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Sake 1 isn’t your typical DJ. Holding a graduate degree in social work from UC Berkeley, he volunteers for Caduceus Outreach Services, providing aid to mentally ill homeless adults. He is in the middle of a year initiating as a priest of Elegua in the Lucumi faith (more commonly known as Santeria) and, among other restrictions, must wear white from head to toe, refrain from sex, alcohol, and drugs, and avoid physical contact with others. His weekly party Pacific Standard Time regularly donates a portion of its proceeds to community organizations such as DiverCity Works and the Center for Young Women’s Development. And he has continued to be an in-demand hip-hop and soul DJ, playing parties like Little Ricky’s Rib Shack in NYC and mixing compilations for outfits like Fader magazine, while relentlessly maintaining an optimistic outlook — even though 2006 saw the deaths of his brother; his best friend, DJ Dusk; and his protégé, DJ Domino.
“It has been hard to lose my best friend, my brother, and a student-friend all in the span of four months,” Sake said from his home in the Mission the week before he was to play a memorial party in New York for his brother, house producer and DJ Adam Goldstone. “But it reminds me where I come from and why I do what I do as a DJ. And I have angels all around me …”
ANGELS FROM THE AVENUES
Sake 1 (the name is his tag from his graffiti days) grew up Stefan Goldstone in the Fillmore and the avenues and graduated from Washington High School before attending UC Santa Cruz and finally UC Berkeley. He learned to mix by using records like Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads” and Ultramagnetic MC’s “Ego Tripping” on one turntable while listening to KPOO on Sunday afternoons. His older brother in New York expanded his world with Red Alert, Pete Rock, and Marley Marl tapes, and Sake 1 soon began visiting the North Beach Tower Records, which at the time had an extensive selection of 12-inch singles. House parties in Santa Cruz followed when he went to college, and to this day the mood of those early parties is something he treasures. “I always feel like that’s something I’m trying to recapture, that house party vibe where you know everybody, where you feel safe even though it’s kinda out of control.”
Following a long list of steadily higher profile events that included Church, Soulville, and Luscious, Sake’s latest attempt to have a club that feels like a house party is Pacific Standard Time, where he is the resident DJ. The PST started in the spring of 2005 at Bambuddha Lounge, eventually moving to Levende Lounge in search of a bigger dance floor. Reflecting Sake’s diverse selections, which range from hip-hop to disco to broken beat, guests have included Daz-I-Kue from Bugz in the Attic, house producer Osunlade, and local favorites such as Mind Motion.
“Pretty much from June of 2005 until [now], it’s been packed every week, so it’s been a blessing,” Sake said. “The struggle part has been trying to keep the music progressive, keep the ideas and the organizations that we support at the forefront, and not fall back on ‘Well, we’re successful, we’re making money, and people like it, so let’s wild out and just have this bacchanal thing.’ When things become successful, it’s almost like a gift and a curse, because then people expect it to be a certain way every week, and it makes it hard to keep it changing. When it’s not successful, you can change, and nobody’s really trippin’, because nobody’s coming!” he laughed.
REACHING OUT
Saying that the party’s crowd has evolved with its success, Sake acknowledged that at times he finds it hard to strike a balance between playing the more obscure tracks he may personally favor and keeping the party rocking. At the same time, he is well aware that being successful allows him not only to reach a broader audience but to make a bigger impact when he does use his party for benefits. And keeping that success rolling may mean tempering his philosophy of selecting tracks by artists from other countries, female artists, and those that represent genres not easily slotted into the Clear Channel and MTV pigeonholes.
“At PST we struggle with trying to be this sexy, cool, tastemaker thing and then doing these community organization parties,” he reflected. “And the community organizations come and bring their bases, and their bases don’t want to hear SA-RA Creative Partners necessarily. They want to hear commercial rap, because that’s what a lot of our folks listen to.”
Nevertheless, at 11:20 on a recent Thursday night, Levende was rapidly filling up, and the already packed dance floor had no problem getting down to SA-RA’s “Hollywood.” But half an hour later there was a markedly bigger response when Sake dropped “Keep Bouncing,” a track by Too $hort featuring Snoop Dog and will.i.am that the majority of DJs digging SA-RA joints wouldn’t let near their crates.
“DJs should break records, and nightclubs should be places for not just new music but new ideas,” Sake explained. “People should be open to new sounds … and people should be open to having a nightlife experience that isn’t [divorced] from thinking about what is going on in the world outside — that [doesn’t just accept] that you have to step over homeless people to get into the nightclub, you have to disrespect the bar staff to get your drink quicker, you have to touch a girl’s ass if she won’t dance with you.” Walking the line between educating and entertaining, Sake 1 is making San Francisco a better place with a party that might just have it both ways. SFBG
SAKE 1 AT PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Thursdays, 10 p.m.
Levende Lounge
1710 Mission, SF
$10
(415) 864-5585
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Music Features
The people’s party
Gimme back my Bone?
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When pressed to define obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously opined, “I know it when I see it.” For me, a more honest answer would go something like “I know it when I masturbate to it.”
Rock music, like smut, offers an equally simple metric for discerning authenticity: if listening to a band inevitably leads to a stoned argument about the fighting prowess of Bruce Lee, then it is probably real rock. I’ve debated so many Bruce Lee combat hypotheticals while listening to Black Sabbath — Bruce Lee versus genius hammerhead shark, Bruce Lee versus Loma Prieta earthquake, one-armed Bruce Lee versus Willy Wonka — that I never question their place as the supreme suicide-inducing, vengeance-advocating rock band.
The biggest Bay Area radio station that claims to rock is 107.7 the Bone. The Bone consciously sells itself as “classic rock that rocks.” When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, it was the only station that reliably got the Led out. It played a ton of Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath — all the bands that scared me as a small boy because I knew in my heart they possessed evil powers and could, with their music, summon from the soil of the Amazon rainforest an army of cloned Adolf Hitlers. The Bone always comforted me, because it — along with Madalyn Murray O’Hare, pony kegs, bringing M-80s to school, and backward masking — inhabited the same demon-haunted rock-metal world I lived in as a frightened but fascinated child.
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER AND LADY REEBOK
So I’ll never forget where I was the first time I heard the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” on the Bone. It was 2 a.m. earlier this year, and I was driving west on Fell Street at 60 mph, my 1986 convertible LeBaron catching the timed lights one second after they turned green (Fell’s timed lights work at 30, 60, even 120 mph). I wanted rock and prayed for the Bone to twist me up a threefer of Ronnie James Dio. Instead, I found myself thrust into a Lady Reebok ad: vaguely self-infatuated and optimistic about everything but nothing in particular. I defensively smashed my car into a parked Cooper Mini, did a hundred push-ups and sit-ups next to the twisted wreckage, and ran off into the night. As with all time-bifurcating events — 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, being told my seventh-grade “sweats” were actually parachute pants — it’s often hard to remember what life was like before.
Joe Rock, the Bone’s most metal-friendly DJ and assistant program director, told me recently that the station tweaked its format following a 2004 listener-driven “Classic Rock A–Z Weekend” that saw requests for bands like Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog supplant classic-rock lifers like Derek and the Dominoes and Bad Company. The switch from “metal-oriented classic rock,” the station’s previous Arbitron-monitored format, to “heritage rock,” a mix of old metal, new guitar-based grunge and post-grunge, and both old-school and contemporary Reebok rock, elicited a mild-to-moderate shitstorm from old-school Boneheads.
Why change the formula? I think the economics of commercial radio came into play. Few listeners in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic really care about Deep Purple deep tracks anymore, so the Bone started dropping in Staind and Godsmack amid Jimi Hendrix and Ozzy Osbourne. If you’re an old-school Bonehead, the change means that now you only hear KISS once in a while, unless you count all the time you and Strutter, your albino python, lock yourselves in your room and listen to every single KISS song on tape, vinyl, CD, CD box set, digitally remastered CD, and digitally remastered CD box set. If, however, you believe Stone Temple Pilots and Buckcherry are where Ted Nugent would have ended up if he didn’t OD on elk jerky and NRA propaganda, then you feel much like John Hinckley probably did after his psychologist let him watch Taxi Driver on DVD: deeply appreciative but still wondering what all the fuss is about.
THE SONG NOT THE SAME?
The mythology of classic rock holds that everything used to be one big fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same: coked-up druids, trashed Hilton suites, and roadies deep into black magic. The reality is that the vast majority of classic rock is nerdy or nonthreatening. You’re more likely to hear Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Journey, and Jethro Tull on an Aflac commercial than see them carved into the arm of a berserker teen. The Bone has always needed to appeal to men and women, hawks and doves, parolees and nonparolees. Until the change in format, ubiquitous classic rock loser ballads like the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” and Pink Floyd’s “Mother” represented the shadow self of the average Aleister Crowley–worshiping Bonehead. After the tweak the Bone forced its aging listeners to ask themselves a fundamental and humbling question: “Am I getting too old for this I-Roc?” Bone listeners older than 40 — who weren’t impressionable suckers when music, fashion, advertising, and public relations merged with movies, television, and politics in the late ’80s — had to swallow a bitter pill: it’s really all the same now, just younger.
The old Bone — despite its marketing and popularity with grown men who paint their faces silver and black and dress up as Norse war gods for their children’s Pop Warner football games — always played an embarrassing amount of lame music. For every “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)” or “Kashmir,” there were two pieces of shit like “Gimme Three Steps” and “China Grove.” The new Bone basically employs the same formula: Rainbow, Metallica, and Alice in Chains but now with acoustic Nickelback and blink-182 thrown in for the women and the younger sensitive guys.
This, objectively, is no wimpier than the old wimpy stuff, just more corporate and more easily marketable. The new Bone plays songs that strippers born after 1984 can lap dance to and still seem credible to their under-30 clientele. A lot of the new Bone stuff — by so-called active rock bands such as Audioslave and Velvet Revolver — easily out-rocks anything by Don Henley — and anything he ever touched.
Sometimes it’s better to just sound good than appear consistent. What rocks for me doesn’t necessarily rock for my next-door neighbor, unless Alice Cooper is now living in a pupuseria on 24th Street and Harrison. As for the ultimate judge, Bruce Lee’s legacy, I say the Bone still facilitates a Bay Area dialogue, even if it’s only seen Enter the Dragon and the first 10 minutes of Game of Death. SFBG
The other home of Bay hip-hop
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If you don’t know about the Filthy ’Moe
It’s time I let real game unfold….
Messy Marv, “True to the Game”
I meet Big Rich on the corner of Laguna and Grove streets, near the heart of the Fillmore District according to its traditional boundaries of Van Ness and Fillmore, although the hood actually extends as far west as Divisadero. “Me personally,” the 24-year-old rapper and lifelong ’Moe resident confesses, “I don’t be sticking my head out too much. But I make sure I bring every photo session or interview right here.”
At the moment he’s taping a segment for an upcoming DVD by the Demolition Men, who released his mixtape Block Tested Hood Approved in April. Since then, the former member of the San Quinn–affiliated group Fully Loaded has created a major buzz thanks in part to the snazzy video for “That’s the Business,” his E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced single, which was the Jam of the Week in August on MTV2 and added to straight-up MTV in time for the Oct. 3 release of the Koch full-length Block Tested Hood Approved. (Originally titled Fillmore Rich, the album was renamed to capitalize on the mixtape-generated hype.)
Presented by E-40 and featuring Rich’s dope in-house producer Mal Amazin in addition to heavyweights such as Sean-T, Rick Rock, and Droop-E, BTHA is a deep contribution to the rising tide of Bay Area hip-hop. While Big Rich’s gruff baritone delivery and gritty street tales make his music more mobster than hyphy, the album is not unaffected by the latter style’s up-tempo bounce, helping the movement hold national attention during this season of anticipation before Mistah FAB’s major-label debut on Atlantic. “I don’t necessarily make hyphy music,” Rich says. “But I definitely condone it. As long as the spotlight is on the Bay, I’m cool with it.” Coming near the end of a year that has seen landmark albums from San Quinn, Messy Marv, Will Hen, and fellow Fully Loaded member Bailey — not to mention JT the Bigga Figga’s high-profile tour with Snoop Dogg, which has taken hyphy all the way to Africa — Rich’s solo debut is one more indication of the historic district’s importance to the vitality of local hip-hop and Bay Area culture in general.
THE EDGE OF PAC HEIGHTS
The Fillmore is a community under siege, facing external and internal pressures. On the one hand, gentrification — in the form of high-end shops and restaurants serving tourists, Pacific Heights residents, and an increasingly affluent demographic creeping into the area — continues to erode the neighborhood’s edges. “If you grew up in the Fillmore, you can see Pacific Heights has crept down the hill, closer to the ghetto,” says Hen, who as a member of multiregional group the Product (assembled by Houston legend Scarface) moved more than 60,000 copies of its recent “thug conscious” debut, One Hunid (Koch). “Ten years ago there were more boundaries. But the Fillmore’s prime location, and I’m not asleep to this fact. We’re five minutes away from everything in the city. That has to play a role in the way the district is represented in a city that makes so much off tourism. You might not want your city portrayed as gangsta, even though it is.”
Hen has a point. The notion of San Francisco as gangsta is somewhat at odds with the way the city perceives itself. As an Oakland writer, I can attest to this, for even in San Francisco’s progressive artistic and intellectual circles, Oakland is usually understood to be beyond the pale in terms of danger and violence. Yet none of the Oakland rappers I’ve met talk about their hoods in quite the same way Fillmore rappers do, at least when it comes to their personal safety. As Big Rich films his section of the DVD, for example, he remarks on the continual stream of police cruisers circling the block.
“They slowed it down,” he says. “Now they only come every 90 seconds. Right around here is murder central — people be shooting each other every night. By 7 o’clock, we all gotta disperse, unless you want to get caught in the cross fire.” He waves his hands in mock terror. “I ain’t trying to die tonight!”
“BUSTING HEADS”
Though Rich is clowning, his statement is perfectly serious — indiscriminate gunfire among gang members, often in their early teens, makes nocturnal loitering a risky proposition at best. As of September, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Web site, the Northern Police District, which includes the Fillmore, had the city’s second highest number of murders this year, 11, ceding first place only to the much larger Bayview’s 22. For overall criminal incidents, the Northern District led the city, at more than 10,000 so far.
Though Fillmore rappers might be given to stressing the danger of their hood, insofar as such themes constitute much of hip-hop’s subject matter and they feel the need to refute the city’s nongangsta image, no one I spoke to seemed to be boasting. They sounded sad. Hen, for example, reported that he’d been to three funerals in October, saying, “You hardly have time to mourn for one person before you have to mourn for the next person.” While the SFPD’s Public Affairs Office didn’t return phone calls seeking corroboration, both Rich and Hen indicate the neighborhood is suffering from an alarming amount of black-on-black violence.
“Basically, it’s genocide. We’re going to destroy each other,” Hen says. “It used to be crosstown rivalries rather than in your backyard. Now there’s more of that going on. If you get into it at age 15, the funk is already there. Whoever your crew is funking with, you’re in on it.” The ongoing cycle of drug-related violence — the Fillmore’s chief internal pressure — has only ramped up under the Bush administration’s regressive economic policies. It’s a fact not lost on these rappers: as Rich puts it succinctly on BTHA, “Bush don’t give a fuck about a nigga from the hood.”
“Everybody’s broke. That’s why everybody’s busting each other’s heads,” explains Rich, who lost his older brother to gun violence several years ago. “If you don’t know where your next dollar’s coming from …”
To be sure, the rappers give back to the Fillmore. They support large crews of often otherwise unemployable youth, and Messy Marv, for example, has been known to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving and bikes for Christmas. But Bay Area rap is only just getting back on its feet, and while the rappers can ameliorate life in the Fillmore’s housing projects, they don’t have the means to dispel the climate of desperation in a hood surrounded by one of the most expensive cities on earth. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the disconnect between their community and the rest of the city, which trades on its cultural cachet.
“It’s like two different worlds,” Hen muses. “You have people sitting outside drinking coffee right in the middle of the killing fields. They’re totally safe, but if I walk over there, I might get shot at. But the neighborhood is too proud for us to be dying at the hands of each other.”
HOOD PRIDE
The neighborhood pride Will Hen invokes is palpable among Fillmore rappers. “I get a warm feeling when I’m here,” Messy Marv says. “The killing, you can’t just say that’s Fillmore. That’s everywhere. When you talk about Fillmore, you got to go back to the roots. Fillmore was a warm, jazzy African American place where you could come and dance, drink, have fun, and be you.”
Mess is right on all counts. Lest anyone think I misrepresent Oaktown: the citywide number of murders in Oakland has already topped 120 this year. But my concern here is with the perceived lack of continuity Mess suggests between the culture of the Fillmore then and now. By the early 1940s, the Fillmore had developed into a multicultural neighborhood including the then-largest Japanese population in the United States. In 1942, when FDR sent West Coast citizens of Japanese origin to internment camps, their vacated homes were largely filled by African Americans from the South, attracted by work in the shipyards. While the district had its first black nightclub by 1933, the wartime boom transformed the Fillmore into a major music center.
“In less than a decade, San Francisco’s African American population went from under 5,000 to almost 50,000,” according to Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of the recent history of Fillmore jazz Harlem of the West (Chronicle). “The sheer increase in number of African Americans in the neighborhood made the music scene explode.”
Though known as a black neighborhood, Pepin says, the Fillmore “was still pretty diverse” and even now retains vestiges of its multicultural history. Japantown persists, though much diminished, and Big Rich himself is half Chinese, making him the second Chinese American rapper of note. “My mother’s parents couldn’t speak a lick of English,” he says. “But she was real urban, real street. I wasn’t brought up in a traditional Chinese family, but I embrace it and I get along with my other side.” Nonetheless, Pepin notes, the massive urban renewal project that destroyed the Fillmore’s iconic jazz scene by the late ’60s effectively curtailed its diversity, as did the introduction of barrackslike public housing projects.
The postwar jazz scene, of course, is the main source of nostalgia tapped by the Fillmore Merchants Association (FMA). Talk of a musical revival refers solely to the establishment of upscale clubs — Yoshi’s, for example, is scheduled to open next year at Fillmore and Eddy — offering music that arguably is no longer organically connected to the neighborhood. In a brief phone interview, Gus Harput, president of the FMA’s Jazz Preservation District, insisted the organization would “love” to open a hip-hop venue, although he sidestepped further inquiries. (Known for its hip-hop shows, Justice League at 628 Divisadero closed around 2003 following a 2001 shooting death at a San Quinn performance and was later replaced by the Independent, which occasionally books rap.) The hood’s hip-hop activity might be too recent and fall outside the bounds of jazz, yet nowhere in the organization’s online Fillmore history (fillmorestreetsf.com) is there an acknowledgement of the MTV-level rap scene down the street.
Yet the raucous 1949 Fillmore that Jack Kerouac depicts in his 1957 book, On the Road — replete with protohyphy blues shouters like Lampshade bellowing such advice as “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whisky!” — sounds less like the area’s simulated jazz revival and more like the community’s present-day hip-hop descendants.
How could it be otherwise? The aesthetics have changed, but the Fillmore’s musical genius has clearly resided in rap since Rappin’ 4Tay debuted on Too $hort’s Life Is … Too $hort (Jive, 1989), producer-MC JT the Bigga Figga brought out the Get Low Playaz, and a teenage San Quinn dropped his classic debut, Don’t Cross Me (Get Low, 1993). While there may not be one definitive Fillmore hip-hop style, given that successful rappers tend to work with successful producers across the Bay regardless of hood, Messy Marv asserts the ’Moe was crucial to the development of the hyphy movement: “JT the Bigga Figga was the first dude who came with the high-energy sound. He was ahead of his time. I’m not taking nothing away from Oakland, Vallejo, or Richmond. I’m just letting you know what I know.”
In many ways the don of the ’Moe, San Quinn — reaffirming his status earlier this year with The Rock (SMC), featuring his own Ski- and CMT-produced smash, “Hell Ya” — could be said to typify a specifically Fillmore rap style, in which the flow is disguised as a strident holler reminiscent of blues shouting. While both Messy Marv and Big Rich share affinities with this delivery, Will Hen, for instance, and Quinn’s brother Bailey — whose Champ Bailey (City Boyz, 2006) yielded the MTV and radio success “U C It” — favor a smoother, more rapid-fire patter.
What is most striking here is that, with the exception of fellow traveler Messy Marv (see sidebar), all of these artists, as well as recent signee to the Game’s Black Wall Street label, Ya Boy, came up in the ’90s on San Quinn’s influential Done Deal Entertainment. Until roughly two years ago, they were all one crew. While working on his upcoming eighth solo album, From a Boy to a Man, for his revamped imprint, Deal Done, Quinn paused for a moment to take justifiable pride in his protégés, who now constitute the Fillmore’s hottest acts.
“I create monsters, know what I’m saying?” Quinn says. “Done Deal feeds off each other; that’s why I’m so proud of Bailey and Rich. We all come out the same house. There’s a real level of excellence, and the world has yet to see it. Right now it seems like we’re separate, but we’re not. We’re just pulling from different angles for the same common goal.”
“We all one,” Quinn concludes, in a statement that could serve as a motto for neighborhood unity. “Fillmoe business is Fillmoe business.” SFBG
myspace.com/bigrich
myspace.com/williehen
myspace.com/sanquinn
Smart and dangerous
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The Fucking Ocean are seriously fucking refreshing: they’ve taken cues from Mark E. Smith and Ian MacKaye alike to produce biting, sincere post-punk that’s nigh anomalous in American music. In band member John Nguyen’s San Francisco home, the current three-piece talked about their politics, new record, playing under the stairs at the Edinburgh Castle, and a shared affinity for Mexican food and DC punk.
It was collegiate rock enthusiasm that initially helped bring about this ensemble. Nguyen went to Brown with fellow band member Matt Swagler, where they played together in what Swagler said was a “pretty embarrassing ’90s power pop band.” When Nguyen subsequently moved west to enter med school at Stanford, he randomly tuned in to Fucking Ocean cofounder Elias Spiliotis on KZSU, the campus radio station.
“I had a show called Lethal Injection on Saturday evenings where I was playing Greek punk and bands like the Fall, Fugazi, and Blonde Redhead,” Spiliotis said. “Before I ever met him, John called in one night, said he liked the show, and asked me, ‘Where are the cool people at Stanford?’”
They inevitably found each other at a station staff meeting a few months later, and Nguyen started his own finely titled show, Sad and Dangerous. Later, after Swagler moved to San Francisco, a 2003 show from defunct DC no-wave ragers Black Eyes blew the friends’ collective mind. Starting a band was the noble, noisy result.
As cryptic as the Fucking Ocean’s name is, it has rather silly origins: “I was dropping off Matt after band practice when ‘Foggy Notion’ by the Velvet Underground came on the radio,” Spiliotis said. The band had been tossing around possible names, and when he suggested “the Foggy Notion,” his Greek accent unwittingly locked in a different phrase, one that they’ve used to this day.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
Luckily, Swagler explained, the Foggy Notion serves as a name for playing kids’ birthday parties — when his grandmother recently asked his band’s name, that’s the one he gave her. Spiliotis, while no longer in the band (he left in order to continue his research in cell biology at Stanford), appears on the record with Nguyen, Swagler, and Marcella Gries, who joined the group after former bass player Megumi Aihara moved to Boston for graduate school.
For more than a year their rehearsals were tape-recorded on Gries’s clock radio. The band eventually had a friend help them record a five-song EP that, while never released, primed them for their studio time at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio.
“We were playing a lot of shows, and our friends in the Mall suggested going to Ian and Jay Pellicci to record an album,” said Gries of the Pelliccis, who have recorded some of their favorite bands, Deerhoof and Erase Errata. They brought the Fucking Ocean newfound on-tape clarity and a pointed drum sound care of Jay Pellicci, as well as some nifty frills — a vintage Gibson amplifier and, appropriately, a telephone, which Nguyen said was “rewired and disordered in a way that makes it sound vaguely like a bullhorn.”
“MUSICAL VOLLEYBALL”
The Fucking Ocean’s affable attitude contrasts with their music’s tension and focus. Drum, bass, and guitar duties aren’t singularly assigned — the band writes collectively and swaps instruments. The approach makes their live show as varied and blindingly fun as their record. On the road they have been carting around new songs and video accompaniment courtesy of local artist Tony Benna. Shawn Reynaldo, who signed the Fucking Ocean to his Oakland label, Double Negative Records, calls them a “musical volleyball team” with a deliberately Minutemen-like songwriting economy. The prevailing maxim among the Fucking Ocean is that if an idea is presented to the listener, it needn’t stick around that long: no use in letting John Q. Listener get too comfortable, right?
Recording the album, all done on analog tape, took six days in June. While a lot of Indian pizza, Gatorade, and various caffeinated drinks fueled their long nights behind the boards, the result, Le Main Rouge, is damn lean. At 11 songs in a little under 27 minutes, it’s an urgent delight of terse angularity from a band bursting with novel ideas, both politically and riffwise.
Addressing abortion rights in the fuzzed, pissed strut of “Adam,” the Fucking Ocean close with the lines “Do you remember when, do you remember when?/ Women had to risk their lives just to live again!” “Bombs in the Underground,” a response to last year’s London Underground bombings, opens with a memorable guitar-bass groove reminiscent of midperiod Sleater-Kinney before bursting into a shouted refrain, then traversing odd tempo shifts and a drum fill — it’s thoughtfully fragmented and endlessly listenable. Le Main Rouge shows a band whose enthusiasm hopefully bodes a good run ahead. You’re advised to polish up that kayak and tune in. SFBG
FUCKING OCEAN
With Kid 606 and Friends and Warbler
Thurs/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$8
(415) 621-4455
Mod couple
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One of the hottest hip-hop albums of the year comes from the unlikely combination of a six-foot-seven Canadian producer and a New Orleans mother of two. Voice’s Gumbo (Groove Attack) is a testament to the modern modes of production, with the protagonists only recording in the same room twice but nonetheless able to marry beats and rhymes into a vehicle for a rapper who is not only talking loud but saying something.
Toronto’s too-tall Kevin “Moonstarr” Moon has long been known to heads who like their hip-hop with a side of jazz and a chaser of broken beats through his productions for his own Public Transit Recordings as well as remixes for the likes of Recloose and Jazzanova. In spring 2001 he was introduced to Erin “Voice” Tourey through mutual friend Rosina Kazi of LAL (also on Public Transit), with whom Tourey was staying. “I met with her on a Friday, and we just connected. She came by the studio, and I gave her a beat CD. The next day we got together, Saturday afternoon, and she had already written two complete songs to my beats,” Moon remembered with awe over the phone from Toronto. One of those songs ended up on the Scattered Snares compilation released on Twisted Funk, a label run by Marc Mac of 4 Hero, and the other went on Moonstarr’s own Dupont (Public Transit). The pair have been collaborating ever since.
TOTAL FREEDOM
“She’s so versatile — she’ll flip from a rhyme to poetry and back to a rhyme again, so it’s total freedom with her in terms of what you can get away with,” Moon enthused when pressed to explain why he enjoys producing Tourey. “It’s really cool to work with her because you’re not constricted by, like, a straight-up hip-hop snare on every second [beat].” Witness “Guerilla Hustlin’,” in which Moon swings from three kick-drum beats that lurch into the fourth over to snare drums that threaten and stutter with Brazilian flare beneath a trilling flute as Tourey spits, “Wanna know my name, wanna know why I’m on the streets selling beats instead of chasing fame/ Well I’ve always done my own thing, figure people’ll come around on their own term, used to try and push it but I had to live and learn, now I pick and chose when I be concerned.”
“Guerilla Hustlin’” is a rock-solid tune — and it inadvertently captures one of the few ways in which Tourey and Moon view the world differently, as the rhymes tell of struggling to get paid while the production hints at an affection for Baden Powell and isn’t exactly Clear Channel–friendly. When I spoke with Tourey, who patiently answered my questions from her home in New Orleans while her three-year-old and five-month-old played not so patiently in the background, I mentioned that Moon had described his status as an underground producer as “comfortable.” “Obviously, we’re in a situation where we have to sell records, but we’re independent,” Moon said. “We can get away with a hell of a lot more than an artist that’s stuck in a position where their art has to generate revenue for them. We’re in this really comfortable position where we can get away with whatever.”
So does Tourey treasure the same silver lining to not selling too many records that Moon does? “Mmm, no,” Tourey said succinctly. “I love Kevin, but, well, he doesn’t have kids yet. When he starts reproducing, he might feel the burn a little more, like I do. Underground is great in terms of creative control and street credibility and loyal fan bases, but at some point I gotta pay bills. I’m trying to find a middle ground.”
ALL SYSTEMS FLOW
That’s not to say that Tourey has any interest in focusing on cash flow at the expense of mic flow. As a survivor of the cattle calls and series pilots that litter the past of child actors (her father renewed her agent’s contract every year from when she was 5 to 16 — when she shaved her head bald and started winning poetry slams), Tourey shows a marked animosity toward any kind of Hollywood success in her Gumbo rhymes. The rapper — whose recent listening runs from Bilal to Björk — may want to feed her kids, but her rhymes reflect a keen awareness that one day they’ll want more than just the next meal. To quote Tourey in “Total Eclipse,” the most recently written song on the album, “They said I should dumb it down, appeal to my audience, apparently we like our rap with no substance, but then I’m looking out into the crowd, and I’m seeing me, a sea full of honeys quietly thanking me, ’cause we support, and I’m just tryin’ to find a healthy balance, intellect toes the line, introduces a new challenge.”
Despite the distance between their locales, Moon and Tourey come together on Gumbo to serve up an album full of adventurous production and rhymes for the mind, no matter how far that consciousness has to travel. Moon said, “At the end of the day, good food tastes good — wherever you go in the world.” SFBG
VOICE AND MOONSTARR AT SICK AND LOADED
Sat/18, 8 p.m.
Space Gallery
1141 Polk, SF
$10
(415) 377-3325
Goldies Music winner Deerhoof
It’s hard to picture a band as wild, mild, and Apple O’–pie sweet as Deerhoof causing a ruckus — yet they really have. Just picture the humidly frantic, hopped-up, and happy sold-out scene last year at the release show for Runners Four (5RC) at the Great American Music Hall. Or the national CMJ college radio chart assault by that same brave, increasingly addictive album, notable for the way it brings the voices of Deerhoof’s crack instrumentalists — drummer Greg Saunier, guitarist John Dieterich, and bassist Chris Cohen — to the fore along with vocalist-guitarist Satomi Matsuzaki. Or the thousands at recent Flaming Lips and Radiohead shows bopping in place (or scratching their heads in bewilderment) at the opening group. Or the way the unassuming combo has of increasingly popping up on film (the forthcoming Dedication), on other artists’ albums (backing Danielson on 2006’s Ships), and even at elementary school (inspiring a ballet this year at North Haven Community School in Maine).
Now if only Deerhoof could cause a stir making political music or protest songs. “That’s the one thing I wish we could do that I think is very hard to do,” says Saunier on the phone from the Tenderloin apartment he shares with Matsuzaki before they leave to tour with the Fiery Furnaces. “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to do it, but I think it’s a very interesting thing that bands or artists can grapple with — is it possible to do music that specifically makes some kind of political statement? That’s sort of an eternal question. It’s hard to find a way to sing an angry song about something bad that doesn’t start to kind of need that something bad to exist.”
Angry music is a challenge for a band that’s as optimistic to its fruity core as Deerhoof. (Or else call them Madhoof?) The group began life in April 1994 as Rob Fisk’s solo bass spin-off project from Nitre Pit, a goth metal quartet that the 7 Year Rabbit Cycle founder shared with Saunier. It has since evolved, eight albums along, from a rudimentary noise improv duo into a cuddly-cute but deeply idiosyncratic and utterly distinctive unit that seems intent on beating out a new rock ’n’ roll language: part singsong child jazz, part cockeyed quirk pop, part J-pop dance moves, and part exhilarating and life-affirming anthems to stinky food, universally appealing pandas, combustible fruit, and toothsome cartoon critters. Deerhoof are making rock ’n’ roll relevant again — and maybe even sexy in a noncliché, edible way — for punk nerds, jazz codgers, and baby-voiced girls who make their own clothes. Though Deerhoof’s is an expansive tent.
“Something that is particularly cool about them is how generous they are with their time and talent and increasing popularity,” Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart said of Deerhoof in 2003. “I have never heard them utter a snooty remark about other bands that are new and not well-known…. If they think that a band that is unknown but has a cool demo can possibly perk the ears of any record people they know, they send it on without asking for favors.”
Matsuzaki joined in 1995, guitarist Dieterich and keyboardist Kelly Goode in 1999, guitarist-bassist Cohen in 2002. Fisk, Goode, and Cohen have since departed, but Deerhoof’s compact herd has occasionally enlarged to include such players as Blevin Blechdom, Steve Gigante (Tiny Bird Mouths), Chris Cooper (Fat Worm Error), Arrington (Old Time Relijun), Joe Preston (the Melvins), and Satomi’s dog in Japan, Brut. The members have busied themselves during their increasingly rare spare time with side endeavors such as Retrievers, Gorge Trio, Natural Dreamers, and Nervous Cop.
Now down to the lean Reveille-era lineup of Saunier, Matsuzaki, and Dieterich, the band sounds as fiery and fulsome as ever, reworking the Runners Four compositions to fit the three like a soccer jersey. And a dozen years on, Saunier is excited about the new paths the group has yet to pound. “I still think that there’s a lot that’s never even been tried in this universe with just guitar, bass, and voice,” he says. “I still feel like almost a total beginner.” (Kimberly Chun)
Goldies Music winner Om
Possibly the heaviest band to ever receive a Goldie from the Guardian, Om consists of drummer Chris Hakius and bass player Al Cisneros, who met in high school in the ’80s and have been playing on-and-off together ever since. Along with guitarist Matt Pike, Hakius and Cisneros formed the landmark ’90s stoner doom–Sabbath worship metal band Sleep, which you better know all about by now.
A couple years ago, after a fairly long hiatus from playing music, Hakius and Cisneros began working together again. The pair eventually named their project Om, as an outlet for the things, good and bad, that drive them. Working within the parameters of a single bass and drum setup, with alternately creepy and prayerful space-chant vocals, Om makes music that’s as loud as all hell, repetitive to the point of inducing meditation, and tough to categorize. The first, most obvious genre it’d be nice to cram the band into would have to be doom metal, but without most of the aesthetic trappings of metal — guitar leads, screaming, lyrical negativity — Om doesn’t fall easily into it.
“The songs are sonic reports of where we’re at,” Cisneros told me over the phone. “The work is an exteriorization of our thoughts and perspectives. There is movement, and nothing is fixed in time. Being open to the inflow when it visits is principally the process of songwriting for us. Instruments are the bridges over which the expressions may be carried. All the instruments: drums, bass, voice, mind, heart, soul, spirit, and the physical organism of the human body.”
Huh? Heavy-duty ideas, but that’s the thing that has always set Om apart. When the band first appeared in 2004 with Variations on a Theme, listeners didn’t exactly know how to react. There are plenty of bands messing with the idea of creating a separate reality through heavy repetition and slo-mo tempos, but few attack their work with the single-mindedness of Om. The bass lines change gradually over the course of 20-minute pieces. There are no explosive guitar solos or major tempo shifts. Om’s two albums have only three lengthy songs each, and their lyrics are eternally inscrutable, vibing inner peace or at least the search for inner peace amid chaos.
Om’s new album, A Conference of Birds, is slightly more accessible than Variations in that the songs are a little more dynamic. Instead of two main changes in each, there are several, and they follow a more traditional structure, even if it remains veiled. “Birds introduces the idea of subtlety to Om,” explains John Whitson, who put both Om records out on his Holy Mountain label. “And while it is a departure from the first album, it’s better.” When asked about how the band fits into the musical landscape today, Whitson replied, “They’re like those cave paintings discovered at Chauvet in France, considered the very first ever made. They’ve always been here — the music has always been here.
“Om is just picking note patterns out of the universe and playing them really fucking loud.” (Mike McGuirk)
Goldies Music winner Traxamillion
When I met Traxamillion, the young producer-rapper was in the lab with Balance, recording a faithful cover of EPMD’s “You’re a Customer” for a Mind Motion mixtape. Naturally, I would have preferred seeing Trax record an original, but watching him vibe to a classic was perhaps more revelatory. Where many producers insist on their isolation from outside influences, Trax is an unapologetic lover of music.
“Everybody’s a fan,” the musician, born in East Orange, NJ, and raised in San Jose, points out. “Somebody inspired somebody to make a beat, to rap. That’s how I go about my beats. I listen to shit. I get inspired. I appreciate it and harness and learn from it. I’ve always tried to mimic what’s going on, on the radio.”
Despite this unpretentious attitude toward his art, Traxamillion has developed a highly original sound of his own — bright, downright cheerful noises animate his eminently danceable grooves — and he’s already earned a place in Bay Area rap history. In June 2005 he topped the local rap charts as producer of Keak Da Sneak’s infectious independent single “Super Hyphy” (Rah), proving the Yay could hang in the mix with big-label megastars while opening up the airwaves to a long-suppressed flood of local talent.
“The beat was inspired by the youngstas,” Traxamillion says. “My little cousins came through drunk, wildin’ out on a birthday, and started dancin’. I was paying attention to their movements, thinking, ‘I gotta make some music for these cats,’ because the youngstas are really the hyphy movement. When I was making the beat, I was replaying their dancin’ in my head, and ‘Super Hyphy’ came out an hour and a half later.”
Knowing he had a hit on his hands, Trax shot the beat at Keak, who reportedly wrote the song in one session during a drive home from Tahoe. Within a few weeks “Super Hyphy” was all over the radio.
“It took two months to get to number one [on KMEL’s list of most requested tracks in June 2005],” Trax recalls. “But it was fresh, and Keak’s so abstract when he comes with something — people are fiendin’ for it. People loved it, and it still slaps to this day. It’s a big club anthem in the Bay.”
“It was weird because it was my first time on the radio, period, as a producer,” Trax says. “I was, like, ‘Man, this is crazy — all these people are going crazy to my song. This is my shit I made in my mother’s bedroom.’ I be at the club, watching everybody at the peak of the song when they would run it back like three or four times, going, ‘God-damn!’ Nobody knew it was me.”
If Traxamillion’s name wasn’t ringing bells, “Super Hyphy” was, and in short order he was working with the Team, whose “Just Go” earned the producer further spins. But when he returned to the local number one slot on KMEL’s most requested tracks in December 2005, producing “Getz Ya Grown Man On” for East Palo Alto’s then-unknown Dem Hoodstarz, Trax proved his success with Keak was no fluke. The remix — with guests Mistah FAB, San Quinn, Clyde Carson, and Turf Talk — has even picked up national airplay and features prominently on Dem Hoodstarz’s Band-Aide and Scoot (SMC) as well as Trax’s own The Slapp Addict (Slapp Addict). “The Slapp Addict is the soundtrack to the hyphy movement,” Trax says of the album. Its single-producer, multirapper format has earned it a reputation as a Bay Area Chronic. “It’s basically a Who’s Who of the Bay, produced by me. After ‘Grown Man,’ I was superhot. People were, like, ‘I want to work with you.’ In turn, everybody did songs for me, ’cause game recognize game. Damn near a year’s worth of creativity went into that album.”
In addition to spawning singles like “The Sideshow” (Too Short and FAB) and “Wakin’ ’Em Up” (Turf Talk and Hoodstarz), Slapp Addict has spun off another huge hit collaboration with Keak. “On Citas” demonstrates the producer’s special rapport with the Bay’s hottest rapper.
“When me and Keak get together, we make hits,” Trax says. “When I first met Keak, he told me, ‘Man, your beats and my voice — it’s a marriage.’ Ain’t nothin’ I’m doin’ or nothin’ he doin’ — it’s just his shit plus my shit equals hits.” (Garrett Caples)
San Francisco Jazz Festival: Particular and infinite
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Marisa Monte is a true musician. Her albums routinely go putf8um around the world, and her shows sell out wherever she plays — whether in or out of her native Brazil — but her approach is not at all that of a pop star. Her musical background is rich and combines the samba traditions of her hometown, Rio de Janeiro, European classical opera training, and Brazilian and international popular music. Music for her is not a means to an end but a process, a way of life, as she explained by phone from her home in Rio.
“I don’t do a career. I do a life, and sometimes out of my life something happens that can serve the music in my career as well professionally, but you know I do music every day with my friends,” Monte said. “It’s really part of my house, of my environment. Most of my friends are musicians — we play almost every night at home, and so it’s a natural consequence of the style of life.”
Out of this atmosphere were born her new twin EMI albums, Universo ao Meu Redor and Infinito Particular. Her seventh and eighth full-lengths were the product of a hiatus of a few years — agonizingly long to her fans — during which she took time off to have a baby. This gave her a chance to comb through her tape archives, both of her own unreleased material and of sambas known only through oral tradition in Rio. Out of these archives came most of the material for the new releases.
Although these records were issued simultaneously, they take distinct approaches to Brazilian music. Universo ao Meu Redor reflects her commitment to and exploration of Rio’s rich samba heritage, whereas Infinito Particular focuses on original compositions written over the years by Monte in collaboration with various songwriting partners (Arnaldo Antunes, Carlinhos Brown, Seu Jorge, David Byrne, etc.).
INFINITE PARTICULARS
Though Infinito is in the vein of some of the pop music Monte has recorded in the past, it has a conceptual depth and consistency surpassing that of her earlier work.
“Most of the songs were composed on the acoustic guitar, so all the harmonic texture is basically based on the acoustic nylon string guitar,” Monte explained. “But we also invited different arrangers to do different songs and had them all write for the same group of instruments, the same quartet, which is bassoon, cello, violin, and trumpet. So even if we have Philip Glass, João Donato, Eumir Deodato — each very different styles — the unity of the record happens through the same group of instruments, and it’s the same group of instruments that I have on stage now with me.”
For several years Monte has been archiving sambas passed around by veteran Rio sambistas, and her other new recording, Universo, collects her versions of these, combined with more recent sambas written by Monte and other contemporary Brazilian musicians. These are approached not as historical documents but as contemporary recordings of traditional music.
“Even if the repertoire sounds very classical, I didn’t want to do a traditional samba record,” Monte said. “I wanted to do a record that could dialogue with my other works — dialogue with the other references that I like and that are present in my work. So I wanted to do samba that I could call mine, and that’s Universo ao Meu Redor.
“The subjects of the songs are very pure, very naive as traditional samba,” she continued. “Most of the songs, they talk about love, about nature, about human common feelings like the values of the community … and yet it sounds very psychedelic. We deal with a lot of freedom with the sounds.”
Both records, as with most of her previous work, rely heavily on collaboration, not as a crutch but as a stimulus for collective creativity. For Monte, music is a social act both in process and in spirit.
“I really love to work together,” she said. “It’s something that stimulates me. It gives me discipline … and I like to think together. I’m very open in my work. I’m not very attached to what I do. I like to exchange and to collaborate, and something that’s very strange about music is that for me it can be also a lonely activity. You can be a solo artist, but for me it has always been a collective way, with bands, in the studio, with composers. I’ve been always finding ways of reutf8g with people and with life through the music.
“Sometimes I think if I was a plastic artist, like a visual artist or a writer, I would suffer a lot. If you are a painter or something, you have to work alone,” Monte added. “Though I would love to one day also be able to do a concert only myself. Maybe one day.”
DIALOGUE OF TRADITIONS
This spirit of collaboration has manifested itself as a dialogue between different styles and approaches within Monte’s music. In addition to the Brazilian and international pop she grew up listening to as a member of her generation, more traditional and classical elements found their way into her life. Her father was a teacher at a samba school in Rio, and she grew up hearing and singing popular and traditional sambas.
“The fact is, samba is the most important musical expression from Rio, and I grew up in Rio,” Monte said. “It’s very natural, loving music.”
Later, Monte became a serious student of opera, which also continues to inform her music, both as a discipline to aspire to and as an aesthetic to avoid.
“When I was 13 or 14, people started to ask me to sing because they noticed — friends in the school and in the family — they noticed that I liked to sing and that I had a nice voice, and they started to ask me, ‘Sing for us. You sing very well — sing for us.’ And then I started to study,” she recalled. “It was very important for me to know my vocal apparel, to learn how. Until now I warm up before every concert with vocalizes that I learned when I was in classical training, but I don’t use that technique for popular music because it’s a technique that was developed for a premic world: you had to sing over a whole orchestra, so it’s very intense — a lot of volume, and it’s a little bit artificial.”
As with many musicians whose voices happen to be their instruments, Monte is forever linked in the minds of her fans with her timbre and delivery. (On Infinito, she plays with this idea of her voice as an instrument, employing wordless melodies and textures and using audio effects to alter and disguise her voice.) In any musical context, it is her profound sense of phrasing that captivates, while focusing the listener’s attention not so much on her own voice as on the song itself.
“I really search for simplicity when I’m singing. I love to sing, and my intensity, I try to find something very similar to the conversation we are having here,” Monte said. “It helps to communicate with people, to be direct, to be without any oversinging. If I am singing a song that is intimate, you can sing really slowly, you can sing it low, you can sing it soft, you can sing it with intimacy. It’s something that I really search for — the exact intensity that the songs ask me to do.”
For Monte, music is a social activity, and communication and collaboration are key elements. In her music and in her process of making music, dialogue flows in all directions: between songwriters and musicians, between audience and performers, between different musical worlds, between musicians and the music itself. The emphasis is not on creating commodities to sell but on sharing the musical process with as many people as possible.
“When we do a song, we don’t do a song to be recorded. I don’t do it like that. I just do it because it’s fun to do. It’s like a game. It’s like playing — a nice thing to do with friends, instead of playing cards or video games,” she offered. “And sometimes something comes out of this universe, this atmosphere, and can be part of something that you can share with a lot of people.” SFBG
MARISA MONTE
Sat/4, 8 p.m., and Sun/5, 7 p.m.
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
3301 Lyon, SF
$25–$64
1-800-850-SFJF
www.sfjazz.org
San Francisco Jazz Festival: Something else
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“Music is the celestial sound. And it is sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much greater than any other power in this world.”
Swami Satchidananda addressing the audience at Woodstock, 1969
Each year, in addition to its roster of standard jazz players, the San Francisco Jazz Festival tucks a few cards up its sleeve. The past few years have seen performances by the likes of Caetano Veloso, Ravi Shankar, Orchestra Baobab, and João Gilberto, for example. This year promises to perhaps surpass even those when Alice Coltrane is joined by Charlie Haden, Roy Haynes, and her son, Ravi Coltrane, in a rare performance. It may just be one of the concerts of the year.
To some, Alice Coltrane may be overshadowed by her husband, the awe-inspiring John Coltrane, but don’t let that fool you. After all, who among jazz players isn’t in the shadow of the unrelenting, spiritually questing saxophonist, one of the 20th century’s towering musical figures? To many, however, the pieces Alice created as a bandleader between 1968 and 1975 have become landmarks of their own — perhaps especially in recent years with the renaissance of interest in cosmic music of all kinds. In fact, they are some of the most elevated, incandescent recordings of the 1960s and ’70s — and of any time, really.
After studying classical and gospel music as a child in Detroit, Alice McLeod was turned on to jazz by her brother, bassist Ernie Farrow. She played sessions with guitarist Kenny Burrell and shared the stage with Terry Gibbs. That’s when she and John Coltrane met. In 1966 they were married. It was the same year John would break up his classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. With his new quintet, including Alice, Garrison, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders, John began his spiritual quest, which took him away from the modal jazz (improvisations based on scales, or modes, rather than chords) of his hits like “My Favorite Things” to the controversial outer regions of jazz on blistering free albums such as Meditations and Interstellar Space (both Impulse!, 1965 and 1967). Here, Alice’s adventurous and spiritual musical story took flight.
Though all of the trappings of jazz are in her music — and certainly, with her surname, she will always be defined by the genre — Alice Coltrane’s sound is something else.
“Well, we put labels on everything, don’t we?” Alice, 69, suggests, speaking from her home near Los Angeles, where she runs the John Coltrane Foundation with her daughter Michelle, as well as her ashram, where she teaches as a minister. “And that’s OK. I don’t see any harm in it. It lets the people go to a location where they can say, ‘OK, yeah, I understand what you’re speaking.’ But I know it’s something else. It’s much more than that. In music you hear experiences. You hear challenges.”
John died in 1967, arguably at the peak of his powers. He’d been incorporating motifs from the East, reaching for something otherworldly in scope. Alice continued playing with his last group, including Garrison, Sanders, and Ali. After a trip to India in 1970 to follow guru Swami Satchidananda, her music began to evolve, finding an altogether unique spot between the not unrelated worlds of ecstatic jazz and classical Indian forms, even Western classical music (see her interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird on Lord of Lords [Impulse!, 1973]). Pivotal albums like A Journey in Satchidananda, Universal Consciousness, and World Galaxy (all on Impulse!, 1970, 1971, and 1971) hold a rarefied place in the 20th-century canon. Playing harp, Wurlitzer organ, and piano, she created a style and sound that are impossible to forget — swirling harp arpeggios, long-held organ notes, and fluttering piano play among shimmering sleigh bells, tamboura, occasional tablas, and often large string sections. If it is jazz at all, it is astral jazz. Or perhaps it is what new age music, that most maligned of genres, should have been: challenging, all encompassing, ecstatic, ancient, timeless.
It’s no surprise to find devotion is of such importance to Alice, whose song titles reference nearly all cultural myths and spiritual traditions. Unsurprisingly, you won’t find dogma at the root of her devotion.
“We have our one sun in the universe,” she muses. “How many different names is it known by — through all the different languages? But it’s providing that heat and that power and energy to all of us here and throughout the rest of the universe.
“I feel that throughout our lives, if we know where to look, where to research, we will have discovery. We will find we are so much alike as humanity. We might try to focus on differences and cultural circumstances and boundaries and all these things, but as humanity, we are so close that really, we are basically one.” SFBG
ALICE COLTRANE QUARTET
Sat/4, 8 p.m.
Nob Hill Masonic Center
1111 California, SF
$25–$85
1-800-850-SFJF
www.sfjazz.org
Rock between wars: Ecstatic Sunshine
Vocalless but intensely lyrical electric-guitar duo Ecstatic Sunshine take risks on their first non-CD-R release, Freckle Wars (Carpark) — namely by eschewing a drummer or even a drum machine despite a tendency to craft manic post-rock buildups that seem to predict explosive toms and thundering cymbals. But these happy rockers are more interested in preparing sunshine than predicting rain. For two guys with guitars, they make remarkably unindulgent music.
“Most of the songs took us months to write,” Ecstatic Sunshiner Dustin Wong said on the phone from the group’s Baltimore practice space. It’s no accident that the second guitar — or one of them anyway; they’re well blended — seems to speak with a witty, melodic voice on tunes like the cascading “Power Ring,” which sounds like a deconstructed Kaki King tune, and “Beetle,” which resonates like an early Nintendo soundtrack made with an open guitar tuning on a beat-up Strat. When the Japan-raised Wong went back to Tokyo for a summer, co-Sunshiner Matthew Papich “sent e-mails with MP3s of new ideas,” Wong said. “He would record one part of the song at a time — an intro, for example — then I would record another track and send it back.” “Power Ring” is one such song. It’s as if they’ve boiled their musical ideas down to their essence.
Next on the phone, Papich told the same story, audibly excited about the musical friendship, which has only grown stronger since they signed to Carpark Records after founder Todd Hyman found out about them through Baltimore City Paper. Both musicians feel supported by the local scene. “For me, what distinguishes the scene in Baltimore — at least the one that we’re a part of — is its sense of humor and whimsy. It’s very positive, and everyone has a good time at shows,” Wong explained.
Papich and Wong met in art school when Wong, after completing two years at the California College of the Arts, transferred to the Maryland Institute College of Art. Papich had only played in grindcore bands — and not much since high school — before he started jamming with Wong for a friend’s art project.
They saw a similar spark in each other — perhaps the drive to make music with the wild vision and focused craft required by the visual arts world. “We were working with more abstract structures where we don’t repeat things,” Wong said.
There isn’t a boring moment on Freckle War’s 12 zippy, bittersweet tunes, though some sound raw — as in scratchy and frenetic — for the sake of getting someone’s attention. But so what? Wong left the CCA and San Francisco behind for no particular reason — if only we can listen with the same abandon.
Leaving San Francisco meant leaving old musical ideas behind. “Sometimes we get too comfortable with a certain structure, and then we break through that comfort zone,” he said. “To be comfortable is to be boring, and that’s not a place that I want to be in for writing music.” (Ari Messer)
ECSTATIC SUNSHINE
Wed/1, 9 p.m.
Hotel Utah Saloon
500 Fourth St., SF
$10
(415) 546-6300
All that jazz
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Anyone who’s experienced the aural carnage spewed by Wolf Eyes can confirm the patience required to endure their shows.
The Michigan noise-ticians — comprising Nathan Young, John Olson, and newest member Mike Connelly — vigilantly carve a slow burner of nauseating sounds and mangled rhythms into a single, decaying pulse while a thundering reverberation slowly boosts the anticipation of a jam-packed throng.
The trio toy with duct-taped noisemaking appliances, sheet metal, and tapes. Though a Wolf Eyes’ song substructure lacks any linear beat, a stray headbanger or two can be seen freaking out to the grumbling emanation of oscilutf8g fizzles, hisses, and wheezes. Spectators muffle their ears with their hands and contort their faces as a wall of scraping feedback mounts in tension.
Then with the blink of an eye, free terror and industrial bombast rain down on the crowd in fist-pumping torrents as the band members convulse and bang their bodies against their instruments. The pounding fuzz of detuned bass, prickly saxophone, and bottom-heavy drum machine hardens and shakes a club’s foundation with paint-peeling tumult.
Young slobbers like a rabid animal and shouts into the microphone with throat-straining appeal. Connelly claws maniacally at his guitar while the sleeveless Olson slams his arms down on his electronic box or gong.
It’s an adrenaline rush that flickers like a strobe bulb set on light speed. It’s amplifier worship for flapping subwoofers, though some listeners aren’t so receptive to the chaos. This is something Wolf Eyes have grown accustomed to after tours with ex-member Andrew W.K. and Sonic Youth — and welcome with open arms.
“You play your best when you’re playing in front of people who do not want to hear you,” says Olson from a tour stop in Birmingham, Ala. “You can’t always play in front of the same people or your music will go nowhere.”
Like such fellow noise polluters as Sightings, Wolf Eyes are no strangers to fabricating all sorts of ugly racket. Since the late ’90s, when Young hatched Wolf Eyes initially as a solo endeavor, until Olson and former member Aaron Dilloway climbed aboard, the group have endlessly documented their music on homemade CD-Rs and cassettes.
In a move that had critics and fans alike scratching their heads, the band signed with Sub Pop in 2004. Olson proclaims that the group’s association with the onetime grunge record label, which now releases albums by the Postal Service and Hot Hot Heat, “started off as a total retarded joke.” A friend who was working with Sub Pop at the time drunkenly suggested the band when the label asked him whom it should sign next.
“They said, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea,’” Olson recalls. “They flew out to see us at a gig, and we were in shock.”
While only a few Wolf Eyes albums — namely those put out by Sub Pop — have seen the light of day in music stores, most of the band’s hard-to-find recordings have been released on Olson’s American Tapes label and Dilloway’s Hanson Records. (In the past two years alone the band has also released Fuck Pete Larsen [Wabana], Black Vomit [Victo], Solo [Troubleman Unlimited], and Equinox [Troniks].) Olson reveals that the group has been criticized for putting out too much material, but fans are free to pick and choose.
“I think a lot of people’s best work is the stuff not intended to be on the big releases,” Olson explains. “For instance, Black Dice only put out big releases, and I think that’s a shame because you miss out on the failures. Failures are just as interesting as the successes.”
If that’s the case, Wolf Eyes’ new full-length, Human Animal (Sub Pop), would mingle perfectly among past releases. Though the disc isn’t too far from the deathlike electronic dissonance that Wolf Eyes devised on their Sub Pop debut, Burned Mind (2004), Human Animal flows like two meaty chapters — making it seem like “more of a conversational piece,” as Olson describes it.
The band’s decision to substitute Hair Police’s Connelly for the departed Dilloway does Wolf Eyes justice as well, giving them a seasoned feel. Past recordings such as Burned Mind tended to blow up and then taper off into omnidirectional soundscapes — Human Animal’s tracks are more reserved in mood and command. Though past albums such as Slicer (Hanson, 2002), with its crackling fissures, and Dread (Bulb, 2001), with its sonic assaults, are distinctive in their own right, the unpleasant soundscapes of Human Animal actually sound like real songs, a feat the band had yet to accomplish.
The album’s first three numbers embody a creepy ambience that prepares the listener for the recording’s interior turbulence. The pieces become more galvanic as the album chugs along, whether through popcorn-inflected drum frenzies (“Rusted Mange”), bestial snorts and drones (“Leper War”), or the band’s punishing take of No Fucker’s “Noise Not Music.” “It doesn’t sound much different from the original,” says Olson with a laugh. “But we totally massacred the lyrics.”
Given the grinding assault that the song exhibits on Human Animal, it’ll be fun to hear it magnified, in addition to the rest of the album, live.
To Olson, the pieces are so simple that it’s easy to flesh them out and switch up the tone — it just comes down to maintaining a catalytic framework from which to improvise. In that sense, he explains, “Wolf Eyes is not too far from a traditional jazz band.” SFBG
WOLF EYES
Nov. 11, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
The sound of evil
› duncan@sfbg.com
Metal people scare me.
Not in an “ooh, I’m scared” kind of way, but in an “oh, that’s sad,” arrested development kind of way.
This is especially true of the black metal cabal. Black metal is supposedly the be-all and end-all of evil, and it’s just so camp that it’s silly. Everyone’s got a fake metal name (Necronomicon or Umlaut), panda bear Kiss tribute makeup (I mean, corpsepaint), and homemade nail-spike armbands. Don’t forget the unreadable band logo that looks like cleverly arranged twigs. Clearly, these are people who spend as much time rehearsing their look in front of a mirror as they do rehearsing their music in the studio, if not more.
Which is why Ludicra is one of the few bands generally classified as black metal that I’ll bother with. For one thing, the group includes vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman and guitarist–backing vocalist Christy Cather — they’re not in the same old heavy metal boys club.
More importantly, when I want to hear heavy music, I want it to intersect with my life. I haven’t been burning churches or worshipping Thor lately. If I want to hear some fairy-tale shit, I’ll cut out the middleman and listen to Ride of the Valkyries. Alienation, loneliness, the death of relationships, and the sense of anonymity in being yet another face in a big city — this is stuff I can relate to. “Something big and bright/ Looms outside my window/ Choked with promise/ Smothered in hope/ Days plod on like machines of ceaseless ruin/ Lost in a forest of haunted buildings.” These are the opening lines of “Dead City” from Ludicra’s new album, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis (Alternative Tentacles), which quotes Saint Jerome, via Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, meaning “dregs of the city, law of the earth.” Jerome was referring to Christ’s apostles and how they were the lowliest scumbags teaching the highest truth. This is echoed in the album’s verminous cover art: restrained line drawings of roaches, ants, rats, flies, and a club-footed pigeon. The meek shall inherit the earth — or at least the urban parts — but they probably won’t be walking on two legs.
Although it’s not necessarily meant to be a concept album, Fex Urbis feels like one to me: five epic tracks, the longest almost a dozen minutes, about the entropy of modern city living. From that hopeful light outside the window, just out of reach, to “the sign that modern times is finally crashing down” in the final track, “Collapse,” the full-length reminds me of the Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn (Neurot, 2005), which, in turn, reminds me of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. For all its double-bass drum bombast, dark screams, and perfectly timed twin-guitar riffing, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis has more in common with Philip Glass’s score to that film than with anything released by Mayhem.
Putting in the CD for the first time, I was kind of spooked out by Shanaman’s voice. It’s an otherworldly death rattle. But when juxtaposed with both the lyrics and the relatively clean backing vocals, also sung by Shanaman, the result isn’t evil — a tone that has held so much sway over the metal community for so many years after the first, eponymous Black Sabbath album — but heavy. The music is epic without being cheesy fantasy, which makes it resonate.
I think it’d be fair to say at this point that I don’t believe in evil. I believe ignorance and delusion exist at the base of willful choices. Evil is supernatural. Ignorance is human and therefore that much scarier. Even on Halloween, nothing is going to reach out from the land beyond and get you.
Sure, Shanaman’s voice sounds evil, but when I talked to her in person, the first word that came to mind was sweet. She laughs easily, sometimes because she thinks something is funny but mostly out of nervousness, it seems. She’s a self-admitted “total choir geek.”
Drummer Aesop Hantman knew he wanted to be in a band with her since the mid-’90s, when he was in Hickey and she was in the local noise-grind act Tallow. “Here was this totally demure, nice girl that would fucking explode,” he says in a phone interview. “It was really unnerving.”
Ludicra, which includes guitarist John Cobbett and bassist Ross Sewage, are likewise unnerving. They remind you that just because there’s no bogeyman under your bed and Satan is real only to country bumpkins like the Louvin Brothers and unrepentant metal geeks, it doesn’t mean you won’t be swallowed up by forces greater than yourself: “Gone are the days of reckless vanity,” Shanaman howls as the album winds down. “Gone are the old songs from the shore…. Here’s the end of what we have dreamt of. Here’s the face of the collapse.” SFBG
LUDICRA
Tues/31, 9 p.m.
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
$7
(415) 552-7788
Online Exclusive: Method Man at the crossroads
a&eletters@sfbg.com
When a bumped phone interview with hip-hop legend and putf8um artist Method Man mushroomed into a proposed
backstage post-show encounter, I naturally jumped at the chance.
Being a devotee of the ultimately more funk-based grooves of Bay Area hip-hop, I tend not to pay
attention to the doings of NYC, and I can’t claim to have ever followed the Wu-Tang Clan in general or Meth
in particular, though I have always admired both from afar. Yet one needn’t follow the Big Apple’s scene in
great detail to appreciate its impact, and with Meth’s successful film and TV career, most recently as a recurring character in this season of HBO’s cop drama The Wire, one needn’t even listen to hip-hop anymore
to appreciate his.
This situation is exactly what’s troubling Method Man. His very success in the cultural mainstream, he
feels, has been held against him by the hip hop-industry, a curious situation considering
mainstream success is the perceived goal and direct subject matter of most raps these days. Unlike the
recent fashion among rappers like Andre3000 to pooh-pooh their interest in music in favor of their
“acting career,” Meth wants to be known primarily as an MC. But Hollywood success has proved to be a
slippery slope, paved by Ice-T and Ice Cube — each in his turn the most terrifying, authentic street rapper
imaginable — to the end of your hit-making potential in hip-hop.
Couple this perception with Meth’s vocal challenges of the effect of corporate media consolidation, and it’s
not difficult to imagine why Def Jam released his fourth solo album, 4:21: The Day After, without a peep
at the end of August, as if the label had written him off despite his track record of one gold and two
putf8um plaques.
Still, no one who’s heard the angry, defiantly shitkicking 4:21 (executive produced by the RZA, Erick
Sermon, and Meth himself) or saw the show Meth put on that evening (leaping from the stage to the bar and
running across it by way of introduction, later executing a backwards handspring from the stage into the crowd by way of ending) could possibly doubt his vitality as an MC. He put on a long, exhausting show,
heavy with new material, that utterly rocked the packed house.
Shortly after the show ended, I was brought backstage by Meth’s road manager, 7, to a tiny corridor of a
dressing room crammed with various hangers on. A man in a warm-up suit with a towel over his head was
sitting alone on a short flight of steps in the center of the room.
“That’s him,” 7 said, before disappearing to take care of other business.
It was like being sent to introduce yourself to a boxer who’d just finished a successful but punishing
brawl. The face that looked up at my inquiry was that of a man who’d retreated somewhere far away into
himself, requiring a momentary effort to swim to the surface. Quite suddenly I found myself face to face
with Method Man, whose presence immediately turned all heads in the room our way as he invited me to sit down
for a brief discussion of his new album and his dissatisfaction with his treatment by the music
industry.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: I read the statement on your Web site [www.method-man.com] in which you
discuss your problems with the industry. Could you describe the problems you’ve been having?
METHOD MAN: My big problem with the industry is the way they treat hip-hop artists as opposed to artists
in other genres. Hip-hop music, they treat it like it’s fast food. You get about two weeks of promotion
before your album. Then you get the week of your album, then you get the week after, then they just
leave you to the dogs.
Whereas back in the day, you had artists in development, a month ahead of time before you even
started your campaign, to make sure that you got off on the right foot.
Nowadays it’s like there’s nobody in your corner anymore. Everybody’s trying to go into their own
little club, for lack of a better word. Everybody has their own little cliques now. Ain’t no money being
generated so the labels are taking on a lot of artists because of this at once that they don’t even have
enough staff members to take care of every artist, as an individual. Their attention is elsewhere, or only
with certain people.
SFBG: Your new single [“Say,” featuring Lauryn Hill] suggests you’ve had problems with the way critics have
received your recent work and even with the radio playing your records. How can someone of your status
be having trouble getting spins?
MM: You know what it is, man? A lot of people have come around acting like I’m the worst thing that ever
happened to hip-hop, as good as I am.
Hating is hating. I’ve been hated on, but just by the industry, not in the streets. They never liked my crew
[the Wu-Tang Clan] anyway. They think we ain’t together anymore and they try to pick at each and
every individual. Some motherfuckers they pick up. Other people they just shit on. I guess I’m just the
shittee right now, you know what I mean?
SFBG: Do you think it has to do with the age bias in hip-hop? The idea an MC is supposed to be 18 or 20?
MM: You know what I think it is? As our contracts go on, we have stipulations where, if we sell a certain
amount of albums, [the labels] have to raise our stock. A lot of times dudes just want to get out their
contracts so they can go independent and make more money by themselves. There’s a lot of factors that
play into it.
SFBG: Are you not getting enough label support?
MM: A label only does so much anyway. It’s your team inside your team that makes sure that you got a video.
Or that you got that single out there, or that your tour dates are put together correctly. The labels,
they basically just do product placement. They make sure that all your stuff is in the proper place where
it’s supposed to be at. They’re gonna make sure your posters are up. They’re going to make sure that
they’re giving out samples of other artists that are coming out also. [But i]t’s really up to us [the
artists] to make sure our music is going where it’s supposed to.
Right now there’s so many artists people can pick and choose from, don’t nobody like shit no more.
SFBG: Do you think you’re getting squeezed out of radio play as a result of corporate media
conslidation?
MM: Absolutely; this shit ain’t nothing new. It isn’t just happening to me. It’s been going on since dudes
have been doing this hip-hop music. They bleed you dry and then they push you the fuck out.
That’s why I always stress to the fans to take your power back. I always hear people talking about things
like, “Damn, what happened to these dudes? What happened to these guys? I always liked their shit.”
But the fans, not just the industry, tend to turn their backs on dudes. They get fed so much bullshit,
they be like, “Fuck it; I’m not dealing with that shit. I’m going to listen to this.”
SFBG: So what about your acting career? Do you feel like you’ve been overexposed as an actor or that
you’ve been spread too thin and are readjusting your focus?
MM: Fuck Hollywood, B.
SFBG: But I heard you say on the radio today you wanted to play a crackhead and get an Oscar….
MM: I do want to play a crackhead in a movie. I’m going to be a crackhead who dies of an overdose at the
end of the movie, and people cry, and I’m going to get me an Oscar. But fuck Hollywood; tell ‘em to come see
me. Tell ‘em to come to my door.
SFBG: Obviously, from what you said during the show and the lyrics on 4:21: The Day After you haven’t
renounced smoking marijuana, so could you discuss the concept behind “4:21”? Is it about the difficulties
of living the hard-partying lifestyle of the rap artist?
MM: It was just symbolic of a moment of clarity for me. I made a symbol for myself of a moment of
clarity. You know I’ve always been an avid 4:20 person. I like to get out there and smoke with the
best of them. But I picked “4:21” as like, the day after. I got tired of people running up on me and
being like, “You was funny in that movie,” because I was an MC first and foremost. It used to be like, “Yo,
that fuckin’ verse you did on that song, that was hot.” Now it’s like, “My kids love you; they love that
movie, How High.”
It gets to the point when even when I’m having a serious moment, or a serious conversation, people
laugh at the shit like it’s funny. But they laugh cause they thinking of the movie; they thinking of
some sitcom shit.
SFBG: Besides yourself and RZA, Erick Sermon executive produced the album. Can you talka bout your
connection with him?
MM: I’ve been fuckin’ with E ever since I’ve been fuckin’ with Redman. E knows what I like, you know
what I’m saying? The same way he knows what Redman likes. And RZA, that’s a given right there. I’ve been
down with RZA’s shit A1 since day one.
SFBG: 4:21 also features a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When did you guys record this track?
MM: “Dirty Meth” — that’s a posthumous joint with O.D.B. It was after he was gone already. I tell everyone
that so they know.
SFBG: But he seems to permeate the new album.
MM: He does. Good word, too. He permeates it.
Surfing new turf
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Listening to the warm analogs, e-bowed guitar, and post-jazz swing that manifest on “Medium Blue” off Surf Boundaries (Ghostly International) — one of two new albums by Christopher Willits — you might assume that the instrumentation was performed by an ensemble of helping hands rather than simply the Bay Area electronic musician. And you’d be half right. The 28-year-old Kansas City, Mo., native executes many of the album’s compelling melodies and fizzling, ambient textures on guitar, laptop, and synths — aided at times by compañeros including Adam Theis, Brad Laner, and notably, R&B-pop vocalist Latrice Barnett on the calming orchestrations of stringed instruments and horns.
“My name’s on the record, but tons of collective energy came into making it happen,” explains Willits at a Mission District bar. “I outsourced some things to the brilliant friends around me.”
Their impact is evident: the CD shifts dynamically from the usual guitar-run-through-a-laptop drone and fuzz of Willits’s live sets. He says that he hopes to someday put together a band to perform a release like Surf Boundaries on tour. That plan isn’t a surprise, considering Willits’s determination to always have a full plate.
The Mills College graduate’s musical career has quickly taken flight since his move to the Bay in 2000. It’s amazing that Willits even has time for solo endeavors between playing with Flössin — his side project with Hella’s Zach Hill featuring guest noisemaking from Kid606, the Advantage’s Carson McWhirter, and Matmos — and ongoing collaborations with avant-garde musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, and former Tool bassist Paul d’Amour. When not on tour, Willits spends his time at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, where he began teaching digital audio workshops five years ago. With John Phillips, he also founded Overlap.org, an online community that aims to give exposure to electronic and experimental artists through blog feeds, podcasts, and live music events.
Much of Willits’s work as a solo artist and a collaborator is documented on labels such as Taylor Deupree’s 12K and Sub Rosa, but his recent alliance with the Midwestern electronic imprint Ghostly International may prove the most promising. “I really like Ghostly, because they’re more into artist development rather than boxing in artists’ sounds and constraining them from branching off,” Willits says.
Likewise, his latest offerings are all over the sonic map. The art alone for Surf Boundaries illustrates its ethereal mood: soft hues delicately wash images of animals scattered around a portrait of Willits. The music within strikes a wonderful symphonic balance between electronic composition and live instrumentation as Willits and his collaborators frolic with a blend of jubilant French pop, glitchy guitar, and shimmering psychedelia.
Along with Surf Boundaries’ cozy, sleepy appeal comes Willits’s shrill wake-up call with guitarist Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company) — the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. The space pop–oriented unit gives the Creation Records class of ’91 competition with white-noise guitar treatments and alt-rock rhythms.
The duo met through mutual friend Kid606, and for Willits the collaboration was a dream come true.
“Laner is one of my guitar heroes,” he says, adding that when he first listened to his old Medicine cassette in high school, he mistook Laner’s nails-on-chalkboard approach to guitar playing for a stereo malfunction.
“I realized that the way he’s making that sound is that he’s running all his guitar effects into a shitty four-track and then cranking the preamps up on it, so it’s getting this full …” — Willits makes a fast, circular motion with his arms — “whish!”
Released in August as Ghostly’s first full-length available exclusively via download, NVSO’s The Right Kind of Nothing highlights Laner’s signature guitar bluster and Willits’s ability to dabble subtly in an aggregation of soundscapes. What results is a continuous squall of beaming shoegaze discord that feels like sunshine bursting into a dark room — only to be broken by heavy kraut rock tempos and Swervedriver guitars.
Though Surf Boundaries and The Right Kind of Nothing radically differ in sound and structure, both discs showcase Willits’s ambition to crack the electronic mold and move toward a contemporary vein of experimental rock.
“All I’m trying to do is feel out my own energy and relationship to my creative process,” Willits explains. “I could have never envisioned the albums sounding the way they do. I love being surprised by my own creativity.” SFBG
CHRISTOPHER WILLITS
With Daedelus, Caural, and Thavius Beck
Fri/20, 9 p.m.
Bar of Contemporary Art
414 Jessie, SF
$10
(415) 777-4278
www.sfboca.com
www.overlap.org
Hailing a Japanoise guitar maestro
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FULL CIRCLE For more than three decades Masayuki Takayanagi (1932–1991) has served as a cult figure to a small but rabid coterie of listeners searching for the roots of extremity in improvised music and free jazz. The Japanese guitarist has received kudos from renowned experimentalists like John Zorn and Otomo Yoshihide yet has remained obscure because his recorded output has been generally unavailable. During the last decade a slew of his reissued recordings have been available only as hard-to-find, pricey imports, while the original vinyl pressings have changed hands for ridiculous amounts of money.
So what’s the big deal? Beginning in the late ’60s, Takayanagi blazed kamikaze musical assaults of a previously unheard violence and abstraction in the jazz idiom. Long before the pure Japanoise of artists like Merzbow, Masayuki Takayanagi threw down a gauntlet. “I always feel that beauty of form and tone are lies. Playing music that’s muddy and violently splattered is an essential way of getting at the truth,” he once wrote. This approach manifested itself in a concept he called “mass projection” — a gushing, sweaty arc of maximum density and energy that was savagely defiant of melody, interplay, and structure.
Unfortunately, a good portion of Takayanagi’s early free-music output is marred by lousy recording quality: early ’70s performances on the DIW and PSF labels suffice as archival documents but barely hint at the true strength and articulation of the music. The newly issued CD versions of the mythically scarce 1975 diptych Axis: Another Revolvable Thing Volume 1 and 2 (Doubt Music, Japan) should rectify this situation, presenting almost 100 focused minutes of Takayanagi and his classic New Directions Unit in full fury.
Recorded live in Tokyo on Sept. 5, 1975, the quartet revealed their manifesto in six movements, roughly building from agitated, spacious quietude to climactic, sustained catharsis. Although the volumes mix up the sequence, the release’s freshly translated liner notes suggest that the music can also be pondered in the order it was executed. The first part — a display of Takayanagi’s more minimal “gradual projection” style — evokes the low-volume scuttling of English guitar pioneer Derek Bailey’s early Company groups. Spotlighting acoustic guitar, flute, slide whistle, rubbery acoustic bass, and skittering percussion, the music is pervaded with a deceptively delicate sense of restraint. A second gradual projection concerns isolated, dynamic sounds that burst through silence in their own mysterious tempos. After a few minutes, Kenji Mori’s lumpy bass clarinet croaks while Takayanagi surprisingly sneaks in a few brief melodic shards that allude to his straight-ahead roots. Part three — a dull drum solo — fills space before the final half of the concert: three mass projections. The first builds very slowly, with sustained cymbal wash and sinister tremolo bass bowing before revealing the perverted grunts from Takayanagi’s now-electrified strings. The second pushes the intensity up but still feels like a tease, threatening to explode before receding into sustained tones penetrated by pricking soprano saxophone curlicues and tumbling percussion.
In the final segment the floodgates open, and we are assaulted by a lengthy tirade that appears to start at maximum intensity but manages to blow straight through the roof, ascending into unknown levels of forceful cruelty. Hiroshi Yamazaki’s superhumanly dense drum attack violently propels the onslaught. Bassist Nobuyoshi Ino ditches his main ax, creating an acidic wall of fierce noise on cello while Takayanagi goads his guitar into shrieks of feedback and crusty slabs of distorted density, bashing it with a metal slide. Intermittently cutting through the din on his alto saxophone, the unflappable Mori is eerily eloquent. Throughout this hypnotic overload of information, one might concentrate on the detail of parts, the texture of the whole, or nothing at all. After 16 minutes the saxophone lapses into outright screaming. Takayanagi’s guitar coasts arrogantly over the damage in thick sheets of atonality before rising into dog-whistle range, calling an end to a harrowing 22 minutes of sustained devastation. If only the first and last sequences of this concert were paired alone on one release, Axis might have been Takayanagi’s single finest recording. With these discs, at least, the secret is out, and the tortured innovations of an obscure musical pioneer are finally revealed to a wider audience seeking buckets of blood in their music. SFBG
Straight outta Mill Valley
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Some time has passed since people routinely looked in 924 Gilman Street’s direction to familiarize themselves with what’s new and interesting in Bay Area rock. However, this doesn’t mean that nothing worthwhile passes through its doors. Topping the bill of the annual Punk Prom earlier this year were the Abi Yoyos, whose cavalier, recklessly hooky normal-dude brand of punk is totally outlook brightening.
Over beer and burritos at a San Francisco taquería, guitarist-vocalist-songwriter Matt Bleyle and lead vocalist Shawn Mehrens, both 21, recently strolled down a nearly five-year-long footpath of memories, including problematic tour vans and onstage pleas for Albuterol inhalers. Unlike a lot of local groups, the Abi Yoyos openly rep the North Bay: namely, Mill Valley. Its members’ paths crossed when Bleyle, Mehrens, and bassist Jeff Mitchell attended Tamalpais High.
“The band was sort of an offshoot of the conversations that Matt and I would have while taking all-night walks in Mill Valley,” Mehrens said. “Nothing is open past 10 p.m., and nobody really presents any options as to how to change things aside from maybe starting a band.” Originally, they played straight hardcore; since then, they’ve adopted a more complex, melodic approach. They cite Charles Darwin — or as Mehrens calls him, “Chuck D” — and Phil Ochs as inspiration for their evolution, along with bands like los Rabbis and the Fleshies.
“Originally we were called Gutter Snatch, as we tried to just come up with the most offensive name possible,” Bleyle said. The moniker Abi Yoyos came to pass courtesy of a Pete Seeger song and an African tale that prophesied “if we turn our back on music and religion, Abi Yoyo [a bogeyman who symbolizes Western civilization] will come and get us.”
The musicianship of the band — which includes drummer Blaine Patrick and saxophonist Kyle Chu — is remarkably solid. “Blaine has won ‘Outstanding Soloist’ awards at Stanford Jazz Camp,” Bleyle explained. “Jeff was in a band called Turbulence that sounded like a cross between Weezer and Hendrix.” Chu joined the band after the Abi Yoyos’ first 7-inch, “The World Is Not My Home” (Riisk), and the lineup solidified to what it appears as on their new debut, Mill Valley (Big Raccoon).
To put out that record, Mehrens worked 80-hour weeks between three jobs, including one at ellusionist.com, a magicians’ supply Web site. “We’re really hard to pigeonhole,” said Mehrens, who now runs Big Raccoon. His friend Corbett Redford, who ran S.P.A.M. Records, along with other industry-seasoned pals, gave the Abi Yoyos the guidance needed to release Mill Valley, an altogether inspired, infectious set of songs.
“I think we can all agree on our hometown heroes,” Bleyle said with a smirk. Sammy Hagar was one of the first names to be mentioned, along with “the guy who invented the toilet-seat guitar,” Huey Lewis, Clover, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Cruisin’ and boozin’, my ass!” exclaimed Mehrens to much laughter. “I hate Sammy Hagar.”
Instead the band takes after punkier forefathers. John from the Fleshies introduced the Abi Yoyos to the Punk Prom audience as what Flipper would sound like “if Flipper were good.” After a few minutes of searching for the drummer, that description gained credibility as the band, donning dresses and sparkly makeup, ripped into their cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.”
They routinely jam “Helter Skelter” in their practice space — a large metal storage box with electrical outlets by San Quentin State Prison — skirting lunacy in their proximity to inmates and in their unusual reverence for both the sticky melodies of ’60s pop and the fast, snotty punk that emerged from LA in the ’80s. In a scene where, in Mehrens’s words, “image means a lot,” the Abi Yoyos tend to defy punker conventions, adopting an unusually eclectic aesthetic. “Quagmire” moves from medium-paced hardcore to a full-blown anthem about halfway through — a nod to Bleyle’s recent “openness to prog” and odd song structures — and they pop hooks in a forcefully shameless manner; Mehrens was, after all, “raised on R&B and Motown.”
“We have friends in a lot of different scenes,” Mehrens said. “Bands that play hardcore, dancy punk, crusty punk, and some that don’t do anything at all. At every show, there are different types of kids rockin’ out.”
Their first nationwide tour began in late July and has included such transcendent experiences as Dumpster diving, playing a farm in Las Cruces, and shooting Roman candles out the passenger-side window of their van on the Williamsburg Bridge. “We’re a little too weird for the South,” said Mehrens by phone from Ohio. “And one show flyer described us as ‘strange punk,’ which we all think is pretty awesome.”
With any luck, their sharp wit and taut songwriting will take them much further than would the gas tank of Sammy Hagar’s convertible. SFBG
ABI YOYOS
With This Is My Fist, Onion Flavored Rings, Giant Haystacks, and Robocop 3
Sat/21, 7 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$5
(415) 255-7227
In bed with the Long Winters
It’s become popular to characterize the Long Winters’ John Roderick as an intellectual ronin of sorts: a librarian without master who travels the countryside lending his songs and wisdom to brainy 826 benefits. Others reject this stuffy veneer outright, preferring to embrace him as a lovable vaudevillian rogue of the “song, dance, seltzer down the pants” variety.
Still, Roderick is well aware of his reputation as a mysterious dude, explaining, “It’s never been clear, even to the people close to me, whether or not I might actually be an emotionally abusive, exploitative, drunken rapist posing as a sensitive singer-songwriter, and that’s an ambiguity that I cultivate.”
His band, the Long Winters, are back with their third album, Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk), a sonic patchwork of lust, architecture, rock ’n’ roll love children, and memories of lovers past that defy destruction. Maybe. Roderick writes to ensure that his lyrics don’t bind the listener with logistical detail, preferring to provide softly focused emotional Polaroid photos. “What I’m shooting for is that the listener be able to recall their own stories — when they felt the same way,” he says. With mentions of everything from teaspoons to retired Air Force pilots, however, come fans usually seeking interpretational guidance. Why not indulge listeners with answers? “No one really wants me out in the parking lot after a show explaining my lyrics” he deadpans. “Even if a few people might think they do.”
The crazy thing is, it actually works. On “Teaspoon,” rituals of courtship, “the way that she smiles me down,” careen past as a horn section trumpets the start of a new relationship. Even if the lady in question “claims to be clowning,” the mood is clear, the butterflies in the stomach already swirling. Putting the Days to Bed’s best moment is the wistfully gorgeous “Seven,” a song that lies on its back in tall grass, staring at the sky and hoping against hope to see a lost lover’s face in the clouds. “Would you say that I/ Was the last thing you want to remember me by?” Roderick wonders aloud.
It’s this kind of masterfully eloquent longing that has built the Long Winters no small amount of indie fame. Yet while appreciative of the kudos, Roderick quickly reduces them to a digestible perspective: “I think the Long Winters fall somewhere between it being OK for us to sample some crackers from the deli tray of the Wrens without getting our hands slapped but not so far as to get drunk and spill guacamole on Sufjan Stevens’s pants.” (Kate Izquierdo)
More of Kate Izquierdo’s interview with Long Winters’ John Roderick.
LONG WINTERS
With What Made Milwaukee Famous and the Vasco Era
Fri/13, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
Sweet dreams
› kimberly@sfbg.com
“It definitely contributes to this kind of cavelike, sort of womblike environment up here.”
Tom Carter is surveying his kingdom, a.k.a. the Oakland apartment he shares with his partner, Natacha Robinson, and we both try to make the connection between Charalambides, his 15-year-old duo with ex Christina Carter, and the hundreds of Playmobil figurines that populate damn near every surface around him. The only Playmobil-free space seems to be Carter’s cranny-cum-closet-cum-studio housing a computer equipped with Pro Tools and sundry plug-ins that simulate analog effects. Otherwise the Lego-like pieces cover his mantles, bookshelves, lintels, and alcoves, reenacting the Crusades, banquets, pirate ship scenes, you name it. In front of Carter on the table is Robinson’s latest tableau in progress: a petite pair of anthropomorphized mice in wedding garb, fashioned from Sculpey, next to a pile of teensy clay food.
It’s a distracting collection, yet the multitudes also seem to mirror Carter’s prodigious creative output: in addition to Charalambides — which most recently released one of the more straight-laced recordings of its lifespan, A Vintage Burden (Kranky), an almost slow-fi folk album that manages to be both haunting and achingly beautiful — Carter is in Badgerlore (the Bay Area supergroup of sorts with Seven Rabbit Cycle’s Rob Fisk, Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, Yellow Swans’ Pete Swanson, Grouper’s Liz Harris, and Skygreen Leopards’ Glenn Donaldson); Zaika with Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards; Kyrgyz with Loren Chasse and Christine Boepple of the Jewelled Antler Collective and Robert Horton; and various stirring CD-R projects with solely Horton (the latest, Lunar Eclipse [Important], collects 73 minutes of terrifying drone, conjured with the aid of e-bow, boot, vibrator, and field recordings). All of which led Carter, who also records other musicians regularly and continuously toils on live CD-Rs, to quit his job as a manager at Berkeley’s Half Price Books in order to concentrate on performing live with Charalambides, which plays its first show in the Bay Area this week since Carter moved to town in 2004. The duo has also lined up fall dates at Arthur Nights in LA and All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK.
There’s obviously a lot on Carter’s plate — we’re not even going to start with the dusting. But Carter is no one’s toy, despite his laid-back style and acid-washed drawl and the fact that Charalambides is now catching a second wind of attention from publications like Wire after putting out vinyl-only recordings throughout the last decade on respected underground imprint Siltbreeze.
Carter began Charalambides in 1991 with fellow Houston record store employee Christina after playing in “pretty goofy” bands like Schlong Weasel. (They named the band after a Greek surname noticed on a shopper’s check; “it was supposed to be evocative but doesn’t mean anything,” he explains.)
“I probably would have met her anyway,” Carter says now of their fateful encounter. “I knew all her boyfriends.” Nonetheless the two were wed, becoming creative partners.
Houston at that time was a hotbed of “superweird experimental stuff,” Carter says. “It was sort of grunge-influenced in a way, but it was sort of psychedelic and bizarre. People just making odd decisions based on drug use and volume.”
Third Charalambides members would come and go, like guitarist Jason Bill and pedal steel player Heather Leigh Murray, but the Carters were constants, even after they broke up in 2003. The 2004 album Joy Shapes (Kranky) documents the split. “It was kind of an intense record to make and kind of intense to listen to,” remembers Carter. “Exhausting to listen to and just exhausting all around.”
Developing their songs through improvisation and then overdubbing parts over the sounds, Charalambides dropped in and out of dormancy until 2000, mostly, Carter says, because “we were never really comfortable as a live band.” The group started to make music with an eye to performance. “We always wanted things to be somewhat formless when we approached a song, but at the same time, we wanted to kind of know what we were doing so it would actually exist as a song. What was the minimum thing you could have in a song and it still be a song?” Vintage Burden turned out to be their first “duo record” in ages, a return to the way the pair had once worked, producing sprawling psychedelic numbers, with one notable difference. Christina, who now lives in Northampton, Mass., wrote all the songs before Carter flew to her home to record on her eight-track Tascam digital recorder. Working on music was easy, he says. “Neither one of us is a particularly grudge-bearing person.”
Keep the grudges for movie-house sequels. Currently listening to ’60s West Coast rock groups like the Byrds and the Grateful Dead in addition to peers and pals like the Yellow Swans and Skaters, Carter might be considered the kick-back link between hippie experimentation of the past and the transcendent aggression of the present. “I do consider myself part of the tradition of Texas–West Coast transplants,” he says mildly. Why do so many Texans turn up on these shores? “I dunno. It’s a place to smoke weed in peace. Ha-ha-ha.” SFBG
CHARALAMBIDES
With Shawn McMillen, Hans Keller,
and Feast
Mon/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$7
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Also Tom Carter–Shawn McMillen duo, Sean Smith, and Christina Carter
Tues/17, 8 p.m.
21 Grand
416 25th St., Oakl.
$6
(510) 44-GRAND
21grand.org
Writing wrongs
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If there’s one person you would expect to condemn the present state of America’s political affairs, it would be Billy Bragg, right? Surely Britain’s punk poet laureate should be grabbing every microphone within reaching distance to decry the evils of our current administration. But surprisingly, his reaction is quite the opposite. “I’m encouraged by the results of the last two elections, because I believe that America has not yet decided what kind of country it’s going to be in the 21st century,” he says on the phone from Winnepeg.
Bragg is currently on a bit of a multitasking tour to showcase his two latest works: Volume II (YepRoc), a box set, and The Progressive Patriot, a book. While Volume II is an expected retrospective that covers the second half of Bragg’s career from 1988 onward, The Progressive Patriot is uncharted territory for the singer-songwriter, a treatise that addresses Britain’s national identity, the emergence of organized racism, and the political road that weaves between the two.
Much as in Britain, Bragg sees battles of ideology as a key proving ground in the future of our country and agrees with the concept of “two Americas” as it pertains to the states’ political climate. “On one hand you’ve got the neoconservative Christian right, who are getting everybody to vote and still can’t get a majority,” he says, “and on the other side you’ve got the more compassionate idea of America as a multicultural society, which just can’t get everybody to vote.” Yet as bleak and insurmountable a problem as this may seem, Bragg takes the long view. “I’m in a fortunate position. I have the opportunity to travel around and meet people trying to manifest that ‘other’ America. Reading local newspapers in America, you see all sorts of things that are going completely against the neoconservative agenda in some states.” Volume II picks up at a crucial period of Bragg’s career, kicking off with his 1988 release, Workers Playtime (Go! Discs/Elektra). The album marked Bragg’s transition from punk iconoclast to, as he would later affectionately come to be known, the “Bard from Barking.” Instead of using just his guitar and a portable amp as on his earlier recordings, Bragg included bits of orchestration on Workers, plus a band to accompany his songs of law, love, and everything in between. “The album of lost love. It’s my great lost soul album!” he says with a wistful chuckle.
At the heart of that bittersweet collection is the amazing “Valentine’s Day Is Over,” a woman’s lament over her lover, rough economic times, and the beatings that result. “That economy and brutality are related / Now I understand,” the protagonist explains wearily. Bragg feels a particular satisfaction with that song and the topics it tackles. “I often cite that as the ideal Billy Bragg song because politics and ‘the love song’ overlap in that song. It’s a really hard thing to do, rather than being a ‘love song writer’ or a ‘political song writer.’ I hate it when people divide those two. Life isn’t divided like that.”
The ever-encircled worlds of life and politics also led Bragg to write the new book, with the ideas spurred by everything from recent elections in his hometown to raising his young son. “A far-right political party called the BNP earned a seat on the council in my hometown of Barking, East London,” the songwriter says. “That was a real shock to me because these were the people that I came into politics fighting. I realized that it needed something more than just writing a song.” Being a father further drives his desire for intelligent debate around the future of his country. His concerns about nationalism are expressed in the interest of cohesion, not the racist ideal of exclusion. He explains, “I’m interested to hear your background, but what is important to me is how my children and your children are going to get on with each other. Everything else is secondary to that.”
As you might expect, Bragg’s MySpace page also bears the mark of his beliefs and ideas. It also contains his songs: items that were conspicuously absent during his recent showdown with the networking Web site. Having successfully lobbied MySpace to retool their artist agreement so that the site doesn’t “own” any artist’s uploaded content, Bragg is now taking on MTV Flux, another networking site that features an upload ability similar to YouTube. A video featuring his challenge to Flux dots the page, along with archival footage of him at various events, such as a concert in Washington, DC, in 2002. That day he addressed the crowd and warned them of a greater looming evil — not of conservatives or imperialism but of cynicism.
He still stands behind that message. “I know from personal experience that cynicism eats away your soul,” Bragg says. “God knows Tony Blair’s been spreading cynicism around for the last few years. I’ve had to fight my own.” SFBG
BILLY BRAGG
Thurs/5, 8 and 10:30 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$30–$35
(415) 885-0750
HARDLY STRICTLY
BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL
Sat/7, 4:40 p.m.
Speedway Meadow
Golden Gate Park, SF
Free
www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com
Restoration Hardcore
Davis might not have those frog signs along the westbound side of Highway 80 anymore — “Live in Davis because it’s green, safe, and nuclear free…. It’s academic!” — but there’s certainly no shortage of wondrous music happening there.
Exhibit A: KDVS — the UC Davis radio station, a longtime champion of alternative music and the only entirely student-run station in the UC system — is about to put on the fourth edition of “Operation: Restore Maximum Freedom,” a twice-a-year one-day music festival, the likes of which have seldom been undertaken by Northern California college radio stations.
Unlike other music festivals hawking themselves as “alternative,” O:RMF is the real thing, presenting strictly music of the compellingly weird variety without sponsored stages and pricey merch tables — by sheer dint of student-volunteer willpower. “It’s a good time out in the sunshine,” said Erik Magnuson, who DJs at KDVS in addition to holding down the station’s assistant programming directorship. “We’re able to get great acts without having to worry about advertising to offset costs.”
The festival isn’t a station fundraiser — all profits go toward future incarnations of the event — but is instead an earnest offering of experimental sounds chosen democratically in committee by station volunteers. Those volunteers run O:RMF at Woodland watering hole Plainfield Station, which KDVS events coordinator and O:RMF organizer Brendan Boyle described as a “biker bar with a quasi-Libertarian vibe.” O:RMF itself fully “represents the radio station,” Boyle continued. “We’re free-form, which is a real anomaly, and it’s a reaction to our current political climate.” Hence the military-operation-inspired name.
The first, all-ages O:RMF in May 2005 was headlined by elastic noise psychos Sightings and Elephant 6 pop oddities a Hawk and a Hacksaw, and the subsequent fests have featured bands like the increasingly relevant, drift-ambience peddlers Growing and the splendidly hard-angled post-punkers Erase Errata. In each case, KDVS has looped in some of the most keenly unconventional artists around, and the upcoming festival looks the best yet.
This time it’s drawn 17 artists of various marginal modes, all of great repute in their respective scenes: longtime glitch-head Kid606 started the Tigerbeat6 label, and quirk-folk guitarist Michael Hurley was a luminary in Greenwich Village’s 1960s folk scene. Hop around to the dance punk of Numbers and the disorienting, psychedelic hip-hop of Third Sight. The garage-punk component is damned impressive by itself: the Lamps, one of Los Angeles’s finest and an In the Red mainstay, will crack their bass-heavy fuzz whip along with Th’ Losin Streaks, whose famously fun live show begets a cleaner, more Nuggets-like, ’60s garage vibe.
Suffice to say that few stations have the guts and the cavalier student base to put on an event like this, especially one that’s plainly not out to make money. As Boyle puts it, “it’s a very real event with no bullshit attached,” and with any luck, attendees will get as stoked on smashing music industry conventions as KDVS is. (Michael Harkin)
OPERATION: RESTORE MAXIMUM FREEDOM IV
Sat/7, noon–midnight
Plainfield Station
23944 County Road 98, Woodland
$15, $10 advance; all ages
For tickets and the complete lineup, go to www.myspace.com/maximumfreedom
Rock till you drop
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“They’re the ones that pushed E-40 into hyphy,” says Hamburger Eyes photographer Dave Potes, in reference to his friends the Mall, a San Francisco art punk trio, and the hype that surrounds them.
“Yeah, we’re part of the hyphy movement,” adds Mall guitarist-keyboardist Daniel Tierney, 27, and his bandmates erupt into cacophonous chuckling.
I’ve heard the “h” word dropped incessantly for weeks now and have pretended to be hip to the Bay Area hip-hop phenomenon. As the band continues chatting about the genre and its influence on the new DJ Shadow album, bewilderment washes over me, and I hang my head and admit to having no idea what anyone’s talking about.
“You’ve got to get on the bus then,” bassist-guitarist-vocalist Ellery Samson, 29, demands when someone mentions the “yellow bus.” In unison everyone chants a couple of “da, do, do, do”s as if the composition should strike a chord, like my sister’s favorite New Kids on the Block track. I grin and nod even though I’m still puzzled.
Whether or not the Mall seriously acknowledge an affiliation to the hip-hop movement is questionable. However, while chilling over beers on a bar patio in the Mission District, I get a sense of buoyancy and selflessness from the mild-mannered band members.
“Up until last month, we all lived within three blocks of this bar,” says drummer Adam Cimino, 28, adding that this particular area definitely inspired their recent songs.
Given the languid quiet of this cool, fogless night — punctuated by the occasional crack of a cue ball or the faint sounds from the bar jukebox — it’s hard to imagine this neighborhood spawning a band whose music brims with pissed-off aggression and agitated velocity. But then, the Mall aren’t exactly from this hood. The band’s beginnings trace back to Montgomery High in Santa Rosa, where Samson and Tierney met and became friends. The pair worked on another musical project, called Downers, but soon found themselves seeking an additional element: Cimino.
Samson gave him a call. “I want to do this screamy, art fag, punk rock thing,” jokes Cimino in a mock-Samson accent, re-creating the talk. “I was, like, ‘I get it. That sounds awesome.’”
The three obtained a practice space without ever playing a note of music together and began work on the first few songs that would end up on their EP, First, Before, and Never Again (Mt. St. Mtn., 2006). From there on, the band gelled into what has become an enterprising experience for all involved.
The group’s new debut, Emergency at the Everyday (Secretariat), is an exercise in emphatic pugnacity and loud-as-shit tumult. The 13 songs — clocking in at less than 20 minutes — are punishing in scope yet danceable. Casio-pop melodies ebb and flow along a thunderous foundation of crunching guitars, plodding bass lines, and dynamite-fueled drum pops.
“We get our sound from fucking up the amps, and we don’t use distortion pedals,” Cimino explains. “It’s just little Casio keyboards and an amp turned to 10. That’s what makes it so gritty-sounding.”
Samson’s vocals add to the mélange of fuzzed-out commotion. Imagine the throaty screech of a young Black Francis shattering through an aggro mixture of angular guitar bluster and punk avidity. During the recording of the album, Samson sang through an old rotary telephone hooked up to a PA to match the distortion of the other instruments and capture the intensity of live performance.
“The music was so blown-out it was too awkward to have clean vocals,” adds a smiling Cimino. “It’s a neat trick.”
But even without the aid from the telephone, you can’t deny the hostility of Samson’s vocals. It’s surprising considering his placid demeanor.
“Everybody’s really angry right now, and we’re just as angry as anybody else,” he says.
The band backs up Samson’s statement by discussing the unending Iraq war and their disapproval of the president, and though the Mall’s songs don’t exactly cover those topics, they certainly fuel the fire. “There’s a lot of violence and frustration and boredom going on,” Cimino adds.
“Fuck, I thought it was party music, man,” Tierney chimes in, and the band bursts into another fit of laughter.
After three years together and a national tour on the horizon, including dates opening for the Slits, the Mall’s sound continues to evolve. And who knows? Maybe their direction will cross the border into genuine hyphy. Already back in the studio recording songs for another EP, the Mall aren’t holding back anything: to them, it’s all about having fun and making great music for their friends.
“It’s totally replaced skateboarding for me,” Cimino says. “I’m off work. I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t want to eat dinner. I get to hang out and play music with these guys.” SFBG
THE MALL
With the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower and Boyskout
Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com