework of hip-hop in circa-1980s South Bronx. A Vocoder-dissimulated MC channels the cosmic frequency of Afrika Bambaataa, calling us to respect the foundation. But even these more conventional drum patterns and familiar vocal refrains wisp away into static and gurgling fuzz.

What Illgen emphasizes in his recording technique is a preference for textural environment over the clarity and crispness often associated with quality. “I see experimentation as an open-minded direction to making music,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m going to find, but if I open my ears, I’ll find something. And I’ll let that dictate where the music goes.”

Paul Salva takes a similar improvisational approach to music production. “Without all the theory and formal training, I have to relish this time where I’m feeling out the instruments and learning what to do with them,” he says. “As amateurs, and coming from a place of ignorance, kids are doing amazing shit — by accident.”

Despite his Chicago upbringing, Salva initially gravitated to West Coast backpacker hip-hop and the East Coast stylings of the Diggin’ In The Crates (DITC) crew before taking an interest in his hometown-bred house and its ghetto-tech offspring. “Record store culture really helped solidify my eclecticism,” he says. “Through working at Gramaphone Records in Chicago and also in Miami, I got into IDM, drum ‘n’ bass, and whatever else caught my ears.” Recently, as genre allegiances have begun to dissolve among young musicians and listeners, Salva grew comfortable with the idea of consolidating his diverse tastes and producing a record on his own terms. Although Complex Housing takes influences from a flux of emerging ideas and sounds across the spectrum of today’s future bass and beat scene innovators, it finds an enduring coherence in being, very simply, a well-crafted dance record.

“Wake Ups” has Salva showing his chops on the synthesizer and the drum machine, layering lush boogie-funk chords over a skittering rhythmic grind. In “Keys Open Doors,” he anchors dirty disco arpeggios with poly-percussion pilfered from the odd-shuffle of UK funky and grime. In these songs, the gritty underside of club music — recalling its many places of origin and evolution in abandoned warehouses and neon-lit bars, juiced from electric outlets in public parks and now the outer zones of the Internet — emerges from layers of shimmering production. The record reaches toward its apex with “I’ll Be Your Friend,” a future-funk rendition of Robert Owens’ early ’90s house classic of the same title. Salva edits Owens’ longing hook into a repetitive chant, spliced around a minimal rhythmic knock and atmospheric washes of sound that delicately grow and just as softly decay.

What consistently stands out within the record is Salva’s ability for crafting effusive melodies over rolling bass lines. It’s an absolutely seductive combination that hinges on a resilient tension in the music: a mechanistic but unsteady beat underpins the expressive quality of the chord progressions. Salva owes this effect at least in part to his recording technique of combining live instrumentation on the keyboard with laptop robotics. “When I’m making music with live instruments, I have more of an open palette,” he says. “When I’m in the computer, in the sequencer — the options are nearly limitless — anything goes. And because of that, my creativity can be stifled if I don’t place restrictions on myself.”

Salva and Mophono both figure out surprising and compelling ways to tap into the elusive formula of creativity. In the end, the search for the future beat is more of a mad science than an exact one.

FIX UP PRESENTS: SALVA COMPLEX HOUSING RELEASE PARTY

With Shlomo, B.Bravo, Epcot, and more

Thurs./17, 9 p.m.; $8

222 Hyde

222 Hyde, SF

(415) 345-8222

www.222hyde.com


CB RECORDS PRESENTS: MOPHONO CUT FORM CRUSH RELEASE PARTY

With Gaslamp Killer and Citizen Ten

Sat./19, 10 p.m.; call for price

SOM

2925 16th St., SF

(415) 558-8521

www.som-bar.com

Noise Pop 2011 short takes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Noise Pop 2011 short takes

 

DAN DEACON

Don’t take drugs before a Dan Deacon concert — it’s a waste of your perfectly good toxins, because even sober attendees will feel totally fucked up after a show with the holy Jesus of electronic madness. Crawl! Spin! High fives! Jump! Close your eyes. Spin! Imagine you’re running in a forest, etc. You’ll leave a wolf. With Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Oona, and Altars, Tues./22, 8 p.m., Independent. Also with Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Sister Crayon, Lily Taylor. Wed./23, 8:30 p.m., Rickshaw Stop. (Amber Schadewald)

 

VERSUS, TELEKINESIS

Live through this — be it heartbreak, hearing loss, or the heavy-duty poker sessions in the basement of Lost Weekend Video. Versus’ Richard Baluyut has moved on from his gig at the invaluable Mission video store, but he hasn’t lost his way with a moody rocker: Versus’ On the Ones and Threes (Merge, 2010), its first album in a decade, finds beauty in the darkness — and in the return of old compatriots like original member (and Richard’s bro) Edward Baluyut and engineer Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter). Elsewhere on this insurmountable bill: Michael Benjamin Lerner of Telekinesis has grappled with hearing loss by way of a cryptic disease and coped with the demise of the relationship that inspired his debut. Sounds like he’s rising above, beautifully, via the gritty, grumble-y, bass-wrought numbers of 12 Desperate Straight Lines (Merge). With The Love Language, Burnt Ones. Wed./23, 8 p.m., 21+, Cafe Du Nord. (Kimberly Chun)

 

THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY LIFE OF JOSE GONZALEZ

If the trailer is any indication, this portrait of the singer-songwriter and Junip member uses animation and some Idiots-like live action to illustrate his music. “The best stuff is generally an unexpected twist while still maintaining a thread,” he says in voice-over, as directors Mikels Cee Karlsson and Frederik Egerstrand show him trying to write, slumped over a desk in a dark room. Wed./23, 9 p.m., Roxie Theatre. (Johnny Ray Huston)

 

WAY BEHIND THE MUSIC

Anthony Bedard of Hank IV and the Hemlock Tavern hosts as Mark Eitzel, Thao Nguyen, Beth Lisick, Linda Robertson, Michelle Tea, Bucky Sinister, Jesse Michaels, Paul Myers, and Tom Heyman read from some of the most bizarre American music memoirs. This showcase includes the words of Justin Bieber, Jewel, Gene Simmons, George Jones, Marilyn Manson, Tori Amos, Vince Neil, and Denise McLean (mother of Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean), among others. Thurs./24, 7:30 p.m., Make-Out Room. (Jen Verzosa)

 

APEX MANOR

Terrible-two Spoon meets newborn Dinosaur Jr.? Apex Manor, the latest project from Ross Flournoy, brings such post-punk pack leaders to mind, as the effortless strains of jingle-jangle bliss and well-hooked-up rock ‘n’ roll course out of the new Year of Magical Drinking (Merge). But, really, it must have been Flournoy’s passionate, punchy performance on “Under the Gun,” coupled with a bitchin’ guitar solo, that captured Carrie Brownstein’s heart and won her NPR challenge to write and record a song in one weekend. That’s all gravy, though, considering that the exercise succeeded in busting Flournoy out of a lousy case of writer’s block after the breakup of his underrated Broken West. With Film School, Gregory and the Hawk, Melted Toys. Thurs./24, 8 p.m., 21+, Cafe Du Nord. (Chun)

 

SHANNON AND THE CLAMS

Hey freak, you know you’re one of us. The wait has been long, but the time is coming soon for Shannon and the Clams to release Sleep Talk on 1-2-3-4-Go! Records. Get ready to be blown away by Shannon Shaw’s voice, one of the great untamed forces-of-nature of rock ‘n’ roll, and my vote for the best pure sound you can hear at this year’s fest. With Jake Mann and the Upper Hand, Wet Illustrated. Fri./25, 5 p.m., 21+, Benders Bar. (Huston)

 

NICK ZINNER’S 1001 IMAGES

While most noted as the guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Zinner is making a name for himself as a talented photographer. (He has four books of images to his name, including his latest, Please Take Me Off The Guest List.) In this exhibition of 1,001 photographs, the Bard College-educated, four-time Grammy nominee captures intimate moments of his world travels as a member of an iconic art rock and garage pop trio. Fri./25, 5 p.m., 21+, Public Works. (Versosa)

YOUNG PRISMS

Thick, super-gooey reverb-smothered toast, crunchy and burnt and totally delicious. Young Prisms is a group of five San Francisco residents who roast gritty shoegaze tracks straight over the fire while living together in a house that apparently feels like an “extended camping trip.” You can’t take small bites of Young Prisms — this sound is meant for inhaling. With Big Lights, Seventeen Evergreen, DJ Britt Govea. Fri./25, 8 p.m., 21+, Independent. (Schadewald)

 

TAMARYN, THE SOFT MOON

Noise Pop broods with this bill, which presents an opportunity to hear the widescreen songs from Tamaryn’s The Waves (my fave: “Dawning) in live form, and find out how they’ll translate to Cafe Du Nord’s close-quarters basement setting. Luis Vasquez is a busy guy — in addition to his band the Soft Moon, he also plays with the Lumerians, who’ll be putting out an album this spring. With the Black Ryder, Wax Idols. Fri./25, 8 p.m., 21+, Cafe Du Nord. (Huston)

 

BATTLEHOOCH, EXRAY’S, DOWNER PARTY, NOBUNNY

Whether playing impromptu shows on street corners or headlining Noise Pop at Bottom of the Hill, Battlehooch is a San Francisco five-piece with a brilliant manic-depressive sound that flips from indie pop to experimental noise rock. Joining Battlehooch are: Exray’s, an SF duo whose song “Hesitation” was handpicked for use in the blockbuster Social Network; pop-punk trio The Downer Party, which dazzles audiences with its songs of teenage angst; and Nobunny, a psychobilly-meets-garage rock force of nature. Fri./25, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill. (Verzosa)

 

HUNX AND HIS PUNX

Hunx masters songs of love and death — whether they be teen-death love anthems or odes to his late father — on the upcoming Too Young to Be in Love, with tremendous help from Punkette Shannon Shaw of Shannon and the Clams. (He’s also just recorded some “straight”-ahead classic rock-pop solo songs that will make it less possible for dunderheads to pigeonhole him as a gay comic novelty.) I’d tell you exactly what’s rad — as in truly radical — about the interplay between Hunx’s and Shaw’s voice, but I’m going to wait until the album comes out. Why don’t you find for yourself? With Best Coast, Wavves, Royal Baths. Sat./26, 8 p.m., Regency Ballroom. (Huston)

 

NO AGE

Yes, age — maturity has been good to the L.A. duo. Beyond the walls of grinding distortion lies Everything in Between (Sub Pop, 2010), and such raging jewels as “Fever Dreaming,” a hell-bent, hardcore-fed hurl through sheet-metal noise and bemused but anthemic Joey Ramone-style vocals. Somehow the twosome has reclaimed the epic poetry in art punk, scratching through the ethereal rubble of “Skinned” and the mournful crunch and glimmer of “Positive Amputation.” With Grass Widow, Rank/Xerox, Crazy Band. Sat./26, 8:30 p.m., Rickshaw Stop. (Chun)

Noise Pop 2011 highlights

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Noise Pop 2011 highlights

MUSIC The 2011 edition of Noise Pop finds the festival stretching the definition of noise pop ever further outward in order to swallow excellent sounds. Back in 1993, when Noise Pop originated, muted My Bloody Valentine-derivative bands with lowercase names evocative of junior-high lunch were the norm. This year, the fest taps into the recent, more sharp-edged shoegaze revival and the current California garage rock zeitgeist, while also making room for hip-hop, freak folk, and deep funk. It’s safe to say that, unlike the character assassinated in Steely Dan’s “Hey 19,” Noise Pop at 19 knows about the queen of soul. Here’s our guide to some of the event’s best lineups.

>>Read more of our Noise Pop 2011 picks here

 

PEANUT BUTTER WOLF AND DÂM-FUNK: THE DISCOVERERS

It’s the midnight hour on Valentine’s Day in Portugal when I reach Dâm-Funk, a.k.a. Damon Riddick, on the phone. He’s just outside of Lisbon, his surroundings are “phenomenal,” and he’s ready to wax enthusiastic about his longtime partner in funk Peanut Butter Wolf. “Me and Chris [Manak, a.k.a. Peanut Butter Wolf] connect on that sound because we remember and we revere,” he says, when I ask about their shared love of soul, hip-hop, and funk. “We knew what it was like before cable television and the Internet existed, we remember everything from those early VHS tapes to the way the sun set.”

As the sun is still rising on Valentine’s Day, in L.A., the man Dâm-Funk calls “Wolf” for short shows similar brotherly love. “When Dâm met me, we had a mutual respect,” says Manak. “He saw my record collection and vice-versa. When we discover songs, we’ll say, ‘Check this out.'” In turn, this shared enthusiasm, and the positive response to Dâm-Funk’s albums Toeachizown and Adolescent Funk — both released on Manak’s label, Stones Throw – has recharged funk sounds in Los Angeles and SF, and led to new discoveries of soulful and funky treasures from the recent past.

One such gem is Jeff Phelps’ 1985 Magnetic Eyes, a Tascam Portastudio 244 bedroom recording with sensational vocals by Antoinette Marie Pugh, who stars in a terrific no-budget video for the album’s “Hear My Heart” currently up on YouTube. “That album is something I’ve known about for a long time,” Dâm-Funk says, when I mention Magnetic Eyes and its hand-drawn yet futuristic cover art. “It’s a great project.”

Another great project is Tony Cook’s Back to Reality (Stones Throw), a collection of mid-1980s recordings by a musician who got his start as James Brown’s drummer. Taking on the role of executive producer, Manak has added some extra pop to the already formidable strut of Cook songs such as “Heartbreaker,” even drafting in Dâm-Funk to contribute new vocals to one track, “What’s On Your Mind.” “You’d think they were 24-track recordings, but he [Cook] only worked on an 8-track,” marvels Manak. “He was a good musician and producer – when you’re bouncing tracks, you have to know what you’re doing. In those days it was hard to achieve a full sound like that.”

These days, both Dâm-Funk and Peanut Butter Wolf know what they’re doing — and that’s a damn lot. Reflecting his Gemini nature, Dâm is planning to explore the dark side on an EP with that title before venturing into the light on his next LP. He’s also remixed Nite Jewel and is collaborating with her on a project, Nite Funk. He’s producing music by Steve Arrington for Stones Throw, and he wants to put out another chapter of his archival venture Adolescent Funk, with him choosing the tracks instead of Manak. As for the man Dâm calls “Wolf,” he’s got Stones Throw’s 15th anniversary on his hands, including a 7-inch box set, and a series of live-to-vinyl performances by the label’s artists in L.A. These guys are busy, but — fortunately for Noise Pop, and for SF — that doesn’t mean they don’t have time to throw a 45 party. (Johnny Ray Huston)

PEANUT BUTTER WOLF, DAM-FUNK

With Guillermo (Sweater Funk), Hakobo (Fresco)

Sat./26, 9 p.m., $15 (21+)

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

 

DOMINANT LEGS: LOST IN LOVE

Whether he’s raging in the streets alongside fellow Giants maniacs or musically lost between the sheets, Dominant Legs’ Ryan Lynch sounds like he’s sweet to the core—and even more. “I didn’t have anything to do with setting the mattress on fire, but I was there,” says the SF musician of SF’s impromptu World Series throw-downs. “But I wasn’t stopping anybody from celebrating.”

Lynch also rolls with the love when it comes to music. “I don’t really listen to much music that would be characterized as aggressive,” he continues, on one of those sunny Bay afternoons that make it easy to float away on blue skies and daydreams. “I listen to pop music and, honestly, mostly KISS FM.” His favorite song on this crisp, creamy day is R. Kelly’s “Lost in Your Love.” “It’s all about him wanting to bring love songs back to the radio,'” Lynch adds. “And that’s sort of what I also aspire to—not that we get any radio play!”

But, oh, a girl — or a boy who once was a Girl (until recently, Lynch was Girls’ touring guitarist) — can dream. And dreams have been coming true for Lynch, a longtime Giants follower who recently contributed “Finally Champions” to a digital-only benefit comp of Giants tribute songs released by True Panther. Meanwhile Dominant Legs continues to pick up steam—and members.

Once the repository of Ryan’s solo singer-songwriter imaginings away from longtime band Magic Bullets, Dominant Legs found favor when the Redwood City-bred musician was laid off from his job as mail clerk-receptionist at a law firm. He didn’t sink his sparse funds into job retraining classes or the like; instead he bought a cheap Casio keyboard and drum machine. “I shouldn’t have been spending any money,” he recalls now. “But the direction of the music really took off after acquiring those pieces of musical equipment.” Friend Hannah Hunt, who had just graduated from college, offered to help out at a 2009 show at Amnesia and ended up sticking around.

“She brought a softness, and delicacy, which made the songs more delicate since her voice is so different from mine,” he observes. “I think her voice is easier on the ear than mine.” For Noise Pop, the two have acquired a few more legs to help them on their way: drummer Rene Solomon, bassist Andrew Connors, and guitarist Garrett Godard, the latter once the drummer for Girls.

They’ll be filling out the already intoxicating pop bounding off Dominant Legs’ 2010 EP, Young at Love and Life (Lefse), which has inspired music bloggers to go wild, tossing out scattershot, albeit flattering allusions to Orange Juice and Belle and Sebastian, Kelley Polar and Arthur Russell—and even Dave Matthews. Feeling lost again? Just listen to the earnestly lovelorn, gently bopping, synth-popping tunes like the title track and “Clawing Out at the Walls,” with its curious admixture of sweetness and self-doubt. Kindred spirits and modern lovers such as Jeremy Jay and Camera Obscura, also given to such exquisitely anxious reveries, would understand. “The only thing I’ve heard is that [the EP] is too heavily influenced by the ’80s,” says Lynch. “But I don’t see that as a problem.” (Kimberly Chun)

DOMINANT LEGS

With How to Dress Well, Shlohmo, Chelsea Wolfe

Sat./26, 8 p.m., $12–$14

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

ADMIRAL RADLEY: LIFE AFTER GRANDADDY

Jason Lytle has never been shy in revealing the frustrations leading up to Grandaddy’s demise. Exhaustion from middling success, a love/hate relationship with his lifelong home of Modesto, and a diminished interest in making music with others resulted in a move to Montana to focus on a solo career in 2006. Enter Admiral Radley, a collaboration with members of indie-pop group Earlimart and Grandaddy drummer Aaron Burtch that has him not only playing in a band again, but touring Japan and singing about his former home on songs such as the sarcastic “I Heart California.” Lytle took some time out from a snowy day of magazine shopping at Borders in his new hometown of Bozeman to talk about the project.

SFBG Rumors of a collaboration between you and Earlimart date back to the Grandaddy days. What led to you guys finally working together?

Jason Lytle It was really an excuse to hang out at [Aaron Espinoza’s] studio and just have people coming in and playing parts. We set aside a week as a fun little project. Maybe somebody else had other plans for it, but at the time, I was convinced it was just gonna be a cool opportunity to make a record and be done with it.

SFBG Were you guys surprised by the amount of excitement surrounding the project?

JL Yeah. Then it turned into, alright, we gotta name this record something, and give the band a name, and pretty soon it was this real entity. The Japan thing started off as a joke, and then became more of, “Let’s give this a go, and if it winds up getting us to Japan, we can call it good” — and the whole thing was worth it.

SFBG And how were the Japan shows?

JL They were really scrappy. The places were just dumps. I kept joking with Aaron, saying, “If we weren’t in Japan right now, and if these weren’t exceptional circumstances, there’s no way I’d be putting up with this.”

SFBG You’d expressed some skepticism about playing in bands again after Grandaddy split. Has this experience changed your opinion?

JL My place in Admiral Radley is totally different from what my situation was with Grandaddy. I’m getting off easy. Aaron is a great organizer and knows that a big appeal for me joining the band was not dealing with a lot of the day-to-day crap I used to deal with. I feel like I’m a piece of a puzzle with this band, which after all these years is something I’ve never really experienced. So it’s been kind of neat.

SFBG Both you and Aaron like being hands-on with production in your work. How was the collaborative process on this album?

JL That part was pretty effortless. Aaron and I share a lot of the same philosophies on production and making albums sound a certain way. I definitely sat in on some of the mixing, but there was a lot of it where I was just able to trust what he was going to do, knowing that it probably wouldn’t be too far off from what I’d do myself.

SFBG Was it strange writing lyrics about California now that you’ve been gone for almost five years?

JL I’ve definitely had a renewed perspective. Every time I visit or I’m there doing some work, I’m thrust right into the shit. Like right into L.A. or SF, rather than adjusting or letting it sink in slowly. So, usually it’s pretty jarring for me just because the pace is a lot more relaxed and different here. Having a bit of that outside perspective now allows me to look at things a bit differently. (Landon Moblad)

ADMIRAL RADLEY

With Typhoon, Social Studies, Fake Your own Death

Wed./23, 8 p.m., $12 (21+)

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

GEOGRAPHER: EARTH PEOPLE

The dress code doesn’t include a finely-pressed lab coat, and the toolbox isn’t filled with fragile beakers, but a geographer is indeed a scientist, one who pours himself into the earth and bleeds across its surfaces to observe and categorize its residents. I haven’t asked the members of the San Francisco synth-pop trio Geographer if this occupation has had any inspiration on its sound, but there’s reason to believe the answer may be a humble yes.

Geographer has discovered new ground in the electronic realm. Its unique ménage a trois of music-making contraptions — drums, synth and cello — produces audible scenery that simultaneously calms and energizes the senses. Luscious forests of synth share habitats with rushing bass and guitar. The cello adds a sneaky-smooth layer that easily melts between or melds the more jagged sounds.

Behind the sweet scenery resides a less than pretty picture. Themes of loss and inevitable change creep through their sun-stained melodies, pulling at the roots of the band’s core. In 2005, Michael Deni fled his home in New Jersey, after the unexpected deaths of two family members. He landed in SF, and his instruments became a source of comfort and release while he wandered the new, unfamiliar territory. After a period of searching and surveying, Deni met and began collaborating with Nathan Blaz and Brian Ostreicher. In 2008, Geographer self-released its debut full-length, Innocent Ghosts, a far more relaxed collection that showcases Deni’s round, patient voice.

The landscapes on 2010’s Animal Shapes (Tricycle) are majestic, but far more celebratory. Things are tighter spun, beats kick harder and there’s a cohesive exploratory factor. Specifically fabulous: “Kites,” a track that strikes gold with a lustrous synth party. Deni’s sincere vocals float high above the mountainous bass vibrations, but mingle ever so courteously with the shrill, twinkling electronic additions. Enter the romantic cello and the song is a straight-up gem.

Now is a good time to button up your favorite white jacket and take some notes on the current environment in which you reside. Whether you’re into earth science or not, Geographer is a swell listen that goes well with salty pretzels and an adventure around your own neighborhood. Animal Shapes on repeat will keep you in step with eyes and ears open. And listen carefully: there’s good word on the street about these Geographer guys in the live form. (Amber Schadewald)

GEOGRAPHER

With Butterly Bones, K Flay, Funeral Party

Wed./23, 8 p.m., $13–$15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 

PSYCHIC FRIEND: PIANO POWER

Will Schwartz and the piano go way back, to when he was nine. “I’ve been attracted to the C chord and to A minor since I was a kid,” he says from L.A., where he’s living in Los Feliz. “I learned to play piano by ear, and it was always based on [starting with] a C major and going from there.”

You could say Schwartz played his first gigs on the instrument. “We had this two-story living room in our house in New Jersey with a little balcony, and the piano was up on the balcony,” he says with a laugh. “I would imagine I was playing for people down below. I would put on shows for the living room furniture.”

In his new band Psychic Friend, Schwartz updates California chamber or piano pop for today’s era, with contributions by Hole drummer Patty Schemel and instrumentalist-producer Bo Boddie. The result is a fresh chapter in Schwartz’s musical story, one that has ranged from the guitar-rock of Imperial Teen to the D.I.Y. choreographed pop of Hey Willpower, which involved contributions from videomaker Justin Kelly, DJ Chelsea Starr, and musician Tomo Yasuda.

Crisp and clean, in a way Psychic Friend sounds like the moment Schwartz has found his voice, or unknown heights or depths of it. The pounding “Once a Servant” revives the spirit of Jobriath. “Water Sign” has a Serge Gainsbourg undercurrent. “Shouldn’t Have Tried Again”‘s rendering of the repeat failure of a relationship matches the plaintive sunshine-y yearning of Harry Nilsson’s sublime covers of Randy Newman.

You could say Psychic Friend is new Californian pop. The piano-based melodic immediacy of the group’s sound has a kinship to Carole King’s solo work, or Burt Bacharach and some of his hits for psychic and other friends, yet both the sound and the lyrical content is very contemporary, not retro. It also isn’t Rufus Wainwright showboating — tracks like “We Do Not Belong” allow Schwartz’s voice a freedom and resonance it hasn’t had before, but he doesn’t run away with himself. “The nature of playing a piano and writing melodic songs, it almost brings you back to ’70s songwriting,” Schwartz observes.

“I just found this place in my voice that feels very connected, actually, that comes from playing the piano, and it feels good,” he adds, simply.

Schemel’s powerful drumming and Boddie’s hit-making skills have a role in this shift. “It’s like an Eddie and the Cruisers feeling,” Schwartz says, “where you start to play something, and by the end it sounds like a finished song.” (Huston)

PSYCHIC FRIEND

With The Concretes, Birds and Batteries, Magic Bullets

Fri./25, 8:30 p.m., $13–$15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

To the bone

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
To the bone

DANCE/MUSIC There are a lot of interesting things in Brontez Purnell’s room. Giant self-made posters of Josephine Baker (“The most famous black party kid ever,” he says), Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, and the legendary Harlem Renaissance publication Fire!!. An arrangement of Polaroid Instamatic nude shots of old flames and interview subjects from his zine, Fag School. A few more Instamatic shots – of him and his mom and grandmother. A framed letter from Kathleen Hanna. An autographed copy of the Go-Go’s’ Talk Show. A typewriter. Effects pedals. On a window ledge, a CD by his uncle, the late blues guitarist J.J. Malone. On his bed, a well-worn paperback of Lady Sings the Blues, next to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillow. But the most interesting presence in the room is Brontez himself.

“I grew up with a strong Southern Baptist influence,” Brontez says, when I ask about the role of ritual in his dance projects. “These days I’m not as likely to disregard what that did to me and how it set my way of thinking about the world into motion. I talk to my mom, who is a devout Christian and also totally wild-ass, every day. But for the first 15 years of my life, I was at a place where, every Sunday, the most conservative people could scream their heads off. It wasn’t pretentious, it was to the bone. It’s part of the reason I’ve never had trouble dancing at [rock] shows or getting into the energy of the moment.”

Long before Brontez burned up the stage as a key member of Gravy Train!!!!, he was the talk of the Bay Area rock scene because of his uninhibited energy. “Sometimes, in Gravy Train!!!!, or especially when I was younger, people would sexualize me in this way that was weird to me,” he recalls. “I just felt like I was being more punk than sexy. Sometimes I’d jump in the crowd and people would finger me, or rip off my underwear, and I was put off or taken aback. I felt like I was this baby with whiplash.”

No longer a baby with whiplash, the Brontez of today is still punk rock, but also well-read – and a dancer. This Friday, he’s debuting a trio of live dance pieces, and a trio of dance films (The Beats are Falling Down, Itxel, and Free Jazz) made with Gary Gregerson, as part of a Berkeley Art Museum program curated by Betty Nguyen. Shot in black-and-white and kindred in spirit with works by Yvonne Rainer (“Her ideas about task-oriented choreography, and choreography that deals with the everyday, are so fact-based,” he says), the movies are a natural extension from the dynamic dance video that Irwin Swirnoff made for “Sha-Boo Lee,” by Brontez’s band, Younger Lovers. They’ve got an electric charge — they’re inspiring.

“What I like about Gary [Gregerson] and Irwin [Swirnoff] is that there is always a sense of naturalness with them,” says Brontez. “In the Bay Area, there can be this cult of clutter – everyone has their Cockette thing going, and everything has to be splattered with glitter and fuzzy purple rhinestones. With the art I make, there isn’t a lot of high concept and high camp going on. I’m literally trying to tell a story that I want to let breathe. Both Gary and Irwin are respectful of that.”

This directness is present in Rock Flawless (Bachelor), the latest Younger Lovers album, which features contributions from Bare Wires’ Matthew Melton and drummer Taaji Malik (who is also present in Gregerson’s films), as well as bandmate Mateo Corona. Recorded next door to Aunt Charlie’s Lounge at a studio on the corner of Turk and Taylor in SF, Rock Flawless trades the vagaries of romance for the truth. “When I wrote about a boy on [2008’s] Newest Romantic, it was ‘la la la’ and flowery, but on Rock Flawless I’ll write about a specific boy, in a specific neighborhood – like the Lower Haight – that fucked me over.”

Brontez also throws in a killer cover, of “Heartbroken,” by T2 featuring Jodie Aysha. He’s typically candid about its inspiration. “I first heard [the song] during this Adam4Adam trick,” he says. “I went to this guy’s house and he was a total freak. He had this way-too-close relationship with his dog. I hugged him and the dog ran off the bed and he said, ‘She hates when you take my energy away like that.’ We were fucking and he had on his Pandora and that song came on, and I was like, ‘What is this? This is what’s up!’”

What’s up for Brontez today? For starters, his neighborhood in West Oakland, where warehouse spaces like Sugar Mountain, Ghost Town, and Copland are putting on shows. “On the weekend, you see so many white kids it’s like Woodstock,” he laughs. “What’s happening here isn’t going on in San Francisco. But during the weekdays, you see the nice cars that drive by to get heroin and crack, and the regular neighborhood people.”  

What’s also going on is a strong dedication to making things happen, and making dance. “My biological clock is ticking, ticking, going ‘What have you done, girl?’,” Brontez jokes. “It’s nice to sit around waiting on boys to love you, but in the meantime…” In the meantime, he’s reading up on Rainer, Katherine Dunham, and Martha Graham. He’s watching AXIS Dance Company rehearsals. He’s drawing on his studies with choreographers Eric Kupers and Nina Haft. He’s getting set to act with Jesse Hewit and others in a film by Travis Mathews. He’s leading dance workshops. And he’s giving any “fucking squares” in dance a loving “a kick in the ass,” flyering shows punk rock-style, and choreographing pieces involving witch dancers and preachers, with titles like Whenever I Hit the Floor, I’m Like a Fucking Hurricane.

“Thank god I also read a lot of rock ‘n’ roll autobiographies,” Brontez says. “Because all of my favorite artists say the same thing: ‘They did not love me enough.’ This year, I’m going to find out who my brothers and sisters are, so we can start doing shows together.”

L@TE FRIDAY NIGHTS AT BAM/PFA: BRONTEZ WITH BRILLIANT COLORS
7:30 p.m. (DJ Myles Cooper at 6:30 p.m.), $7
Berkeley Art Museum, Gallery B
2626 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Commercial, free

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Commercial, free

MUSIC For a band with some of the horniest lyrics around, the members of Los Amigos Invisibles have remained remarkably faithful to one another. They’ve been together since the early 1990s, when they were teenagers rebelling against the goth- and rock-dominated Caracas music scene. It was then that these six amigos set out to make music with one purpose: to make people lose their shit on the dance floor. And 20 years later, they show no signs of being tardy for the party. We caught up with the group’s guitarist and main songwriter, Jose Luis Pardo, just after both he and Los Amigos Invisibles had released new albums.

SFBG A few weeks ago you guys released the seventh Los Amigos Invisibles studio album, Not So Commercial (Nacional Records), which is a follow-up to 2009’s Latin Grammy-winning Commercial.

JOSE LUIS PARDO/DJ AFRO Yeah it’s like a spin-off. Our intention with Commercial was to create an accessible pop album. But at the end we had all these extra tracks that were more trippy and not so pop. So we brought the idea of putting out an EP to Nacional Records and they were totally into it.

SFBG Did you have any clue when Los Amigos Invisibles first got together that it would be this kind of journey?

JLP Absolutely not. We were just having fun. But this year we’re turning 20, which is a miracle!

SFBG It’s almost unheard of that a band would stick together for that long and not take a break somewhere along the line.

JLP I know, I know, it’s crazy. We love it! But we’re old now, we don’t have that much hair anymore …

SFBG You still have a lot of hair, you’re DJ Afro after all!

JLP Ha, that’s right! We still love playing together. We don’t take it for granted. We were just an underground band in Caracas when David Byrne found us. After he put us on Luaka Bop we started touring the states. Our first plan was to move to San Francisco. But because the label was in New York City, we moved there and it’s been great. That was 2001, so we’ve been in the States for 10 years. We like it here!

SFBG And NYC’s winter isn’t cramping your tropical style?

JLP Not really. We go home to Venezuela on the holidays to get our beach fix.

SFBG Since you’re the principal songwriter of Los Amigos Invisibles, Julio Briceño (Los Amigos’s lead singer) has been your de facto muse for the past 20 years. He’s got that amazing machismo shtick when he’s performing. Just curious, is that a persona he takes on for the stage? Is it like his “Sasha Fierce,” or is that just who he is?

JLP It’s a little bit of both. He’s got a lot of charisma, but it’s kind of weird when people approach him off-stage because he can be shy and reserved too.

SFBG It must feel like you’re married to him because you’ve been together for so long …

JLP Exactly. We haven’t cheated on each other.

SFBG But just a few days ago you released your first solo album, Free (Nacional Records), where you worked with several other singers …

JLP Well, yes, Julio’s been my friend and my brother for all these years. So it was a challenge to write for new people. It was a totally new experience. But getting out of my element was awesome. Right after we finished Commercial I wanted to keep recording. Before that I’d always done remixes and a lot of work on the Los Amigos albums, but the thought of doing my own album never crossed my mind. I don’t like being the front man of anything. I like being part of a group.

LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES

With Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue

Fri/11, 9 p.m.; $25–$35

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-3000

www.thefillmore.com

Free at last?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Free at last?

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Deep in East Oakland, in the 80s blocks of MacArthur Boulevard, I arrive at the locked door of a hole-in-the-wall barbershop. A handwritten sign says “closed for a private appointment,” but I knock anyway and gain admittance. Inside, Mistah FAB, a.k.a. the Prince of the Bay, lounges in the chair, getting a mural of a crown and the Bay Bridge shaved onto the back of his head. It’s a very hip-hop ‘do, befitting his present mood. For the occasion of our interview, in part, is his new release, an Internet mixtape of all-original music called I Found My Backpack. As the title suggests, it’s a return to his roots, FAB’s most straight-up hip-hop project since his pre-hyphy debut, Nig-Latin (Straight Hits, 2003).

“I wanted to start off this year with that vibe,” FAB says, over the low buzz of the clippers. “I went into the music I made before I had any success, music that made me happy.”

To be sure, 2010 was a difficult year for FAB. Not only did he have his first child, a daughter, but his mother (“my best friend,” he calls her) died of cancer, leaving him with no parents just as he became one. (His father, as chronicled on his breakthrough album, Son of a Pimp [Thizz, 2005], died of AIDS when FAB was 12.) FAB’s closest cousin also passed away, while his older brother — after a lifetime in and out of institutions — was sentenced to life in prison.

“A party song — that can’t express my pain,” FAB says. “I’m not going to ignore it because when you ignore it, it only grows more. I want to allow people to see the stresses and the pain that I go through.”

For someone who emerged during the Bay’s hedonistic hyphy era, FAB has had more than his share of stress. For the past three-and-a-half years, he’s been signed to Atlantic Records, which never released his projected album, Da Yellow Bus Ryder. Meanwhile, thanks to a dispute with KMEL’s former managing director, Big Von Johnson, FAB got no local radio play from the station since 2006, even when he was on Snoop Dogg’s 2008 hit “Life of Da Party,” which reached No. 14 on Billboard’s rap charts. Finally, as its most conspicuous proponent, FAB was hit hard by the backlash against hyphy that flared up in 2007.

Any of the above qualify as a career-killer, but FAB has refused to surrender, and his persistence is paying off. He’s finally negotiated an end to his contract with Atlantic, and plans to sign with L.A. Laker Ron Artest’s Tru Warrior label to release a full-blown album, Liberty Forever, later this year. His versatility has allowed him to reinvent himself even as he defiantly claims hyphy on Backpack‘s Droop-E-produced opener, “Blame Me.”

“People treated hyphy like it was witchcraft,” FAB laughs. “Like when the townspeople came to hunt for everybody who’d been involved, and everybody was like, ‘No! I did nothing hyphy! I never wore stunna shades!’ But I’m not ashamed of anything we done then. I had to get it off my chest because I wanted people to realize how fake they were being.”

Most significantly, FAB is being broadcast again by KMEL. Backpack‘s hip-hop vibe aside, he hasn’t renounced his commercial ambitions. A new single, “She Don’t Belong to Me,” featuring Universal Records R&B crooner London, has recently begun getting spins, following a regime change at the station; program director Stacy Cunningham was fired last year, while Johnson, though still a DJ, is no longer manager, replaced by assistant program director Kenard Karter.

“If you go around the country and hear Rick Ross, T-Pain, Lupe Fiasco shout out Mistah FAB, then it’s odd that you’re not playing him on the radio station you control,” FAB points out. “But [Karter] is about change and giving artists such as myself a fair shot. He reached out to me a few weeks ago, and they’ve been playing my new record here and there, which is better than never there.”

This development potentially goes beyond FAB to the entire Bay, whose artists are seldom represented on Clear Channel-owned KMEL. But is Karter really about change? In an e-mail interview two weeks ago, he acknowledged that he hopes to increase airplay for local artists. But when asked what’s preventing it, he was inconclusive at best. “Its all about the music,” he wrote. “Quality, mass appeal music that garners passion is the standard for KMEL.”

This is the same line KMEL has pushed for years, implying that Bay Area artists are at fault for not making quality music. For a concrete example of an artist meeting his criteria, I asked about J-Stalin. Stalin has one of the most passionate followings in Oakland; I hear his music slappin’ in passing cars, on BART, even in the elevator in my apartment building. Yet KMEL put nothing in rotation from last year’s The Prenuptial Agreement (SMC, 2010), which debuted at No. 1 on Rasputin’s rap chart.

“I can’t comment,” Karter wrote, regarding Stalin. “I don’t know much about him.”

When I asked about FAB, Karter stopped replying, refusing to confirm even meeting with him. I can’t say for sure why, though I imagine his reluctance to discuss FAB stems from not wanting to acknowledge the ban in the first place.

I don’t want to criticize Karter. I’m thrilled he’s playing FAB, and he deserves some time to show and prove. But the Bay needs the radio. Radio made FAB a star back in 2005 when KMEL was banging “Super Sic Wid It,” while his later lack of airplay gave Atlantic cold feet about releasing his album. With his current single, FAB is merely testing the waters; he has an arsenal of bigger singles to release — if the radio will play them. “I have crazy records people would be amazed by,” FAB says. “Records with T-Pain, Snoop Dogg, Talib Kweli, one with Rick Ross and Jadakiss over a Justus League beat — you know, just playing the power names, like, look what I been doing over the years. So if they give this a run, they gonna love what I have in store for them.”

Where the Magik happens

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Where the Magik happens

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Because of the rusty pieces of corrugated sheet metal crudely affixed to its exterior, I almost mistake Tiny Telephone, a recording studio, for a very large, dilapidated storage unit. But on a brick-red door, alphabet letter magnets spell out “tiny,” and only bits of dried glue and fragments of “telephone” remain. This must be it.

Through the door, a two-wall art installation made of reclaimed redwood (by resident artist Claire Mack) in the lounge/kitchen area catches my eye. I’ve seen pictures of it on the studio’s website. This is it. It’s easy to imagine Death Cab For Cutie or San Francisco songstress Thao drinking beer, shooting the shit, and jamming in this room.

Once I plop down on the couch, pop-folk icon John Vanderslice, owner and manager of Tiny Telephone, pulls up a chair. Minna Choi, the artistic director of Magik*Magik Orchestra, the studio’s official house orchestra, takes a seat on a tan area rug.

“It’s probably like how everyone feels when you’re from San Francisco and you move to the East Coast and there are no good taquerias,” Vanderslice says, laughing, when I ask him about the history of Tiny Telephone. “I was in a small local band,” he elaborates. “We wanted to make a record. We toured every local studio. It was like there were only either rehearsal places with garbage on the floor, or posh, unaffordable, hardwood-floor, uptight-owner situations. There was nothing in the middle.”

In September 1997, Vanderslice opened Tiny Telephone to give independent musicians the opportunity to make affordable hi-fi recordings. Magik*Magik Orchestra entered the picture in 2008. “We wanted to simplify the process of incorporating classically-trained musicians into a nonclassical environment,” Choi says. “So I e-mailed [John].”

“It was like genius!” Vanderslice blurts out.

Adding the orchestra to Tiny Telephone is in tandem with Vanderslice’s evolution as an artist. On 2004’s Cellar Door (Barsuk), he strayed from electric guitar and used acoustic guitar and keyboards. “[Electric guitars] really take up a lot of territory,” he explains. “It’s a little bit like a cock-block. [Keyboards] can sit in one area, and then you can put something directly above them and below them in the frequency spectrum, so there’s plenty of room for, like, a French horn.” This year’s White Wilderness (Dead Oceans), finds Vanderslice’s tenor accompanied by acoustic guitar and a 19-piece ensemble gleaned from Magik*Magik Orchestra’s roughly 180-person membership.

“It’s great to go in a different direction,” Vanderslice says. “It’s great to move on.”

We all stand to start the tour. As I walk across the aqua blue floor, my hand grazes Fender amps that line the walkway to the main recording room. Inside, it’s dimly lit. When Vanderslice flips a switch, a white deer head becomes illuminated — like a statue of an idol — by Christmas lights strung on a pump organ. In one breath, he enumerates some of the equipment that is available: 14 guitar amps, a Hammond b3, a grand piano, keyboards, an EMT reverb plate. The lexicon of music recording equipment is dizzying. Vanderslice points to the walls: “These are all untreated cedar panels. This is cotton batting.” As we leave the room, he pauses to mention that the studio has been booked for more than 400 days in a row.

We climb a few rickety stairs to enter the control room, where we’re joined by Ian Pellicci, Tiny Telephone’s house engineer. With its UV meters, faders, and colored knobs, the room’s Neve console, built in 1976 for the BBC in London, looks like a prop taken from the bridge of the original Star Trek‘s Enterprise. This is the tape machine,” says Choi. “I’m proud to say that I was here when they put all of the light bulbs in, then all of a sudden it came alive like Wall-E.”

To encourage analog recording, Tiny Telephone provides free two-inch tape to clients. “Not that digital is terrible. But the technology has a ways to go,” Pellicci says. “There’s a greater dimension to the sound [of analog].”

Next we shuffle into the isolation room. “We’re basically in an anechoic isolation room where people can do vocals, drums — ” Vanderslice begins to explain. But with the room’s door open, I can hear the raucous sounds of construction taking place down the hallway.

Next door, what once was an auto shop is being converted into a separate studio, a “B Room” Opening in June, the B Room will be set up as an arts nonprofit modeled after The Bay Bridged and 826 Valencia. Unlike Tiny Telephone, which costs $350 per day plus engineers, the B Room will cost $200 daily. “We wanted to give bands a low-cost option to record on a tape machine, on a real console with microphones, in a space where they can make as much noise as they want,” says Vanderslice.

“With this other price point, [Vanderslice] is tapping into another group of bands and artists,” Choi adds. “There are probably so many diamonds in the rough — crazy talent waiting to be discovered.”

As the tour winds down, Vanderslice shares his vision of Tiny Telephone and the B Room: “We’re going to put a picnic table outside, a basketball hoop — we’re going to build community. And that’s what it’s all about.”

Panabay rising

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Panabay rising

MUSIC Last year was a big one for Los Rakas. The Oakland-by-way-of-Panama duo, Raka Rich and Raka Dun, have been hustling their frenetic Panabay stylings since they banded together as high school students in 2005. But on the cusp of their second mixtape, La Tanda Del Bus, the arresting diversity of their influences and musical ideas began to coalesce. The far reaches of the blogosphere and the streets took notice.

Los Rakas’ “Abrazame” — a song reworked from Gyptian’s crossover hit “Hold You” and remixed into sure shot form by Brooklyn producer Uproot Andy — overcrowded year-end lists as the pinnacle summer jam of 2010. In the video, parallel love stories unfold and collapse over the backdrop of San Francisco’s Carnaval Festival. Shuffling polyrhythms swarm underneath simple Casio chords as Raka Rich moves effortlessly from trading syrupy verses with guest songstress Faviola to bursts of rapid-fire lyricism.

Meanwhile, the video for Los Rakas’ “Soy Raka” — a youthful ode to turfin’ in the streets of Oakland — has surpassed 250,000 hits on YouTube. What other rap groups spit a chorus like “Tengo mi pistola y diente de oro” on the same playlist as a sweltering love ballad? The video not only helped spawn the syncopated dance movement in Panama, but also inspired kids to prefix their names with Raka — “you know, like Raka Miguel” — Dun tells me excitedly in a thick Spanish accent. “In Panama, ‘That’s raka’ or ‘We’re from raka’ means ‘that’s ghetto’ or ‘we’re from the ghetto.’ But it’s an empowering term. It means that we’re proud of who we are and where we come from.”

This sort of community-centered spirit has inspired Los Rakas since the beginning of its rhapsodic ventures. In 2006, Rich and Dun released their first Panabay Twist mixtape with the help and studio support of local outreach organizations Youth Uprising, BUMP (Bay Unity Music Project), and Youth Movement Records. Its single, “Mi Barrio,” in many ways a precursor to the anthemic “Soy Raka,” is driven by the standard hip-hop commandment to represent where you’re from. But the song also honors a more difficult and subtle hip-hop ideal: one love. Los Rakas might boast about Oakland and Panama stomping grounds, but the duo also calls out for us to be “orgulloso and put your flag in the air.” Which flag, exactly?

“Oakland influenced us,” says Dun, who moved to the Bay when he was 14. “It didn’t just shape our instrumentals and lyrical style, from Zion I to E-40—Oakland has the history of the Black Panthers and politicism, so we naturally put that content in our music too.”

Los Rakas sound a bit different from, say, any other Bay Area rapper, because Rich and Dun’s music is informed by the infectious rhythms and punctuated Spanish flows heard in Panama’s pop music of the day, plena. A sprawling folk genre that originated in the Caribbean and related regions of Central America, plena has recently been digitized for a new generation, becoming a Panamanian spin on reggaeton.

But the influences don’t stop there. “In Panama we listen to all types of music: reggae, dancehall, salsa, meringue,” says Dun. “When I met Rico, he was listening to Tupac and we traded music. Hip-hop caught my attention fast. I found out about Tribe [Called Quest], Lil Kim, Nas. I researched where it came from, and how it evolved, and just fell in love with it.” Although the connections aren’t obvious at first, hip-hop and plena have a lot in common. They’re both hybrid genres, forms of pastiche that draw from a wide range of sonic traditions and background, computerizing folk and funk for the bass-hungry children of the always-evolving soundsystem.

Unsurprisingly, Los Rakas garnered attention from an emerging scene of enthusiasts, producers, DJs, writers, and musicians concerned with the musical diaspora of the Afro-Caribbean, or more acutely, what British sociologist Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic. The term denotes the webbed network of the African diaspora culture that is not so much organized by a clear conception of roots but by a rhizomatic set of exchanges and networks: migrations, ships, trade, Creole, European miscegenation, flights, origin myths, stories of repatriation, and now the most diffusive cross-cultural exchange device of them all, the Internet.

Keep in mind that 2010 was the year that Diplo and Switch’s over-the-top dancehall project, Major Lazer, took clubs by storm, and even Rihanna finally started reppin’ roots, rhythm, and wires with “Rude Boy” and multicolored neon booty shorts. Even if MIA’s third full-length was lackluster, something of her world-town swagger has penetrated our times, while her “Bird Flu” call to arms has circulated through our quickly multiplying musical economies. Check the formula: add world genre to rap and uptempo dancehall/Bmore/house/techno; reconfigure percussion patterns in a drum machine; loop melodic fragments of a regional instrument; add inner-city noise, gunshots, chants, or field recordings of aggressive animal life; manipulate with a swill of static, fuzz, and a heavy dose of low end. Bump loud. Call it third world democracy.

Los Rakas, without even asking for it, has popped up in countless mixes and blog posts loosely labeled under the category of tropical bass. Rich and Dun contributed the steady banger “Afro Latino” to the recent Banana Clipz EP, produced by tropical harbingers Chief Boima and Ora 11 of Bersa Discos, and released on their Ghetto Bassquake blog and upstart. Speaking of Bersa, it hosts the crazy monthly Tormenta Tropical, which spotlights new sounds of electro-cumbia and related frontiers arising from the Black Atlantic. “That movement, I’m not sure what to call it, embraced us,” says Dun. It only makes sense that Los Rakas — navigating Oakland and Panama, turfin’ and plena, hiphop and digital polyrhythms, the new and the old — has returned the favor.

AUDYSSEY PRESENTS THE NEIGHBORHOOD: LOS RAKAS

with Roach Gigz

Wed/2, 9 p.m.–-2 a.m.; free

111 Minna Gallery

111 Minna, SF

(415) 974-1719

www.111minnagallery.com

Landmark to loudness

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Landmark to loudness

MUSIC Happy Sanchez’s office is above the cafe, by the entrance. There are only a couple of windows. One opens onto the parking lot, where a car alarm blares during our interview. The other is dark; below it are the building’s two hourly rehearsal rooms. Aside from the vibration of a double bass revving, we’re cut off from the activity going on at Secret Studios. As the owner, Happy makes up for this isolation with a wall of closed-circuit TVs showing the hallways and common areas tying the Studio’s 130 monthly rehearsal spaces together.

“Mostly it’s just about dealing with the headaches of running a business,” Sanchez says. The headaches, when your clients are all musicians, can be numerous. Bands arrive at 2 a.m., fresh from a gig, and decide to toss utility carts down the stairs. People try to smoke inside, piss in the parking lot, live in their units. Watch out for speed freaks. Make sure women aren’t being harassed. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the principal of the school,” Sanchez says.

Sometimes it’s just plain traumatic. “The one thing that upset me the most, this fucking guy was pissed at his girlfriend, took her cat, put it in the [rehearsal] room, and left it for weeks. Fucking poor cat was skin and bones by the time the girlfriend came and asked me to look for it. Most I’ve ever been upset at anyone. He was banned.”

“But most of the time people are pretty cool,” Sanchez is quick to add. “The people who are on the lease are level-headed. It’s always the friend or the guy that’s just hanging out that makes problems.” There is reason for me to doubt this statement, having just heard Sanchez tell another story about being held up at gunpoint by a rapper who wants his demo tape. But I’m still inclined to believe him, given the sheer number of clients he’s come in contact with in the 25 years since he took a job as a studio manager at Secret Studios, back when it was a small two-room operation.

At the time, Secret, like most of the studios in town, was about hourly rehearsal and recording space. The two units of Secret Studios were originally at Third St., before a mid-1980s move to 215 Napoleon St. in a building with lots of neighbors. “Mostly we did a lot of punk rock recordings, back in ’87,” Sanchez remembers. “This guy David [Pollack], who I later bought the studio from, at the time I was just working for him and he set me up with all these gigs.” They’d rent the place out for parties, for extra money. “Metallica rented it, back in the days when I guess they were big in Europe but they weren’t really that big, yet. Before the Black Album [1991’s Metallica] came out, when they blew up.”

Those involved in Secret during the Napoleon Street era attempted to confine major sessions to nighttime, but it eventually became clear — as the neighbors bitched — that a different location was needed. After the owner sold the business to Sanchez (“Basically, he gave it to me at minimal cost”), he was able to expand and then move into 50 units at the current location on 2200 Cesar Chavez St. The large warehouse with a single floor of small rooms was previously the sound stage for the talk radio TV drama Midnight Caller.

Sanchez credits some of his success to timing. “I got in at the right time. It’s just more expensive to build nowadays. People have tried to build big studios like this and it’s just not affordable anymore. They see it as easy money, but it’s not easy to pull off.”

One person who tried — and succeeded — was Greg Koch, who developed the nearly 180-unit Downtown Rehearsal in 1992. Earlier, Sanchez had passed on its Third Street location. “It was shady at night when most of my clients would be around,” he says. “That building was cheap, though. They couldn’t give it away.”

Downtown was a major competitor until the summer of 2000, when Koch attempted to evict all of his tenants without notice in an attempt to flip the property for a huge profit. In the process, he instigated a musical community revolt, resulting in a large cash settlement and the formation of a then-hopeful, now apparently stagnant nonprofit, SoundSafe. At the time of the turmoil, Secret Studios was still expanding to its current size of 130 units. “I basically opened my units and saw a huge influx of bands,” Sanchez says.

Sanchez has had many models for what Secret Studios should — and shouldn’t — be. He recalls that Francisco Studios, a Turk Street basement space, had a bathroom out of Trainspotting. He’s quick to admit that since he’s taken over the business, there have been mistakes and failures. A plan to start the International DJ Academy in the front offices of the building, with a partner who managed Invisibl Skratch Piklz, fizzled. “They never could quite get it off the ground,” he says. “It was a good concept, but I think they needed someone to run it as a business.” Along with a rap studio that was going at the time, the academy devolved into something that included a barber shop and a night club before Sanchez had to shut it down.

Which, technically, makes two rap studios Sanchez had to end. Back in the late 1980s, at Secret’s old location, there was a lot of money to be made from hip-hop. “These rappers were coming in and you could pretty much just charge them anything,” Sanchez says. “I think there was always the drug dealer in the background financing it. I swear, we had like three clients over time that got murdered. The first time it was kind of a shock. They found the guy in a trunk in Oakland. The second guy got murdered on the night of the earthquake in 1989. The scene just got too crazy. Gangster rap came out, and the whole vibe changed. It got really hardcore.” After a hold-up occurred at the studio and an expensive keyboard was stolen, Sanchez stepped away from the rap game in 1991.

Many artists have come through Secret Studios, but it’s not something Sanchez brags about. In part this stems from his respect for overall security, a high priority when theft is a concern. But it also has to do with his respect for confidentiality. The music business exposed him to a lot of drugs in the ’80s, and he himself struggled with addiction. From 1989 until 1992, he hosted a Narcotics Anonymous gathering — the Straight Edge Rockers meeting — in the studio on Sunday nights. “There were a couple people there that you would definitely know their names,” he says. “I’m actually thinking about getting it going again. It’s not as easy to pull off, but I always thought that meeting was so cool. There are a lot of people in the music industry that need that.”

Sanchez is desensitized to stardom. He’ll say that no one really big has ever been at Secret Studios, then rattle off a long list of names: the Dead Kennedys, Michael Franti, the Go-Gos, EPMD, Romeo Void, Chris Isaak, Mike Pistel, Toots Hibbert. Some of these connections are long relationships, some are incidental. MC Hammer rehearsed at Secret before he was big (but had the parachute pants). Gene Simmons came down in a limo.

Sanchez is happy with his success so far and grateful for the freedom to be a musician with a stable business. With another 10 years on the lease (which he hopes to extend to when his two-and-a-half-year-old son reaches adulthood), he’s satisfied with assuming a more administrative role at Secret. He does the books, handles the day-to-day issues, and makes his own music, composing for movies and television as the Latin Soul Syndicate.

For a lot less drama, Sanchez is a little less in the know about his clients and their role in the scene of the moment. A while ago, for example, he needed to contact a band about a bill. But the band was on tour, and he was referred to its business manager. He went online to look it up. He had no idea who the band was until he Googled “The Dodos” and a video popped up showing the band playing on The Late Show with David Letterman.

www.secretstudios.com

arts@sfbg.com

Ollie beats

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Ollie beats

caitlin@sfbg.com

MUSIC Tommy Guerrero likes to skate down Potrero Hill. He’s been doing it since he was a young pup street boarder — one of the first to go pro, in fact — cruising down those steep residential declines that, looking south from SoMa, resemble like nothing so much as that scene from Inception where the dream city folds on top of itself. Guerrero skates smoothly from one legendary SF career to another, a shape-shift neatly illustrated by the release party for his eighth solo album Lifeboats and Follies at Cafe Du Nord Saturday, Feb. 5.

Despite the requests for autographs that he still gets; the occasional cravings his beat-up body experiences for skating (“It’s so raw and the energy is so fucking gnarly. Once you’ve had a taste of it, there’s no turning back.”); and a job that most ex-skate rats would kill for — he’s the art director for Krooked, a subset of Potrero Hill skate company Deluxe — he’s really more into music these days. “I would love to have all that time to work in the studio. I want to retire [from skate design] in a year,” he says, half-jokingly — but still longingly.

Maybe it’s a grass-is-always-greener thing, but until now he’s done a good job of balancing his various passions. Even in the 1980s and ’90s when Guerrero was grinding out his signature moves on the driveways and suicide hills of the city, back when he was popularizing Public Enemy in Japan by skating to the group’s tracks during competitions, music was always playing a supporting role. He and brother Tony played in punk bands, including Free Beer (a name that made for alluring concert flyers).

Nowadays Guerrero makes layered instrumental music that’s appropriately enough a mix of many different elements: chill jazz with electronic crescendos, a little Latin percussion, maybe a horn solo easefully inserted. Guerrero has a DJ-like impulse to play with genres. “I just hear so much shit in my head, this is what comes out.” Apparently his albums cause havoc in the Amoeba cataloging system. “I’ve seen it in electronic, rock, alternative, even experimental or some shit,” he laughs, sitting cross-legged in a patio booth at Thee Parkside, black leather Vans (his own signature design) on his feet.

He’s in the middle of doing some promotional work for Lifeboats and Follies, but like the rest of his projects, you get the feeling that Guerrero would be doing the same thing even if he never got paid a dime. After failing to resolve differences with his old label, Quannum, Guerrero bought the entire stock of his last album, From the Soul to the Soul, back from the company. He’s mulling over what to do with it — maybe give CDs away at Saturday’s show?

Guerrero never gained the Thrasher notoriety he got from skating in his musical career. But he casually mentions that he is, as the saying goes, big in Japan. He performs there a lot and gets off on being able to take risks with in his live performances that wouldn’t go over well with American audiences looking to hear the same old thing. “They can love J-pop and, at the same time, they can love John Zorn,” he says of his Japanese fans. It makes sense that Guerrero would gravitate toward an audience looking for a more diverse experience, one that trusts that whatever he’s popping off with — on the skateboard or mixing board — is gonna turn heads. 

TOMMY GUERRERO: LIFEBOATS AND FOLLIES RELEASE PARTY

Sat/5 9:30 p.m., $12

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com>

The road, Thorrior

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
The road, Thorrior

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC There’s no easy way to describe Valient Thorr. Hailing from Chapel Hill, N.C., the quintet has labored throughout its career under the strain of countless casual characterizations, each less accurate than the one before it. Reached by phone in Raleigh, N.C., as he prepared for the band’s impending tour with Motorhead, singer Valient Himself gives the wry rundown.

“Forever, in The Onion, it said ‘Kiss-like band, biker band’ or some shit. None of us ride motorcycles!” he scoffs. Nor, for that matter, does the band wear elaborate makeup or sell branded coffins. The mistakes, however, continued. “People would say something like ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque’ or some shit like that,” complains Valient. “We don’t play Southern rock. We have accents from the South because those are the colloquialisms that we have been accustomed to since we crash-landed here. Or they look at ‘Thorr’ and they say, ‘Oh, they’re Vikings.’ If you could pick three adjectives that we get called the most that are totally wrong, they’d be Southern, Viking, biker metal.”

Now, if you’ve been paying attention so far, you’ll have noticed that the singer goes by an outlandish pseudonym and makes offhand references to things like “crash landing.” By “here,” in the previous paragraph, he means “planet Earth.” This is because the band Valient Thorr claims, with a straight face, to be from the inside of the planet Venus. Valient Himself, a former sixth-grade teacher, sticks to his story throughout the interview, even when gently prodded to discourse on non-Venusian topics.

The band’s beginnings can be traced to East Carolina University, where the five Thorrs (Valient Himself, Eidan, Lucian, Sadat, and Dr. Professor Nitewolf Strangees Thorr) were masquerading as undergraduates. Nurtured by the college radio culture that defined their adopted home state for much of the 1990s, the band soon discovered the geographic advantages of hailing from the Tar Heel State, which features nine midsized cities along the axis of Highway 40, which neatly bisects it into northern and southern halves.

Before long, Valient Thorr was traveling nationwide, hitting 47 cities in 52 days on its first trip out. This relentless dedication to touring would come to define the band, which has effectively been on tour since Valient’s career in the classroom ended in 2005. That event also marked the last time he cut his beard, a fiery red thatch that has since attained truly epic proportions.

Though Valient Thorr’s music — a combination of the rabid, breakneck pace of punk rock and the precision guitar work of classic Thin Lizzy — produces some infectious, exultant tunes, the onstage charisma of the band in general and the singer in particular forms the most important part of its appeal. Clad in impossibly tight pants, cherry-red wrestling shoes, and little else, Valient prowls the stage soaked in sweat, striking mock-muscleman poses and exhorting the audience with the inexhaustible, manic energy of a true rock ‘n’ roll evangelist.

The power of Valient Thorr’s proselytizing can be seen at any show. A growing legion of die-hard fans, called Thorriors, pledge allegiance to the band above all others, often sporting customized jean jackets as emblems of their dedication. In that sense, at least, the band is like Kiss. One Thorrior, a Kansas City native, has even been granted an honorary Venusian surname; “Tim Thorr,” as he is known, “has more Thorrior tattoos than anyone else” explains Valient. “We call him the True Believer.”

Touring with a band as well-known as Motorhead, Valient Thorr is sure to win more converts to its cause. But whether people like it or not, or whether they believe it or not, the Thorrs will be out there. “I think performing is in your blood,” Valient says. “I think everyone was born to do something. We didn’t go to school to be rock ‘n’ rollers — it’s just something that came out of us. It’s an idea that started and it just had to happen.” *

VALIENT THORR with Motorhead, Clutch

Wed/2, 8 p.m.; $35

The Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

Gorgeously Gorey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Gorgeously Gorey

caitlin@sfbg.com

NIGHTLIFE Actually, the Edwardian Ball — now in its 11th year of gothic, ghoulish, glorious celebration — isn’t strictly a gathering of period costume nerds. In fact, those who focus on historical accuracy, says event cofounder Justin Katz, are kind of missing the point. “Much to their frustration, the founders of the ball don’t care if your collar is Edwardian or not,” he chuckles.

That’s because, as any good SF costume freak will tell you, the original Edward of this shindig is Gorey, not Windsor. In its first years, it was actually named the Edward Gorey Ball, a theatrical homage to the work of the macabre writer and illustrator of such classics as the A-to-Z book of child demise, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. This tome was read at the ball’s first incarnation, which was hosted by Rosin Coven, the pagan lounge ensemble that has graced the stage each subsequent year.

Why Gorey? “Once we began to explore his work, we really enjoyed his ‘untelling’ of stories,” Katz continues. “Almost nothing happens in his books!” Which isn’t exactly true, of course, but his slight and spindly, grave-studded plot lines seem slightly unsuited for nightlife action, especially the bedazzled, bedazzling theatrical productions that Mike Gaines’ Vau de Vire Society circus-dance troupe so spectacularly gives birth to on stage at the ball.

“It isn’t the easiest thing to base a dramatic stage show on,” Gaines admits. “But Gorey left [his stories] up for interpretation. He was a real theatrical cat.” Gorey was a noted ballet fan, and his illustrated landscapes could easily double as sets. And if he did indeed mean for his creepy-cute stories to be blown into phantasmagoric carnivals someday, then he is smiling down on the Edwardian Ball.

But as far as the event goes these days, Gorey stories are but one of its attractions. In addition to all the offstage attractions at the ball (which has burgeoned into a weekend-long affair that includes an expo of steampunk wonder-toys, entire floors of the Regency Ballroom given over to vendors of satin and skeletal finery, even a Friday night-only Ferris Wheel to be erected inside the ballroom itself), the event has become a group therapy session for SF’s costume-addicted party people. Well, a therapy session in which the addicted bust out their most flagrant behavior and congratulate each other on having done so.

Top among Gaines’ favorite get-ups from years past was an homage to Gashlycrumb‘s Winnie, the poor tot who met her maker after becoming “embedded in ice.” The intrepid Edwardian in question encased herself in frosted Plexiglass for the evening’s festivities. Others choose more technically Edwardian-accurate ensembles, and others still will use the event as an excuse to wear whatever the hell gets their creative juices flowing: goth-steampunk-geisha, anyone?

This inclusivity most likely explains the success of the ball. Katz mentions that one is likely to see one of the aforementioned period fundamentalists having a cuppa with a giant grasshopper, one table over from a couple who “look like they just crawled out of a nightclub,” all in a steam-powered tea garden. And then they’ll all join in a round of ballroom dancing that takes place near the main stage on Saturday. One mustn’t forget about the ballroom dancing. *

EDWARDIAN BALL AND WORLD’S FAIR

Fri/21 “World’s Fair”: 8 p.m.– 2 a.m., $28–$75

Sat/22 bazaar: noon– 6 p.m., free; ball 8 p.m.– 2 a.m., $38–$85

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

www.edwardianball.com

 

Life within sound

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Life within sound

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Peer carefully at the expansive gatefold cover art of Barn Owl’s Ancestral Star (Thrill Jockey), and what at first glance looks like two interstellar vessels cruising through the night sky coalesces into something much more grounded, tethered to the spectral shadow of the image’s photographer, Barn Owl guitarist-vocalist Jon Porras, holding his hands over the light source in the foreground.

Porras took the three-minute exposure of the moon over a campfire at SF’s Ocean Beach on a cold, clear April night. “If you look closely, you can see the waves crashing,” he says. “All the light becomes saturated on film — that’s why it’s so luminescent. I actually had to go up to the fire to warm my hands, and you can see a ghostly image of me warming my hands over the fire.

“It’s become a funny joke between my friends.”

It’s also an unlikely, mysterious footnote perfectly in sync with the majestic sounds pouring from Ancestral Star, one of 2010’s best albums, and one that continues to surface new pleasures — from “Sundown”‘s opening overture of distorted guitars to the title track’s incremental, tonal tectonic shifts to “Cavern Hymn”‘s glimmering, deeply echoed fingerpicking. The enigmatic, unexpectedly earthbound image parallels the long tone and drone listening experience as well. “It requires a certain patience,” Porras, 25, muses. “I think long tone music can open up aspects of reality you may not have otherwise have seen.”

Meditative drone, black metal, Tibetan throat-singing, gliding meditations on bowed guitar, and celestial compositions sprinkled with synth, gongs, bells, and singing bowls seamlessly ebb and flow, seemingly of one mesmerizing piece, in a work that feels like the lost, alternative soundtrack to Paris, Texas, or the score to a lost Alejandro Jodorowsky western — a sound that was part of the thinking when Porras and fellow guitarist-vocalist Evan Caminiti went into the studio with friend the Norma Conquest in 2009. It was their first opportunity to record over the course of several months, refining their sound and bringing in musicians such as violinist Marielle Jakobsons (Darwinsbitch) in a professional studio setting.

“We were going for a metaphysical cinematic western,” Porras explains. “We like to have these Americana-influenced guitar passages in combination with more experimental elements to create this overall narrative. I guess the desert at night is an image we like to invoke — fog-shrouded hillsides, the awestruck feelings you get from a landscape.” The sweeping, wonder-inducing American spaces of Cormac McCarthy and Porras’ favorite, Zane Gray, were an inspiration for the two musicians, who first met each other in an American Indian science class at San Francisco State University in 2005.

Metal, as well as the long-tone compositions of Lamont Young and the American primitive fingerpicking of John Fahey, also provided common ground. “We had similar ideas,” Caminiti recalls. “I just remember wanting to combine things that hadn’t necessarily been combined before — heavy music and blues with more folk-influenced music — so we’d work on a piece that had heavy drones and do blues-influenced fingerpicking over it. There was a lot of exploration that had to be done, and we just distilled the sound over the years.”

Those sonic journeys have manifested recently in a collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts resident Ellen Fullman — who installed her room-sized long-string instrument in her old army building of a studio — out on the Important imprint. And Caminiti and Porras, who also hold down the musical projects Higuma and Elm respectively, are currently working on a new Barn Owl album with Trans Am’s Phil Manley at Lucky Cat Studio, on music sparked by Popul Vuh’s “interlocking chiming guitar passages,” according to Porras.

Now, with performances in the group’s past at such disparate spots as Grace Cathedral (“Great in particular because there’s six seconds of natural reverb, which is perfect for resonant sound,” Porras says), sometime label Root Strata’s On Land gathering, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the Supersonic Festival in the United Kingdom, the Barn Owl experience might be characterized as more metaphysical than visceral.

“We aim to create an enveloping atmosphere where everyone is sucked away into an alternate dimension for 30 minutes,” Caminiti observes. “Everything around you is just put on pause, and you’re just living within the sound in the moment. You become engulfed in the sound. The sound becomes a living organism, which is also why there’s a lot of room for improvisation in our set. For us, it leaves us centered and at peace — it’s a meditative device in a way.” 

BARN OWL

With Phil Manley Life Coach and Diego Andres Gonzalez

Tues/25, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Playlist

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Playlist

>>Read part one here.

NOBUNNY

Raw Romance

(Burger Records)

Nobunny, the bunny-masked alter ego of Oakland rocker Justin Champlin, has been performing since 2001. He had his first full-length release in 2008 with Love Visions on Bubbledumb Records, and last fall he released his follow-up, First Blood, on Goner. Between that, in 2009, there was Raw Romance, a cassette-only release composed of new songs, covers, and acoustic alternates to favorites from Love Visions. With only 500 hand-numbered copies of Raw Romance in circulation, it garnered a cult following. Now Burger Records is releasing it remastered on vinyl, and the first 300 copies on pink vinyl.

Raw Romance starts out with a Buffalo 66 sample, and then plunges into “Your Mouth.” It’s a simple, sweet song with risque PG-13 lyrics, ornamented with tambourine, handclaps, and whistling. A nod to Nobunny’s own appearance, “Mask’s On” is an ode to mask-wearers and lovers. The recess-worthy “Apple Tree” is both sexy and scary, like a vampire crush. On “Tonight You Belong to Me,” Nobunny offers a raw acoustic version of the song famously sung by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk. “The Gutter” is a mix of Elvis-rockabilly and country twang — a harrowing tale that ends in … the gutter. Although it’s a hodgepodge, Raw Romance makes a boisterous addition to any Nobunny fan’s collection. (Michelle Broder Van Dyke)


NOBUNNY

With Battlehooch, Exray’s, The Downer Party

Feb. 25, 9 p.m.; $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

EXRAY’S

Exray’s

(Howells Transmitter)

From making “musical fiction” with Ray’s Vast Basement to playing in the SF band Black Fiction, a project with Tim Cohen from The Fresh and Onlys, Jon Bernson is a force in the Bay Area music scene. He’s contributed music to a dozen plays and at least four short films. And if you’ve seen the $200 million-grossing movie The Social Network, then music from his latest project Exray’s has no doubt crept into your ears.

As Exray’s, Bernson and Michael Falsetto-Mapp released a cassette, Ammunition Teeth, last year on San Francisco label Howells Trasmitter. The band is now set to release its self-titled full-length Feb. 1. It boasts an impressive guest list: Nate Query (the Decemberists), Warren Huegel (Citay, Jonas Reinhardt), and Cohen. Opening with “You Forget,” the album flows forth with uptempo beats and a florid blend of guitars, synths, and samples. This release evokes various moods, akin to the settings that Ray’s Vast Basement created for its “musical fiction,” making it clear why those behind The Social Network soundtrack found the Exray’s track “Hesitation” appropriate. Underneath the steady pulses and the pop melodies, there is an anxious undercurrent. “Stolen Postcard Sun” is a slowed-down number that hints at the mysterious. An album highlight comes at the end with “When I Was You,” which paints a somber postromantic picture. This electronic-pop duo crafts songs that hint at the unknown while steadily pacing ahead. (Broder Van Dyke)

EXRAY’S

With Magick Trick, Fiveng, DJ Cyclist

Feb. 4, 9:00 p.m.; $12

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF (415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

TY SEGALL

Live in Aisle Five

(Southpaw)

Bay Area-favorite Ty Segall has been churning out recordings under his own name since 2008 with the cassette Horn The Unicorn on Wizard Mountain, and there are no signs he’s slowing down. To start 2011, Segall is releasing Live in Aisle Five, recorded by local noise-maker Eric Bauer last summer at an Amnesia show for Southpaw Records’ first-year anniversary party.

The album starts with a triumphant “How you guys doing?” from Segall, and then the smashing new song “Come to California.” There’s the usual rumble of reverb, so it’s hard to discern all the lyrics, but it sounds like a ragged advertisement for our home state. It’s got an astounding guitar solo that flushes the song out and moves into the pounding drums of “Imaginary Person,” off of 2010’s Melted, on Goner. Segall’s signature wolf-worthy howls are heard throughout the album. On his cover of GG Allin’s “Don’t Talk to Me,” the onomatopoeia of “chitter, chatter” and “yak tak” is screamed like it was meant to sound. More than his recordings, Segall wins fans live. And if you yearn for that visceral experience that is more human in its imperfections — one that makes you want to move — this is your record. (Broder Van Dyke)

TY SEGALL

With Nodzzz

Jan. 28, 8:30 p.m.; $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Grind fidelity

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Grind fidelity

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC For years, critics have written about heavy metal using the vocabulary of biology — the increasingly byzantine music was framed as an evolutionary process, a family tree of genre and subgenre. Given the nature of the predominant acts at heavy metal’s initial apex, this move made perfect sense. Metal has always been a supremely visceral music, acutely concerned with human bodies, from the imperious god-beings of Judas Priest lyrics (are you standing by for Exciter?) to the figures’ inverse: the cadavers depicted by the gleeful medical dictionary versification of Carcass.

Human bodies will always be tethered to metal. But for not entirely arbitrary reasons, I’ve been finding it interesting these days to map out the unfolding universe of metal spatially — as doom continues to position itself as the vanguard of the music (and with good reason), creating sprawling, planar worlds of tone, this approach seems like a productive step toward thinking about the specifically musical elements that link so many disparate styles within the coordinates of the blanket term “metal.” It also seems conducive to starting arguments with your friends about bands and shit, which is a constructive goal in its own right.

If funeral doom represents this (sonic) world-creating move, then grindcore represents its spatial inverse, an implosion of familiar dynamics into dense, indecipherable fragments that are over too quickly to unfold in time. There’s always been something hilarious and perverse about this anti-musical gesture, which is perhaps best explained by the genre’s bifurcated history — as much as it was an antecedent to later metal styles, grindcore was also fundamentally the next logical extreme of punk rock, and thus, rock ‘n’ roll reduced to its most unpleasant and confrontational.

Fundamentally, grindcore has always had a healthy sense of humor about itself: former Napalm Death guitarist Justin Broadrick, as quoted in Albert Mudrian’s book Choosing Death, recalls doubling over with laughter during early rehearsals as he and his fellow bandmates pushed then-drummer Mick Harris to blast away on his kit at increasingly nonsensical speeds. This pervasive sense of fun underlying even some of the most aggressive bands is perhaps one reason why a genre that tends to allow itself an extremely narrow musical space in which its ideas can stretch out has lasted for so damn long.

Napalm Death’s Scum (Earache), the first grindcore record (hypothetical metal-nerd/Siege/Extreme Noise Terror fan: stop yelling at the newspaper; you’re making a scene …) was released in 1987, 24 years ago. Since then, grindcore is still going strong, while countless styles, seemingly more complex, have exhausted themselves and bored their former fanbases in the interim. (Even crabcore, a genre that combined the dynamism of Casio keyboard demos with the showmanship of inexplicably squatting while playing guitar, has fallen by the wayside.)

Speaking of improbable, heroic survivors, what better venue to host the 10th anniversary of Short, Fast, and Loud, a massive showcase of all things grind, than Berkeley’s 924 Gilman, which, like grindcore, has been sticking it to the mainstream’s delicate sensibilities for more than 20 years by simply existing?

This year’s installment is a two-day affair, featuring an impressive collection of scene favorites (including several alumni of the legendary Slap A Ham Records) mostly spanning the West Coast, with one extremely notable exception being New York City’s legendary Brutal Truth. Undeniably one of the genre’s greats, Brutal Truth affects the kind of balance between righteous, politically-conscious anger and the unbalanced energy of the maelstrom of noise and blastbeats and buzzsaw-on-sheet-metal riffs that characterizes its medium. Come watch bodies collide in the space of one of the Bay Area’s most culturally significant venues at what promises to be one of the most thrillingly merciless shows of the year. BLAST! *

SHORT, FAST, AND LOUD

Jan. 21

Brutal Truth, Lack of Interest, Plutocracy, Voëtsek, Iron Lung, D.H.C.

Jan. 22

Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in Dilapidation, Capitalist Casualties, Bastard Noise, Despise You, P.L.F.

Population Reduction

7 p.m. both nights, $12 each

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

924gilman.org

www.924gilman.org

Otherworldly energy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Otherworldly energy

Over the course of nine full-length albums, Neurosis has proven its metal mettle, at least on record. To truly appreciate what the band is capable of, however, you’d have to witness one of its legendary live performances, which despite their decreasing frequency are becoming more and more transcendent. Next week, Bay Area headbangers will have two opportunities to do so, both at the Great American Music Hall, where the band plays its first hometown shows since New Year’s Eve 2008.

Reached by phone from his Idaho abode, Neurosis guitarist Steve Von Till underscores the primacy of the live experience. “There’s no way the emotion and intensity of what we do live can be captured,” he says. “It has to do not only with the look and the sound but also the energy in the room and the way the bass hits you in the chest.”

The band’s music is nothing if not hard-hitting. Though its members coalesced in 1985 as a rampaging hardcore outfit, Neurosis eventually evolved into a musical force defined by its deliberate, inexorable pacing, sprawling arrangements, and thunderous crescendos. Slabs of detuned, distorted guitars blend with throat-ravaging vocals courtesy of Scott Kelly, second guitarist Von Till, and bassist Dave Edwardson. Though this combination is orthodox, the band’s frequent use of samples, inventive instrumentation, and stately acoustic interludes is anything but.

The “look” of Neurosis is handled by journeyman musician and artist Josh Graham, now a permanent member of the band, who crafts visceral, tectonic visuals during performances in real time, displaying them on a giant screen behind the band. “Certain themes are permanently tied to certain songs,” Van Till explains, “but he performs them. It’s always fluid and always changing, though he’s always trying to keep it clearer and keep it evolving with the music.” So lost are the band’s other members in their own instruments that they have next to no idea what’s going on onscreen. Thankfully, they don’t care: “We have absolute trust in what he’s doing.”

Neurosis is currently preparing to reissue its seminal 1992 album Souls at Zero, which marked an important milestone in the evolution of the band’s sound. “We were crawling out of our hardcore roots and struggling with our instruments,” Van Till explains. “Through touring those songs, we really began to understand that we could totally surrender to the power of this music. It was way bigger than us, and way bigger than any preconceived notions we had about what the music should be. It was like a spiritual, driven force that demanded [things] of us.” While crafting their follow-up the next year, the band members continued to subsume themselves to this otherworldly energy: “Over the course of Enemy of the Sun, we tried to facilitate that [demand] in the songwriting process as well, trying to find the ultimate non-interruption of flow. We’re not very angular. We don’t have lots of crazy time-signature changes or cerebral shifts — we really try to have it go from one place to the next.”

Despite 25 years together as a band, the inescapable drive to create Neurosis music continues unabated: “We’ve been in this band our entire adult lives, and it influences everything we do,” Van Till confides. “Everything in our lives affects how Neurosis music is going to evolve. Everything we hear, everything we see, everything we feel. Life’s trials and tribulations. All of it speaks to what’s happening in the music.”

Something is happening, and Neurosis’ many devoted fans will be overjoyed to hear that the band has been playing “two new songs that are pretty close” during their recent run of shows. “We basically have some skeletons that will really evolve into the next record,” says Van Till. This is momentous news, but the guitarist urges patience: “When that happens, we don’t force it. In some ways, we don’t feel all that responsible for creating [the music], and in a lot of ways — sure, somebody comes up with a riff or somebody comes up with an idea — but it’s an unspoken spirit when we’re all together in a room — it’s just magic and it just clicks.” Van Till insists that nothing can or should be accomplished in a hurry: “We trust the process, and the process is one of starting with some ideas, jamming them out, destroying them, and then having the come back together as a whole that’s greater than anything we could have thought of ourselves.”

Listening to the guitarist talk about his band’s next record, one gets the sense that its arrival will be characterized by the same deliberate, gradual escalation that typifies the band’s heavily-amplified climaxes. No matter which angle you approach Neurosis from, an emphasis on trust — and on the attendant forfeiture of control — is paramount. Speaking of the band’s live performances, Van Till echoes this theme: “We just want to be lost in the trance of the situation, and we hope that the people present also want to just surrender and become a part of it.” Those who attend the show would do well to heed his words. *

NEUROSIS

with U.S. Christmas, Yob (Sat/15), Saviours (Sun/16)

Sat/15–Sun/16, 9 p.m., $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750 www.gamh.com

Release me

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Release me

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC As 2011 begins, Bay Area rock is wasting no time staking its claim. This month brings noteworthy albums by at least a handful of local groups and artists. I’ll be covering them over the course of the next two weeks, beginning with a trio of new releases:

 

YOUNG PRISMS’ FRIENDS FOR NOW

Since the late-2009 release of Young Prisms’ self-titled EP on Mexican Summer, this Cali quintet has been hard at work. It put out three different split 7-inches: one with Weekend on Transparent; one with Small Black on Big Love; and one with Mathamagic on Atelier Ciseaux. In the wake of performances at last fall’s CMJ conference, the band is set to release its first full-length, Friends For Now (Kanine Records), Jan. 19.

Once you get past Friends for Now‘s NSFW cover art — it’s just a little nip, and only one at that — you’ll enter into the title track, which blissfully rattles forward with undecipherable vocals, like a sun-bleached step into euphoria. “If You Want To” floats over waves of distortion; the only discernible lyrics are the title lines, nonchalantly chanted like an existential mantra. The single “Sugar” picks up the pace with yowling guitars.

The band also makes sure to include a smoke-break track, just as it did with “Four Twenty Friendly” on the Mexican Summer EP. Titled “All Day Holiday,” this one is an under-a-minute wash of echoes and effects. The opening notes of “In Your Room” are dramatic, then radiant guitars emerge over rumbles of distorted bass. Friends For Now rounds out with tightened mixes of “Feel Fine” and “I Don’t Get Much,” which were both previously released, and closes with the hypnotic “Stay Awake.” Taken together, the collection of songs is cohesive, capturing a sunlit aesthetic while giving the illusion of chaos.

 

SONNY SMITH’S 100 RECORDS, VOLUME TWO: I MISS THE JAMS

Sonny Smith’s approach to recording and issuing music is unique, accentuating its connections to visual art. Using his imagination along with the help of a rotating band, he assembled “100 Records,” an art show that opened at San Francisco’s Gallery 16 and then traveled to other venues. In “100 Records,” Smith created releases by 100 different bands, coming up with names, bios, songs, and album art. Now Smith is releasing 10 of those songs as 100 Records, Volume Two: I Miss the Jams, a package of five, 7-inch singles or a single CD.

Listening to I Miss the Jams, you’ll never think “every song sounds the same,” since each fabricated band has its own rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic. The album opens with Zig Speck’s “One Times Doomsday Trip to Nowhere,” an unshackled surf-jam sung by Ty Segall. Starting off with a bang, “Teenage Thugs” is complete with gunshots and Spanish verses. The doo-wop track “I Wanna Do It” includes a surf-rock wipeout interlude and showcases Heidi Alexander’ (from the Sandwitches) wailing cries, which evoke a classic pin-up doll. Hank Champion’s country track is spoken, and more straightforward than a Doors song, with literal lyrics that tell the depressing tale of its title character, “Broke Artist at the Turn of the Century,” and how he got there.

Smith plays with rock star cliché, but never makes his characters seem two-dimensional. Providing us with a Bay-Area-rock-scene parallel universe, Smith makes us question what is real and what is not.

 

SIC ALPS’ NAPA ASYLUM

Sic Alps has been recording and releasing music since 2004. The band had a prolific 2008, putting out two full-lengths. In the fall of 2009, it released a 7-inch single on Slumberland, toured with Magik Markers, and made up one-half of a 12-inch split release on Yik Tak. The next year began with a handful of shows opening for Sonic Youth. And then Sic Alps went quiet for a bit … but the wait has been worth it. Now a trio, the group is set to release the new double-LP Napa Asylum (Drag City) on Jan. 25.

Napa Asylum displays Sic Alps’ flair for irresistible hooks and torrid experimentation. As usual, the new tracks were recorded with “a delay pedal, reverb tank, two microphones, $100 preamp, and Tascam 388.” There are 22 cuts in just under 48 minutes, with some delicious pop-rock morsels, including “Cement Surfboard,” “Ball of Flame,” and “Zeppo Epp.”

What’s new is how often this San Francisco no-fi band slows its tempo and explores the psychedelic side of its sound, like on the serene “Low Kid,” reverb-riddled “Ranger,” and the closer, “Nathan Livingston Maddox,” which is based on a dream Mike Donovan had about the late Gang Gang Dance member, who was killed by lightning. Napa Asylum‘s other bizarre lyrical ruminations on magic and schizophrenia prove Sic Alps, as ever, aren’t afraid to wander into new sonic and poetic terrain. *

YOUNG PRISMS

With Ganglians, Melted Toys, and Speculator

Jan. 19, 8:30 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

SONNY SMITH

With the Blow

Jan. 30, 8 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

SIC ALPS

With Thee Oh Sees.

Feb. 9, 8 p.m., $13–$16 (benefit for the Coalition on Homelessness)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

The music library

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
The music library

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “They wanna give you it all at the library.”

Dade Elderon’s come up with a perfect promotional catchphrase for the SF Public Library’s Main Branch. We’re IMing about the library, where he sets up his gear and writes and records songs on a 9-to-5 schedule. “One part of the library is a very high-tech, clean learning environment. It’s a temple. Then you go down to the [first-floor] bathroom and it’s like a dirty, filthy circus. There is a lot going on in that bathroom. Every stall is a different challenge.”

A few days later, I meet Elderon on the library’s fourth floor. As is his practice, he’s reserved one of the private rooms and has set up his equipment, most notably a Korg Electribe EMX-1 and ESX-1. “This is what I bring to the library — I have a [Roland] TR-606 and other gear at home and at a friend’s house,” he says, handing me a spare pair of headphones. “I use this [the ESX-1] strictly as a drum machine, and load up different sounds depending on what kind of song I want to make. I program the melodies on the EMX-1 because if you run too many parts at once on the ESX-1, it will make the sound muddy.”

For the next half-hour, Elderon — long bangs spilling out from the right side of his SF Giants cap — gives me a brief tutorial, explaining polycyclic wave forms, saw waves, and different hi-hats while running through a variety of sounds, from hip-hop to trance to freestyle. Sitting with him, I can see how the room, with its soundproof clear glass and stylish card-catalog wallpaper, is an ideal readymade recording studio. “I really like the tables and the glass setup,” Elderon says. “It’s peaceful. Sometimes people will stand outside with a ‘What are you doing?’ look on their faces, but I just ignore it. I don’t know what people might think these things [the Electribes] are — some people are suspicious of them, maybe.”

Contrary to a paranoiac’s sense of appearance, Elderon isn’t working with explosives, though he is hoping some of his projects will blow up. Party Effects, the Oakland techno bass crew he helped figurehead, has disbanded, and these days he’s working with a number of different recording artists. “This is a track I’m making with Dz MC’s, a Brazilian freestyle singer,” he says, as a percolating, skittering melody dances around a haunted-sounding female vocal.

Along with Dz MC’s, who has a following in Brazil, Elderon has been making tracks with aspiring Stateside singers such as Gloria Hernandez, a local vocalist whose voice possesses freestyle-ready sass and snap, and Nikki Marx, whose sexy photos and real-life story have intrigued Elderon and his roommate and former Party Effects partner, Alexis Penney. “She’s German, lives in New York City, and works on Wall Street as a day trader,” Elderon explains, as we look at some of Marx’s provocative photos. “Alexis is obsessed with her, and we can’t figure her out.”

At the moment, Elderon is also in the early stages of some remix projects for 679 Artists, a Warner Music Group label based in London that represents Little Boots, Marina and the Diamonds, and Streets. Along with his other roommate, Myles Cooper, he’s also contributing a track to an upcoming album by H.U.N.X., the “gayest music ever” electropop side project of Hunx and His Punx’s Seth Bogart. “I guess Myles’s idea is to make the most annoying song anyone has ever made, and I think he’s doing it,” Elderon says appreciatively. “Seth and I are making a gay freestyle song. He wants it to be over the top. I sampled him making a bunch of sex noises, and I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the track.”

Elderon’s adept way with genre suits one of his recording monikers, Adeptus. He chose the name because — along with invoking “to attain” in Latin, a quest he likens to Afrika Bambaataa’s search for the perfect beat — he likes its “Gothic, occult, and dark-sounding” qualities. On the one hand, he’s a fan of Ace of Base’s 1990s Euro dance pop — in fact, he’s competing against eight other remixers in an Ace of Base-sponsored contest in which the person who comes up with the best mix of “The Sign” wins a car. But on his own tracks, he’s drawn to seductive somber sounds. As he puts it, “I’m attracted to minor scales.”

The public library as a recording studio and potential pop gold mine — it’s all in a day’s music-making for Elderon, who cut his teeth recording with the eccentric, literally offbeat Tarythyas in Party Effects. “His bedroom is the craziest room I’ve ever been in,” Elderon says, when asked to describe Tarythyas’s home dwelling. “There’s no less than 20 to 30 fish tanks in the room, all lit up. There are crazy toys and lights everywhere, and six different computer workstations.”

The strange is familiar to Elderon, whose past includes a military stint and studies in cellular microbiology, and whose current day job involves flying to Turkey once a month to rescue street animals for a fledgling animal-rights crusader in Beverly Hills. He shows me some passports of pets he’s recently flown back to the U.S., including a cat that possesses a mack’s satisfied smile. “The animals freak out on the plane, so they give me a ketamine spray,” he says.

For now, Elderon is the one traveling, but he’s hoping his music will be going international soon as well. At one point he describes Turkey as a “nexus of weird cultures,” and the same description could be applied to his music, which has pop immediacy, but allows room for wild personality. He’s out to attain something special, and it’s just beginning to materialize.

New thing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
New thing

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC In his 1963 essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) writes, “The New Thing, as recent jazz is called, is a reaction to the hard bop-funk-groove-soul camp, which itself came into being in protest against the squelching of most of the blues elements in cool and progressive jazz. Funk (groove, soul) has become as formal and clichéd as cool or swing, and opportunities for imaginative expression have dwindled almost to nothing.”

In today’s “almost to nothing” post-everything musical wasteland, there is a persistent dwindling yet again. So much musical freedom has given way to downloaded snippets and the time restrictions of YouTube videos. Even our old popular rebel friends, hip-hop and punk rock, have lost their teeth to corporate bling or easy-bake obscurity. Improvisation, experimentation, and innovation are still so hard to come by that I can’t help but wonder — don’t we need a new thing?

The “New Thing” that Baraka defends in his essay is now the mainstay of a modern, and still thriving, jazz movement that included the likes of Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Today you can find it in the sounds of musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Roscoe Mitchell.

In 1965, Mitchell helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). His 1966 album Sound (Delmark) is heralded by many as a milestone that helped usher in “The New Thing.” Along with Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and others, Mitchell became a founding member of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in the late 1960s. He’s since continued to explore the fringes of avant-garde jazz, noise, classical, folk, and world music to create hybrid compositions that mesmerize and provoke.

This week, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Yoshi’s is inviting Mitchell to join Baraka, the author of more than 40 books, poet icon, revolutionary activist, and father of Afrosurreal Expressionism.

Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s, just as Mitchell is revered as the founder of the AACM in Chicago around the same time. Both men have a reputation for the type of work regimens and standards of excellence that produce results. Baraka is a master performer and reader. Mitchell is a master musician who, along with saxophone, plays clarinet, flute, piccolo, oboe, and many handmade “little instruments” that create ethereal, and eerily familiar, sounds. In short, having these two men on stage doing their thing is like having more than 100 years of the radical avant-garde blowing fire and ice in your face. You’ll like it. Trust me.

The idea that American music never fully explored “The New Thing” when it emerged nearly 50 years ago is slowly coming to light, thanks to Soul Jazz’s 2004 compilation New Thing! and a recent resurgence of interest in — and reissuing of — works by Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, and George Lewis. It leaves me to wonder: is the old “New Thing” just the new “New Thing” we’ve been waiting for?

AMIRI BARAKA AND ROSCOE MITCHELL

Mon./17, 8 and 10 p.m., $12–$18

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

So dreamy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
So dreamy

Of all the indie bliss-bands to break through in the last year, Teengirl Fantasy — coming to town Sat/8 — is the dreamiest. Not just in the heart-dotted Tigerbeat vein, although TF’s spangly Angelfire website (teengirlfantasy.angelfire.com) certainly plays on giggle-driven hormone rushes.

No, Oberlin College students Logan Takahashi and Nick Weiss also meticulously tap into a subconscious slipstream of musical influences — 1990s R&B, ’70s soul, Balearic house, Windham Hill new age, bubblegum pop — that roils with allusive energy but never jolts upright into blunt nostalgia or jokey parody. The meticulously layered synth-and-sample compositions on debut album 7AM don’t lead directly to the dance floor either. Instead, they amble ecstatically down some long, spectral hallway toward a distant rave. When performing live, however, Teengirl Fantasy moves multitudes.

SFBG Are you guys still in the midst of your big tour? And did you really play the Great Wall of China?

Nick Weiss We still have one semester left of school, so we tour constantly during school breaks. We played a festival near the Great Wall in August. It was amazing — China was such a nuts place to be. Even though the government attempts to create such a restrictive environment, there are plenty of punks and people who party really out of control. One night we were taken to a Go Kart track around 1 a.m. The place where you bought your tickets was also a bar, so everyone was drunk driving!!! It ruled!!

SFBG You’ve mentioned before that one of the aims of your music is to capture a certain dreaminess or “half-asleep” sensation. There’s a rad sound art exhibition going on from L.A.’s 323 Projects right now that reminded me of you. It’s called “from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.” Basically, you call this number, (323) 843-4652 from anywhere until Jan.17 and it plays an array of sound art pieces made by different people. What would you put on a Teengirl Fantasy Hotline?

Logan Takahashi My voicemail answering message is a recording of one of those Buddha Machines made by FM3. I’ve always thought that was a pretty clever idea for a product or a piece, just a bunch of simple, really pleasant infinite loops.

SFBG Speaking of dreaminess and loops, I think one of the best tracks of the year is “Dancing in Slow Motion” from 7AM. It totally reminds me of how everything sounds when you’re trying to say something in a dream and you wake yourself up — this kind of shivery mumbling. Guest singer Shannon Funchess’ sublimated diva delivery is right on.

NW We met Shannon through her Light Asylum bandmate Bruno Coviello, who coincidentally lived at the studio we were working in. However, we had already seen Light Asylum a bunch of times and knew how amazing her voice was. We wrote the song pretty quickly, but our initial impulse was to make a huge ballad, the size of The-Dream but with a dreamier twist …

SFBG: I also adore the “Dancing in Slow Motion” video, directed by Mark Brown. Between that and the “Cheaters” and “Portofino” videos, you’ve been tagged as adopting a “visualizer” aesthetic. How much input have you had with your videos and the visual manifestation of your music?  

NW: We really just choose an artist whose work we really love, give them the track, and let them do whatever they want. Working with Mark Brown, Kari Altmann, and the legendary IASOS has been so cool… we really love the videos each of them made. I wouldn’t call them pure “visualizer,” I’d say that their looks are pretty intentional rather than automated.  However maybe we just have a pretty high tolerance for rave graphix. I could watch fractals pulse to trance for hours.

LT: Honestly we never intentionally were looking for a unifying aesthetic between our videos, but it is kind of funny to go back and look at the things they have in common. I spent a lot of time watching ‘beyond the mind’s eye’ videos as a child and I think that had an effect on my threshold for abstract 3D FX.

SFBG The title of your album, 7AM is kind of an in-joke to old-school ravers, conjuring up both the kooky bombast of KLF’s “3AM Eternal” and warehouse bragging, as in “Dude, I was there at 7 a.m. when Richie Hawtin dropped ‘Pacific 707.'” Do you guys deliberately build references and concepts into your tracks beforehand, or do they come out of a more organic jamming process?

NW It really is an organic process. We won’t usually start talking about a track until after we’ve written and recorded it. Once we start mixing, we might talk references. But when we’re writing, it’s really more about capturing the live feeling and strengthening improvisations.

LT It helps for us to keep that element of viscerality and response as part of the songwriting process.

SFBG Detroit techno seems a touchstone for you …

LT Detroit!!!! Still trying to make it to the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, hopefully this year. Huge fan of the music that comes out of that city.

TEENGIRL FANTASY with Pictureplane, Tormenta Tropical, and Donuts DJs. Sat/8, 10 p.m., $5––$10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com.

Undercover of the night

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Undercover of the night

arts@sfbg.com

On a hot Tuesday night in October, a huge line of eager music aficionados took over the block in front of Coda, hoping to squeeze into a unique (and sold out) show — Undercover, a collective of several well-known bands and musicians, was joining together to cover the classic album Velvet Underground and Nico in its entirety. The show was electric and the crowd decked out in its 1960s mod finest, channeling that delicious Factory vibe. A CD of the night is set to be released in January on Porto Franco Records, and in February Undercover will reunite to cover the Pixies’ Doolittle. (“We like to hear old music played in new ways by interesting musicians” is the Undercover motto.) Undercover masterminds Charith Premawardhana, Lyz Luke, and Yosh Haraguchi talked about the project.

SFBG How did Undercover come together?

Charith Premawardhana After Jazz Mafia wrapped up their residency at Coda, there was a hole on Tuesday nights. They offered it to me, and I thought it’d be fun to see what happened. Then it gets to be a couple of weeks before the first event and I don’t have anything lined up. So I called Adam Theis and Rupa, and they both agreed to do it. It ended up being this variety show with strings, and afterward Adam and I talked about the next one. We thought about this idea of doing a cover album and bringing together a bunch of different musicians.

Lyz Luke That same night I was up late. I saw Charith online, shot him a message, and he told me about his conversation with Adam. Of course I put in my two cents about my favorite album, “Velvet Underground and Nico.” So we stayed up until five or six in the morning listening to the album and figuring out who’d be the best fit to perform each song. A few hours later, we met at the Revolution Cafe and started calling every musician we knew. Everyone was on board immediately.

 

Top: Liz Phair, Mark Matos, Stephan Jenkins. Center: Sarah Palmer with Edmund Welles. Bottom: Charith Premawardhana, Meklit Hadero, Sean Olmstead.

Top and Center photos by Bill Evans. Bottom photos by Heather Bernard

SFBG What about the guest stars who participated?

CP I’ve known Stephan Jenkins [of Third Eye Blind] for about four years. I was brought in to record for Vanessa Carleton when Stephan was producing her album. We recorded the strings over at Peter Getty’s House. Then a few months ago, I played an event over there and left my phone behind. When I went back, there was a girl on the couch I didn’t know. I told her about the Velvet Underground cover project and that we still had a couple of openings for singers. She immediately starts singing “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and it sounded good. I didn’t even know who she was, she’d just introduced herself as Liz. There we were watching the Giants game, drinking beers. When I finally asked her what her last name was and she said Phair, I was like “Oh shit, I used to have your album.” She agreed to do the show, and when I saw Stephan later that day he wanted to be part of it too. He initially wanted to do “Heroin,” but I had to tell him it was already taken.

SFBG What’s up next?

LL The next album is the Pixies’ Doolittle, another favorite of mine. And we’re moving to Public Works, which is larger. We did really well at Coda, sold out two shows with very little promotion. But it was chaotic for the artists to do two shows with 11 set changes in such an intimate space, including a marimba being hauled back and forth!

UNDERCOVER: DOOLITTLE Feb. 22, 2011. 7 p.m., $15–$20. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.portofrancorecords.com/monkey

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