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SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 132 • FREE

PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS DELROY EDWARDS EDDINGTON AGAIN MY BLOODY VALENTINE SORRY TO BOTHER YOU CUCO • LA LUZ • NUMB.ER AND MORE

L.A. RECORD DELROY EDWARDS PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS EDDINGTON AGAIN MY BLOODY VALENTINE SORRY TO BOTHER YOU CUCO • LA LUZ • NUMB.ER AND MORE

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SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 132 • FREE

L.A. RECORD EDDINGTON AGAIN PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS DELROY EDWARDS SORRY TO BOTHER YOU MY BLOODY VALENTINE CUCO • LA LUZ • NUMB.ER AND MORE

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SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 132 • FREE

6 numb.er bennett kogon

24 DELROY EDWARDS Chris Kissel and Zach Bilson

8 my bloody valentine tiffany anders

28 serpentwithfeet Daiana Feuer

14 NIGHTMARE AIR Julia Gibson

32 EDDINGTON AGAIN Senay Kenfe

18 MARY LATTIMORE Christina Gubala

36 CUCO Bennett Kogon

22 MICHAEL RAULT Ron Garmon

38 la luz Daiana Feuer PHOTO: CUCO

by GARI ASKEW

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EDITOR — Chris Ziegler chris@larecord.com PUBLISHER — Kristina Benson kristina@larecord.com EXECUTIVE EDITOR — Daiana Feuer daiana@larecord.com COMICS EDITOR — Tom Child tom@larecord.com FILM EDITOR — Rin Kelly rin@larecord.com DESIGNER — Sarah Bennett sarah@larecord.com ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR — Debi Del Grande debi@larecord.com WRITER AT LARGE — Ron Garmon ron@larecord.com ACCOUNTS AND ADVERTISING Kristina Benson — kristina@larecord.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Tiffany Anders, Zach Bilson, Tom Child, Miles Clements, Madison Desler, Julia Gibson, Christina Gubala, Zachary Jensen, Bennett K o g o n, E ya d Karkoutly, Senay Kenfe, Chris Kissel, sweeney kovar, Nathan Martel, Ben Salmon, Daniel Sweetland, Morgan Troper and Simon Weedn ® CONTRIBUTING DESIGNERS Kristina Benson, Jun Ohnuki CONTACT fortherecord@larecord.com EDDINGTON AGAIN COVER Gari Askew PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS COVER dana washington DELROY EDWARDS COVER Alex The Brown

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numb.er Interview by bennett kogon illustration by juliette toma Numb.er’s 2018 release Goodbye was to me a farewell to the musical trends that make a local scene feel uninspiring: led by Jeff Fribourg, a founding member of popular psych-‘gaze’ band Froth [and sometime L.A. RECORD contributor—ed.], Numb.er’s blend of punk, darkwave, and goth felt like it was written specifically for me. Fribourg’s stark vocals recall early Gun Club or Bauhaus, while the music behind him—piercing, primal, paranoid—brings to mind classics like Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen. Fribourg spoke to us now while thousands of miles away from the city he grew up in.

You’re speaking to me via long distance call from Paris—what are you doing out there?

Jeff Fribourg (vocals/synth/guitar): I’m here working for the summer. I got a job doing some graphic work for a company that’s s based here now. I’m feeling out this new weird kind of a job in a creative field I’ve always been pretty interested in. Being born and raised in L.A., that’s always been a huge part of my identity as a person. And then to strip myself of that and to go somewhere completely different where there’s a language barrier and all that … I’m having to rediscover my bearings. Especially going into it in acknowledgement of all the crazy punk shit that was going on in the late 70s and 80s …

Like all the synthwave stuff. I’ve been trying to dig deep into that musical history. So I’ve been able to meet a lot of interesting people at record stores and stuff. The guys at Born Bad Records have been showing me all sorts of really cool contemporary stuff from Paris and the region. There’s a band that I saw out here called Stratocaster that was super rad—like Parisian synthpunk. Just really wild shit.

At first listen, Goodbye doesn’t feel like the product of sunny Southern California. So if doesn’t sound like Los Angeles, where does it come from?

I’m really heavily influenced by music from all over the place. The bands that are current in L.A. right now—or over the past five-orso years—have been pulling influences from other regions and genres. Mainly for me, it’s from bands like Wire and [their record] 154 specifically. Or like Bauhaus, Tones on Tail… a lot of U,K, stuff, but not particularly British. There are so many other places that are amazing. X-Mal Deutschland from Hamburg. More on the gloomier side. But an L.A. band that’s been super influential to me is Christian Death.

Bands like them remind us that there is a grit in our city. As someone who grew up here, how do you identify with the lesstourist-y aspect of life in L.A.?

I think much of it is overlooked. For a year or so I lived in the South L.A.-Inglewood area. I walked a lot when I was there. I had a routine where every day for six months I would pack like ten rolls of film and walk down Slauson Blvd. I’d take photos until I couldn’t walk anymore. There’s so much weird industry out there that’s totally on the backburner—and 6

poverty. I grew up in El Segundo, which most people view as a little beach town. But then you’re also sandwiched between the airport, a water treatment plant—for all the shit—a fucking oil refinery, an Air Force base and Raytheon. Mattel’s even located down there.

I had Barbie in my backyard. It’s just so weird—the amount of crazy shit that’s also in LA. It’s kind of unsavory.

As a photographer, has that visual perspective affected your songwriting?

When I’m writing lyrics, I try to visualize the scenario. That plays in a lot. I like to paint a picture in my head. Like when you look at a photo, you can sometimes feel the story of the image. If you could add words to it, what would they say? I’ve been doing a lot of photography where I would walk around and shoot this kind of mundane life from this weird perspective of an outsider. I have this photo project that I’ve been doing for about eight years. Every year for Christmas I’ve gone on a trip by myself and have experienced the holiday in a different city—alone. Especially with the idea of being ‘numb’—the feeling of walking around a place that you’re unfamiliar with during a time of togetherness. Having that separation and isolation, as well as the numbness and the emptiness that comes from that. My music would definitely fit in with some of these projects that I do, so it makes sense. Simplicity, mundanity, obscurity, and the darkness within all that.

Where did you spend Christmas last year?

Last year was the one year that I didn’t do it.

I just stayed home, which was kind of crazy.

I didn’t go outside all day. The year before that, I went to El Paso. I drove all the way out there by myself and got a shitty motel. There was a hole punched in the wall of my room.

I was trying to go to Juarez. I had someone who was gonna take me across, but it’s kind of sketchy in Juarez so I just stayed in El Paso.

One year I did Disneyland, which was super bizarre. Especially because it’s actually the most crowded day of the year there.

You’ve been involved in music for some time now, first with your former band Froth and now Numb.er. How do you feel L.A.’s musical geography has shifted?

It’s super exciting right now. It felt like for a minute, there was a bit of a lull where there wasn’t too much that I was personally interested in. But right now for me, it feels

like sort of an oasis. There’s so many cool underground weirdo punk bands popping up and so many new projects from other people that were already in cool bands. And amazing new bands with people who were never in bands. There are also these cool new DIY shows. I think promoters are back to really caring about throwing these small, intimate shows. I feel like there’s a good show like almost every night in LA now. And I also have to give it up to L.A. RECORD. If it were not for this publication, there would be a lot of shit that I would have never heard.

If I don’t ask this question, someone else will. Is the dot in between ‘Numb’ and ‘er’ meant to signify anything?

It was kind of partially on accident with the dot. I wanted to call it ‘Number’—the derived form of ‘numb’—but obviously that’s spelt the same way as ‘Number’ the numeral.

I’ve always really liked the way the dictionary breaks down the pronunciation of a word, where’s like weird dashes or dots and shit. I thought having a dot there allows you to kind of take a breath and understand the meaning a little better. I’m a very visual person so I really wanted the name to have something visual to accompany it—something that wasn’t just a meaning or the word itself.

Every time I type it out, the computer thinks the dot is supposed to separate the word into some kind of a URL. I looked into getting that as our website, but it’s the most random thing. You have to be part of the country [Eritrea] or something. I tried, but ended up settling with Numb-Er. net. I always thought .net was pretty funny.

On your Bandcamp you describe your music’s exploration of different genres as ‘never committing to a singular worldview.’

What exactly does that mean?

There are so many different perspectives out there. It’s kind of disheartening to me to refer to something as just one thing. When people ask me what my music sounds like, I usually say that it’s kind of post-punk because that’s just the easiest way to explain things at this point. Not goth, but a little more grey and gloomy. Kind of cloudy. But I love all sorts of music. I love krautrock, noise, electronic dance, weird dark shit. I fucking love the Beastie Boys. There’s just so much out there that it’s difficult to commit to one specific idea or genre. I like to have the option to cross

between different sounds to tell the overall story, especially when it comes to writing a record. I don’t want to put something out there where every song sounds the exact same. I’m way more interested in telling a beautiful or meaningful story that takes you from one place to another—one that fulfills my emotions with different sorts of sounds.

Whatever works best for the idea at hand.

Looking at music, or even art in general, there are so many different ways that you should experiment with looking at it. Using different tools for different emotions. I mean, if you’re trying to make the same painting a hundred times, then you’re just going to end up making the same painting a hundred times. It could be a great painting, but it’s going to be that same painting.

Especially nowadays—we really have a lot of tools at hand.

The first song on the Numb.er record—’I Need It’—there aren’t any instruments on it.

It’s just my voice on an iPad. It was originally meant to be an exercise. But it’s great to be able to just make these sounds to explain how I feel. It doesn’t always have to be ‘Let’s just get four chords together and then we’ll have a song.’ I was having trouble fully committing to what I wanted to say. I was frustrated and had been listening to this cool Estonian rapper—this guy Tommy Cash. If you don’t know this guy, he’s insane. Also the craziest music videos in the world. Super inspiring.

There’s this song that he has that’s like dark and eerie with a lot of noises. So I was like ‘Fuck this, I’m gonna roll a beer bottle on the floor and am gonna like swish with my mouth and just montone-ly let this noise out.

Like, “uhhhhhhhh.”’ I just wanted to make something that’s not with guitar or wasn’t necessarily lyrically-based. That was literally one take that I did from the top of my head.

And that was it. I need it.

What exactly is the it that you ‘need?’

I need ‘it.’ Whatever ‘it’ is.

NUMB.ER WITH PALM AND HARMONY TIVIDAD ON THURS., AUG 16, AT THE ROXY, 9009 W. SUNSET BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 9 PM / $15-$17 / ALL AGES. THEROXY. COM. NUMB.ER’S GOODBYE IS OUT NOW ON FELTE. VISIT NUMB.ER AT NUMB-ER.BANDCAMP.COM. INTERVIEW

MY BLOODY VALENTINE Interview by TIFFANY ANDERS ILLUSTRATION by ALICE RUTHERFORD

In 2013, My Bloody Valentine self-released a surprise new LP, 22 years after their critically acclaimed, fan-adored, awe-inspiring— and what many call a masterpiece—Loveless. But what exactly the band were doing during those years in between is a topic that’s provoked equal speculation and frustration, as well as lots of gossip and assumptions. I first met Kevin Shields, the band’s front man and Oz behind the curtains, in 1999, right in the middle of this “off” time. He was not at all how I imagined, based on years of rumor about him and his band. To me, this was a very gentle and unassuming person, who had a great capability for insight and an endless desire to talk about lots of fascinating things—far from your typical grunge-pop star, and even further from your flashy Britpop celebrity. I was happy to have a new conversation with Kevin before he started a tour with My Bloody Valentine. We speak here about future plans for the band, the real way digital and analog fit together, and what he thinks people still get wrong about him.

I am interested in what you think the future of listening to music will be. Vinyl has made a big resurgence and I think that’s great, but as we said I love listening to music on my phone, too, and continue to do so.

Kevin Shields (guitar/vocals): It would be crazy not to—when you can just access something really quick, why not?

I’m amazed by the algorithms that come up. I use Spotify, and Apple Music, and just I noticed for the first time that Spotify was making daily playlists for me. The algorithm started to know what I liked, and I have to say it was pretty spot on. But I had to wonder … how much are we gonna just be fed things through algorithms? My playlist might have stuff from the past like Gene Clark and the Stooges, but what about generations to come if things are just … … computers working it out for them. The only thing I don’t like about it—and it’s the thing I hate about Google—is that …

Obviously, we all use Google because it’s the main thing and I often try and get away from it and try and use other things but they’re so terrible. [But] what I don’t like about it is it sort of corrals you into a little world, and you seem to only have access to things that it seems to think you want. And that is kind of isolating. It’s putting people into boxes.

One of the cool things back in the day when you’d listen to something like John Peele in England or Ireland—he was on most nights for a couple of hours—it was cool to hear things that you never expected to hear or think about. That element gets lost by the algorithm concept. It sounds cool on one level to get something you’re probably gonna like based on what you’ve liked before, but on another level there’s so much stuff out there that people may never hear. Like some kid who’s into metal music will only hear metal music! [laughs] It’s totally true! It felt weird listening to the Spotify playlist because they definitely were able to put me in a box. From everything that I listen to, they did actually kinda INTERVIEW

know me. It was really creepy and I had this moment where I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this how it’s going to be?’

It’s weird. Maybe that’s why I use YouTube.

Even YouTube does that—you play a track on YouTube and then all the other tracks around it have something to do with that. I kinda like that cuz … if there’s a particular thing I’m curious about and then there’s all this other stuff, I’ll wonder, ‘Oh, what’s that? What’s that about?’ I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I don’t like it if it’s the only thing. The whole curation thing where somebody plays stuff that they kinda like, it’s a bit broader because it builds a sense of community. You feel like you’re listening to music with other people even though you’re not with them—you feel part of something and that’s a basic human need in a way. In a weird way tribalism is a natural way of existing, but a tribe is full of individuals and different angles and stuff. Like what you were saying about Spotify putting together playlists for you … in a weird kind of way, you’re a tribe of one like that.

Yes! It’s very isolating and kinda lonely…

You know the stuff that’s been coming out this past year—that people who are on social media are actually more depressed. Facebook makes people have a lesser quality of life, not a greater quality of life, because even though it’s about sharing stuff and people liking what you do or your posts or whatever, the reality of it is there’s an isolation that’s happening.

I think there will be a reaction against that.

Our real instinct is to be a part of something, not just by itself. It would be a bit like if you went to a planet or an island and you can have anything you wanted or liked—but we don’t really know what we like, not really. We don’t really know what we like in advance. I think with a computer or anybody [who ]tries to target one person … it takes away from that thing. That ever slightly expanding reality, you know, where at least with someone like John Peele or DJing … That’s what’s good about DJing, about people listening to people playing music: it always throws up something you didn’t expect before, something you

didn’t think about. That element, I think, is important. I think the future of the likes of Facebook and Spotify and all these things— the algorithm concept of targeting you with what you supposedly like based on your past behavior—is ultimately just a phase. It’s not the future, I don’t think.

I hope so.

I think it’s a cool thing on one level, but I don’t think it’s the future. I think the future is something else. That’s why gigs had a resurgence—people could go somewhere and feel part of something, and share something with other people. Part of the reason that happened is because of being marginalized by an algorithm.

I think people have needed to have music as an experience more—that’s why festivals are so popular.

Sharing it, that’s the key—not being isolated.

Even having one person DJing or making a playlist, that still is sharing. When you know other people are going to listen to that same one thing, it’s like the way TV used to be in the past … When a good movie would be on or a good TV show, part of the enjoyment was you knew millions of people were experiencing it at the same time. With things like Netflix and the modern way of consuming movies and new series, Amazon and Netflix are becoming a world unto themselves by making their own programs and tv series. One of the reasons Game of Thrones was so huge was because it was on TV and people had to wait … although I think the reason people got into Game of Thrones was ironically because they found it on DVD or whatever, and people were watching the whole thing in one go. It was kinda amazing watching it like that … but I think the reason it endured a bit was because everybody watched the DVDs and they had to wait for the new series. There is still something kinda cool about people experiencing something at the same time. I think that element of things won’t go away.

It’s an inherent need, really, and it’s a good thing—it’s a positive thing. It’s something that makes you feel more alive as opposed to some

virtual world of your own likes and dislikes.

I think anybody that has a tendency to isolate themselves and something like Facebook are a bad combo. You feel like you’re checking off that social box without having to do the real connecting.

I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter or anything. One was made for me, but I don’t even know how to access it, really.

It’s better that way.

Yeah, partly. Although I have to admit … because I live in the countryside and we don’t have any good computer connection, it’s really bad. It does put a real limit to that modern way of consuming things. I do have a sense of missing something but on the other hand …

I don’t think I’m being a Luddite or anything but I do miss that kind of shared event-type thing. That’s probably why most gigs have a purpose, even though most gigs now are digital. Most of the desks are digital. A lot of people haven’t even heard analog sound.

Unless you play guitar or just see small bands in small venues where you can hear a lot of the sound coming off the stage, you don’t really get to hear analog music very much now.

There is something that I think about often with you—there’s a bit of a 90’s resurgence right now …

I guess that was bound to happen after the 80s Exactly, and the interesting thing is hearing new music of younger bands that may not have been around for the 90s. While I like some of these bands, the interpretation of what they think the 90s was is so strange to me—even what people remember about the 90s. People have their own ideas of what it was, and people have these ideas of what your music was, what the band was or who you are. What do you think is the biggest misconception?

I think that would be that I’m a perfectionist.

That I work on stuff for a long time perfecting it. I might work on stuff for a long time, but it’s more like I’m capturing moments of spontaneity. Sometimes that can take a long time to capture them all together to make it 9

work. But the actual process of playing and recording is usually reasonably quite rough.

Like for example with Loveless is that everything on Loveless is like a take, like the first or second take—more often the second take. The guitar would be just played from beginning to end, all the vocals were just recorded, there were no drop ins. There’s no comping. It’s just parts recorded from beginning to end. All the guitar on Loveless is just takes, you know—songs starts and we play and then end, and it was usually two or three takes, I don’t remember doing four takes of anything, so that’s what you’re hearing. You’re hearing a bunch of performances in a way. The vocals, they were just like me and Bilinda singing from beginning to end. It’s funny—we just did that recently with Bilinda when she was recording some of the recent songs, and it took awhile for Bilinda to get into it. The engineer said, ‘Well, she can just start comping it—we can just start recording things and dropping it in’ and I said ‘No, just wait, she’ll just hit a certain moment.’ She did 16 takes in a row, and we played them all at the same time and they worked as one thing musically, and that’s a lot of what Loveless is—it’s basically between 7 and 12 takes from beginning to end played at the same time. I would often pick one vocal and think, ‘OK, I’ll make that more like the lead part’ as that one would have bit more treble or clarity to it. So it sounds kinda like one thing. There’s not particularly loss of consonance—from lots of vocals you’re just hearing one, really, so it would be one take from beginning to end, and then maybe ten below it also from beginning to end. That’s pretty much how everything is done. There’s no comping, really. It’s just stuff that’s played.

That’s how I do everything really. So I guess that would be the biggest misconception.

Even the last album where I purposely tried to work in a completely different way where I was recording pieces of music with the idea I would eventually stick them all together—still each piece of music is a bunch of takes. I guess that’s the main thing. I don’t kinda piece things together to create a perfect version—I might piece them together to make a whole song, but each part is done as one thing. That’s one misconception—that a lot of the records are recorded by some meticulous process, when really it’s just a few guitars played and then lots of vocals recorded and that’s it. And the overdub bits are played as one part. What you hear is what I played. Maybe I spend a long time balancing, but not even that long. Most of the songs on Loveless were mixed two days each—wasn’t that crazy. There’s immediacy to things that I think people don’t realize exists.

It’s quite simple, really.

From listening to so much music, I get sick of things getting overly complicated now.

I was looking for music for an ad I was working on, and I just wanted something that was simple and immediate, like ‘Lust For Life.’ The song is what it is, right from the beginning. There’s no long intro I have to sit through. People nowadays just put way too much into it, instead of just starting off with solid drums, good guitar riff … it’s weird how over-complicated people make things. Where are the solid rock bands that just bust it out?

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I know. It’s weird because with electronic music, it’s been going on for such a long time that it’s nearly become the traditional music.

I was checking out some—I’m not gonna say who, but you know … some kinda hip new multimedia electronic artist. And it was good.

But on the other hand I was thinking … this music could easily be in the background of anything on TV and nobody would think twice about it. I’ve been thinking a lot about getting some synthesizers and doing more electronic music because its something I used to do. When I first got a guitar in 1980, I nearly gave it up in 1981 because I got a synthesizer. And then I got a PortaStudio and I was just making music with a synthesizer and PortaStudio a lot. Then after doing that for a about a year or so, by about 83 I started playing guitar again more. The first version of My Bloody Valentine was actually songs that we would start using a synthesizer and PortaStudio and then play live over it. And then we got more and more into the visceral element of just playing music and the synth disappeared and the PortaStudio disappeared.

But I think there is something about the energy of just … you know, hitting something. Just doing it. There’s stuff happening and it’s not controlled by anything and there’s an appeal to that, even though you know when you hear a lot of bands playing guitar music it can get very boring as well. I think when there are rules, rules are boring … but they’re also cool because they force you to create something to bounce off. But they can also deaden things as well—I’ m not too firm about anything at the moment!

You’re doing a bunch of live shows—why now?

We just decided that we wanted to get going again. I had been writing a lot of new material, and it just felt like it was time to start playing again—really, it felt like it was a bit long enough. We’re more in a studio mode in a weird way. We started rehearsing recently.

The band had been rehearsing since about the 16th of May and they had been working solidly since then and I joined about a week ago. I’ve been in the studio up until that point and took a break and taught them the new songs, and I’m hoping to get it together in time for the first gig.

And the Meltdown Festival first, right?

Yeah. I mean—we intended to start playing in the summer and then Robert Smith asked us to do the Meltdown thing and we were like, ‘Oh God, it’s a bit early …’ but basically he’s been asking us to do gigs with the Cure … I think he asked us to do the first gig back in 92. And we couldn’t do it—I can’t remember why. He asked us to do other things over the years and we couldn’t, and then when he asked us to do this, I was like, ‘You know what, we’ll just do it—we’ll just get together and try.’ I had been in the studio but I just thought it would be a shame not to do it.

It must’ve been 92 when I saw Dinosaur Jr open for the Cure here.

Really? Was that in that outdoor venue? I think I was at that. I think we might’ve been on tour with them? I don’t really know what happened but I do know I was there.

You mentioned that you’re working on new stuff—is it a new record?

Beginnings of new stuff, basically. First I was making an EP. We started about … oh, I don’t know, about a year, year and a half ago.

Then I kept writing in the meantime and then around the past 6 months or so I started writing different stuff than the stuff we started with. So I thought, ‘What I think I’m going to do is make some EPs as opposed to just one EP.’ And the stuff we started about a year and a half ago will be more like the album that we finally do. I thought it would be a good time to put stuff out that’s relatively recent—stuff I haven’t been working on for a long time.

So I guess the first thing that will come out will be a relatively short EP. Do an EP now in summer and then do another EP later in the year and finish working on the album stuff for next year. It’s good—even when we’re going to play live, I keep on writing new songs. Some of the stuff that we’ll do live we haven’t even recorded yet. I always wanted to do an EP as a concept but where it’s changed is the stuff that we’re going to put out first is more recent, and the stuff that will come out on the second EP will be stuff we’re going to perform live before we even record it. It’ll be a lot more like when we started. I just want to keep things more current and not getting stuck in really one thing for awhile—just see what happens. This first EP is more … I don’t know, gravitated to more song-type stuff? A bit gentler in a way—a bit less weird than the stuff I started with. Not weird but you know…

Noisy?

Warm—warm would be the word. It has a feel to it I thought would be nice to get out in the summer. When we finished back in 2013, I had been in the studio for most of 2012— actually I started in 2011, went on tour, went on tour, more or less until the end of 2013 and I had that typical slightly burned-out kinda thing. I had ideas, but all slightly fractured. It took until 2016, that I was writing different stuff again. And it just didn’t stop, really. So I thought instead of trying to control it, I’ll just put some records out. And with us performing songs not recorded, I thought, ‘I’m not going to control anything at the moment—just see what happens.’

I like that attitude. I think people spend too much time going over stuff and then you just get paralyzed.

There’s something about the world at the moment … things seem to be reasonably dramatic or changing and it doesn’t feel right to be somewhere for a year or two making a record then touring it for a year or two. That just seems so limited? I would rather be in a more current state, and just see what happens.

In a way I’m not really planning it so much anymore. Of course I do have ideas and plans but I’ve learnt from a bit of aging they don’t work out, so there’s no point in getting too serious about them.

I remember you telling me that it was kinda pointless to buy new vinyl if the music was recorded digitally—you might as well listen to it digitally.

That’s only half true. I mean … a lot of people record digitally on ProTools now, but what’s better about vinyl—even if you record on ProTools—is they do it 24-bit. It’s higher resolution than the 16-bit/44khz which is like

a CD, so it’s still better. For myself, I like to have both. I like the accuracy of digital. Even though I record analog, mostly—we do a bit of ProTools stuff, like if we sample drums, that gets digitized, but the guitars and vocals and stuff are analog. But when I mix it, I mix it down to tape and a digital medium. I like both, really, to be honest for different reasons.

Especially in this day where there’s computers and the internet is the main way people hear music, I like that I can do things analog. When I master stuff I make sure that it’s actually mastered analog as well. I think what it is … since about the late 1970s, people had the good idea that they could use a digital delay basically to cut a record. The tape machine that people would use to cut a record would have a special head on it because when you cut a record, you gotta have two signals. One is for the lathe to know how wide the grooves should be, and the other one gets cut onto the record. The lathe would kinda have a computer which would allow it to know how wide the grooves should be cut and that never gets cut, and the cut signal would be analog.

But then what people started doing around 79—I don’t really know when it started but it became more standard in the 80s—people would start to use a digital delay in it. That would be the thing that would actually be cut onto the record. The analog signal would be used for the preview and the digitally delayed signal would be the one that would actually be cut onto the record. So a lot of the records that we’ve all heard since 1980—or around that period anyway—were digitized before they were cut onto vinyl. Even back then most people were still recording analog, [and] nobody thought digital was a bad thing. It was a new way of doing something in a very precise way. But somehow it seems like kind of a shame, you know, when you have an analog record or an analog tape and you’ve got to digitize it just to get it onto a vinyl record. So even now, there’s not a lot of places that can do it—do a pure analog cut.

Mostly when you go to a mastering place and you bring tape along, you’re going to digitize it before it gets onto the record, which is a bit weird. Maybe I was talking about that. A lot of the vinyl I grew up and loved would have been digitized before it got cut into the record. In a weird way, I remember when I was young thinking that records had a sound … it sounded like a record, but probably I was hearing that digital sound, and loving it in a way. Like, ‘Well, that’s a record.’ I think digital’s cool in that it’s a thing and it has a sound, but I don’t know, not in a Luddite kinda way, more like … When you listen to music and A/B it like you go like analogue/ digital, it’s not such a big deal if it’s good quality digital. But if you listen to analog music for an extended amount of time and then you hear it digitally it does sound … something’s different.

I’m not a purist at all—for my job I have a digital server and that’s how I have to listen to music for my projects. But in my living room I have a record player and it’s sort of become ‘me time’ when I put on an album. I hate to say it but I’m inclined to spend more time with it, and digital is more instant gratification.

INTERVIEW

Most music I hear, I hear digitally as well. I listen to a lot of music from my phone like a lot of people, and I don’t mind it. I don’t really think about it that much. But I did find when the Beatles did the mono box set and they did all the records in pure analog cuts, it was really fascinating listening to the records just purely analog on a record player.

It’s a really different experience, you know, so I don’t know. I do love it, so I’m just going to keep pursuing it until I can’t or hopefully it’ll take off even more. Often when we’re buying tape, I wind up buying all the tape in the UK and Germany—wherever I can buy it, we usually buy all the tape they got. There aren’t that many people using tape really. And people go on about how it’s really expensive and all that, but it’s not that expensive. It’s kinda expensive, but not really. If you wanted to record two or three songs, that would cost you $300. Not that crazy.

You were talking about EPs and I’ve been really into 45s lately. People should release more 45s. In the digital world, you’re going from one song to the other with playlists, and even record shopping I find it so much more enjoyable than immersing myself in flipping through daunting albums and their daunting price tag. You kinda have more freedom to buy more. Even for recording, I thought—it’s cheap to record a 45.

I haven’t done it—I’d like to do it. This EP will be 45 RPM but a 12 inch. But maybe I’ll wind up doing that. I used to love singles in the past.

You played at the Sigur Ros festival in Iceland solo, and when I heard that I had to kind of wrap my head around it—what did that mean for you to play solo?

When they asked me to do it, I just thought … again, it would be a part of this whole thing of just doing stuff. Literally two weeks before I did it, I wrote about an hour’s worth of music especially for that and it turned into about five songs that were just stretched out.

I made five pedal boards, [had] five amps and ran the whole thing at the same time and just played and had Tim from Godspeed playing with me on drums. It was all really spontaneous and improvised, even though there were tunes—in the sense there were chord structures and stuff, the vocals just came in where they came in. I had some basic lyrical ideas. We just did it. Some people liked it. I did manage to clear half of the room by the end. [laughs] The sign of something great, in my eyes!

I didn’t mind. The people who really liked it got it, so that was cool.

That was completely improvised—so will any of that be on the EPs? Actually, one of them I’ve kept. I like them all—well, maybe one I’m not so crazy about now, but of the five of them there are four that I definitely want to do something with. What was kinda … not liberating exactly, but kind of inspiring was writing music I knew I was going to perform quite soon and just play. I wasn’t thinking about making a record—I was just making something I was going to play in front of people. So it was interesting to see what came out that way. It was different than stuff I would normally write and a bit more immediate, but a bit more … I don’t know, meditative? But direct at the same time.

INTERVIEW

It was just a good experience to do it. One of the tunes will be on the EP—I sorta stole it for myself. Not too much planning going on here at the moment—just doing it and seeing what happens.

It’s cool you’re going out and doing new material just for the hell of it. I think that attitude might be lacking in some bands.

Yeah—in some ways it does kinda make things more simple. Some people might think, ‘Oh, the band are getting a bit kind of punk rock’ or something. But—in a weird way—that was bouncing off a lot of the stuff I started a year and half ago, which was very much about writing these songs that were purposely created to layer on top of themselves to have this sorta double-reality effect. I really loved all that, but that led me to create really simple songs as well. That’s why I think that’s gonna come out first because that’s where I was more recently. This is a completely different thing, but you know a lot of post-punk music that came out around the early 80s … something about a lot of those song structures and the way the guitar itself wasn’t necessarily holding down the melody of the song. It was just the bass line and the guitar interweaving with each other. I feel like if I don’t do it, someone is going to do stuff like that soon. It has an element of a lot of electronic music but it’ll be more played, where it’s more interweaving parts.

Are you thinking of the Fall?

Less like the Fall, more like Public Image, Killing Joke, or even the Cure where it was like different parts—they were all necessary to make the whole. Often what I do is work with the guitar [so] it doesn’t need any other sort of instruments, but I think that’s one of the strands that I’ll be working on—stuff that’s more interwoven like some of that post-punk stuff was.

What about the collaboration with Brian Eno? How did that happen?

He just asked me. It started because he was doing a film project and part of it was that he’d collaborate—not collaborate so much as he would have a bunch of guests. When I did the thing, it was more like ‘It’s Brian Eno, with me kinda playing and being involved,’ but he produced and made it what it was. I was just literally making sounds playing guitar and he was making sounds as well. He’s an amazing interpreter. It wasn’t like I did something and he made it into something that I felt separated from. I was like, ‘I want to make something with energy’ and he’d amazingly sort of create something that I described. It was a lot of fun for me.

Were you in the studio together?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah—that was the fun part of it. Going into the studio and hanging out and talking and going for some walks to the hardware shop. [laughs] We—I mean we, but he really—created a bunch of tracks. It wasn’t like a 50/50 collaboration, really. It was more like ‘Brian Eno featuring me,’ really.

Like I said, he was producing the whole thing and mixing it, and I would just kinda say ‘energy feel’ or whatever and we would make my guitar sound like that. I’d play a certain amount of time and he’d elaborate on it on his computer. He works really fast, really fast and spontaneous. Like in four hours we’d have a whole track, then he’d work on it. I think it

took about three days. And we made about three things, three song things. He would say ‘play’ and I’d play and it would just turn into this giant sound thing and then he would just do stuff and do stuff and mix it. For me, it was like having a master class with Brian Eno. It was very cool.

I’ve only heard one piece. Is that all that was released?

So far two of them have come out. The first one came out on the Adult Swim [Singles Series]. And then a vinyl record was made for Record Store Day, and that was two tracks, like a 12-inch single.

When I came across that track, I thought, ‘Oh, it would be so cool if they collaborated on a score.’ I know you did the Lost In Translation stuff—how did you write specifically for film?

Again that was a really good experience of seeing how something is done. Essentially what happened was Brian Reitzell—who was the music supervisor for it—was basically making tapes for Sophia Coppola to listen to while she was writing the script. That created a theme, for lack of a better word, so she decided she wanted to have some My Bloody Valentine music in it. Then she decided it would be cool if I just contributed something, and that it wasn’t just My Bloody Valentine. So Brian came over from America to my studio in London while the film was being made. I got a script before they even started filming, and then saw all the actual sorta rushes? I guess not rushes, but the unedited film, and the idea was that maybe I’d do some of the music while it was panning around Tokyo and stuff. Then Sophia came to the studio and listened to it, and she decided it wasn’t quite right and then her and Brian thought maybe actually write some music. One of the things I had written was in exact timing to one of the scenes, you know—writing it while watching the scene. We had a monitor—LCD TV— and we would start watching these unedited [scenes], and I was just creating music, really.

And Brian was encouraging me, and we wrote a bunch of stuff, and started trying to put it in different parts to see how it worked. The song ‘City Girl’ was originally in different parts of the film, but I got a little attached to it, and I didn’t want to make stems …

Oh really … ?

Yeah, so that kinda made it unusable because normally what you do is give stems so they can balance it out for the actual scene. I didn’t want to do that—I just wanted it to be a song. But it was very much written in the atmosphere of the film. It was a really good experience to see how something gets put together like that.

Would you be interested in doing more score work? Like an entire film?

Definitely. Someday I’d like to do that.

You and Brian Eno! That would be fun.

Your show here was for FYF and that got cancelled, and your last show was at FYF and that had it’s problems—what happened at the last FYF? I don’t think it was anyone’s fault—it was a power problem. It got over stressed and just went down. It was a lot of electronics dying all of the sudden. It wasn’t just the PA that died—a whole bunch of stuff over the area

died. We don’t know if we caused it, the energy or the volume … we don’t know what happened, really. All we know is we started playing and everything just started falling apart. It was something to do with power— power collapsing.

You are still playing at the Shrine, which is really exciting. Have you played there before?

No. It’s a shame that the festival got cancelled but the only good side of it is that we get to play inside which is always kinda better for people watching us.

That auditorium is really nice and has a lot of cool L.A. history and it’s a good sounding room …

I’ve never been there but I’ve seen pictures of the room—it has that kinda classic shape.

We’ll bring our analog desk with us—well, we’re renting an analog desk. I was just checking it out because we’ve got the same desk for the gigs that we’re doing in Europe and it’s the same kind—an XL4. It’s the best of all the analog desks, but seeing all the cables coming out of it, it really does look like a museum piece. It’s a huge amount of cabling, it’s crazy.

Who does your sound? Who controls all that?

A guy called Phillip Harvey—we were halfway through our tour and had been through a couple of sound guys and we heard about Phillip and we’re lucky enough to get him. He was just recently touring with Lorde, but, what was cool about that was he was using some new technology with the sound where you can make it sound more … not ‘surround,’ really, but you can place things around a bit more.

I can’t really explain it because I haven’t tried it, but when he explained it to me it sounded cool—made things louder, makes things more present sounding. Like for example, you have a band, like 10 people on a stage—you can make it sound like everything is coming from where they are on the stage, instead of it all coming out at once. I’m not sure we’re going to get to use it, but I think we might. He’s definitely enthusiastic about it—he was the first that tried it.

When I saw you at the El Rey—the first time you guys came out after reuniting—I was so blown away by Colm and Deb. I had no idea, seeing you live for the first time, that it was that powerful and solid. On the record I just never locked into that. But seeing it live I understood why the shows had been talked about because hearing it all together was pretty amazing.

When it comes to energy, for sure—when we play live it’s definitely about everyone. It’s not about me, even though when we make records it’s mostly myself. Live it’s kinda its own thing.

Debbie very much puts her personality into it the way she plays and so does Colm. That’s the cool thing about not playing with just a bunch of session people—they’re people with their own way of doing things.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE WITH PROTOMARTYR ON SUN., JULY 22, AT THE SHRINE EXPO HALL, 665 W. JEFFERSONBLVD.,LOSANGELES.7PM / $49.50+ / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE. COM. VISIT MY BLOODY VALENTINE AT MYBLOODYVALENTINE.ORG. 11

nightmare air Interview by julia gibson photography by debi del grande

After two long years of recording, mixing, and mastering, modern shoegaze band Nightmare Air has released their sophomore album Fade Out. But guitarist and singer Dave Dupuis has barely had time to celebrate his band’s latest achievement: not only has been he has been traveling the world as Gary Numan’s tour manager and front of house sound guy, he’s preparing to have the rest of the band join him as the opening act on Numan’s fall tour.

L.A. RECORD caught Dupuis on a rare pit stop in Los Angeles to talk about Nightmare Air’s new synth-centered sound, meeting your heroes, shattering skulls, and living life on the road.

So Nightmare Air is a skateboarding reference?

Dave Dupuis (guitar/vocals): Back in the 80s there was a skate company called Powell Peralta. They had something called the Bones Brigade, which was made up of like seven skaters including Tony Hawk. They made these little films where they would go to a spot, skate for a while, then do some dumb acting. As a kid, I loved them. There’s a scene in one of them where they are laying around a hotel room after a sweet skate sesh at a pool, and one of them goes, ‘Hey Lance! [talking to Lance Mountain] Do the nightmare air!’ And so the nightmare air is where he’s laying down and pretends to fall asleep, wakes up from a nightmare, and puts his skateboard down at his feet like he’s landing. It’s such a stupid reference, but it stuck with me. When it was time to name the band, I was trying to think of something that evoked fun, friends, good feelings, and naiveté. It didn’t take long to land on Nightmare Air because I was waiting to use it for a long time. When the band started, I wanted it to be fun. Bands aren’t always fun. You tour the world with five dudes and one guy is a dick, and one guy is yelling at his girlfriend or whatever. I didn’t want any bad energy, so I wanted our name to inspire good energy.

Do you still skate?

I do, yes. I had a little bit of an ankle injury last year so I haven’t much lately, but I do.

I don’t skate like a week or two before tour because I don’t want to break my arm again.

I’ve broken my arms and wrists like eight times, and pretty much every other bone in my body. I don’t do tricks that much anymore either, but I do get excited once 14

I get on a skateboard. I’ll go until I fall down.

Have all of your broken bones been from skating?

They’re all from being a clumsy fool. I did shatter my skull in a mosh pit when I was 19. That wasn’t my clumsy move though.

What? Whose mosh pit was it?

It was a local band from New Hampshire. I was kind of a hardcore kid back in the day, X’s on my hands and everything. I was in this mosh pit and I caught the wrong end of a steel toe Doc right in my forehead. It shattered and pushed in my skull.

I assume you got ... stitches? At least?

Well, this is what an injury in New Hampshire is like in the 90s: they fucking sucked. I got kicked in the head and all this liquid snot came out of my nose. That had happened to me a couple times before when I hit my head snowboarding so I was like, ‘Oh, no big deal.’ But I noticed my forehead was dented in, so my friend took me to the emergency room. They took an x-ray and were like, ‘Looks good to us! If it doesn’t pop out by tomorrow morning let us know!’ I went back home and the next morning it popped out, so I went snowboarding all day long. I had a raging day on the hill, and on the way back I felt my forehead and it was dented again.

I called my mom and of course she freaked out. We went to a doctor who said we needed to take care of it in the next three days or I would be screwed forever. So they cut me from ear to ear, pulled down my forehead, and wired my skull back together—like 13 pieces of it. I had 52 staples across the top of my head. Thank God for these curls. If they ever go, I’m going to look like a freak. The scar is intense. But I’m alive!

You play guitar with Nightmare Air, and also played guitar with your previous band Film School. Have you always been a guitar guy?

I started my musical career with the saxophone when I was seven. I played that until I was 18. I was in the marching band. I never really practiced or took it seriously— it was more of a time after school where I could fart around and hang out with friends. But by the end of high school I realized I was really good at it. Then I went to college. One night I went to a café with my friends and there were these guys there playing acoustic Jane’s Addiction covers.

The girls I was with thought they were so hot, and I was like, ‘I can do that.’ So the next day I bought a guitar. I’m not really like that … but that’s what happened.

Are you a Jane’s Addiction fan?

Oh, massive. Honestly, they kind of fucked me over. My voice is pretty high, and it’s all because I used to sing [along with] Jane’s Addiction and Superchunk. I’m learning how to sing with a lower voice now, but Perry Farrell was definitely an influence.

I got to go out on a U.S. tour with Jane’s Addiction a few years ago and meet Perry and hang with those guys. It was a six-week tour, and I didn’t see Dave Navarro with his shirt on but once. Always shirtless! It’s wild.

Just hanging out in catering, shirtless. They haven’t changed! But he’s a really nice guy.

Just sexed up.

He’s earned it. By all means take your shirt off, Mr. Navarro.

I wish I had pecs like that. I wish I could pull off those nipple rings. [laughs] Hollywood rock hasn’t gone anywhere. People still do that whole thing. I identify more with that sometimes than I do with the younger generations of indie weirdos because I grew up with that. I find myself listening to the Lithium channel on Sirius a lot.

What’s the last song you listened to today?

This is weirdly embarrassing, but the last song I listened to was an Enigma song, last night in my car with a friend. I’ve got this super dope-ass sound system in my little hot rod, and we wanted something with a good beat. We put on Enigma, which is very 90s but really fun. I’ve been at the DMV for the last 4 hours, so I haven’t listened to any music so far today!

I was introduced to Nightmare Air when I saw you open for No Joy at the Echo in 2015. I bought your music the next day and have been a fan since. Have you had that experience of discovering a band?

I had that experience at every concert I went to in the 90s. I’ve been living in rock clubs since I was a kid. I grew up outside of Boston in New Hampshire. I quickly moved to the city and all my friends worked at the Middle East. We were in that club every night and it was a great time for music. People used to discover bands by seeing bands, and that just doesn’t happen anymore. Jimmy, our drummer, and I both grew up in rock clubs and discovered bands that way. We were both in bands when we were younger and when we would tour, people would discover us at those shows. You tour in one 16

city and come back a month later, there’s twenty more people there. You just did it like that. But it just doesn’t happen like that anymore. We all know rock clubs are going downhill, and it was a sad reality that we came to right after High In The Lasers came out. We toured for the album, and it was cool and the shows were good, but it didn’t feel the same. We had a sense of nostalgia and it just didn’t feel like that. It’s definitely a sign of the times.

Are nostalgic rock shows going the way of the dinosaur?

I don’t know. In the past few years, there’s been a big 90s sound revival and there’s a bunch of shitty bands playing again. I see it at South by Southwest every year—there’s shitty bands out there with people in their 20s, and it’s nice to see that. I think things are happening, but I don’t know if it’s going to hold. We’ll see. I hope so.

Something that really strikes me about Nightmare Air’s music is how masterfully you layer sounds to create one cohesive piece of music. How do you fit them together, and then know when to stop?

I don’t know when to stop. It is really hard. The process begins with just trying to create a vibe. That will start with one or two sounds, like a guitar or keyboard.

All of Fade Out started out exclusively on keyboards. High In The Lasers was a guitarheavy record—Fade Out is more synth. The process starts with trying to find a vibe, then layering complementary tones: tones that will build into whatever message the song might have, whether its darker or lighter, whatever the song might need. I really enjoy the layering. I will sit there all night and mess around with 4 sounds, 6 sounds, 25 sounds ... It’s honestly the fun part for me. So first I’ll get the vibe, then the song will come out of the vibe, and then I go bananas layering tones. I try to find whatever is going to make the song go to that level where it’s overwhelming—eyes rolling back in your head, like, ‘YES,’ you know?

It’s funny you’re talking about that ‘eyes rolling back’ effect; I heard you describe Swervedriver as having that same quality.

I learned how to play guitar listening to Swervedriver. We’re departing from that sound on the new record, but we’ve always been more rock-shoegaze like they were. I don’t think they were even called shoegaze back when they started, just alternative rock. I’ve always been way more into rock.

I like Swervedriver more than My Bloody Valentine, although I did like m b v. I’m way more punk than dream. I just like that eyes rolling back in your head, exploding feeling ... I just try to get that with whatever rockiness comes out of my fingers.

Swervedriver was always one of my faves.

Film School was asked to support them on their reunion tour and it was a mega dream come true. As a job, I tour manage and do sound for bands, and I did a few tours with Swervedriver, and now we’re all buddies.

Between being buds with Swervedriver and hanging with Jane’s Addiction, would you agree or disagree with ‘never meet your heroes?’

I’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with almost all of my musical heroes. I haven’t met Thurston Moore, but I would’ve shit my pants if I had met him fifteen years ago. Now I’d just be a little happier. I’ve been able to go out with lots of my heroes, and I haven’t been screwed over yet.

Another one of those heroes is Gary Numan, right?

Yes! I tour manage for him. He is very much one of my musical heroes and influences.

Film School was the last band signed to Beggar’s Banquet, and Gary Numan was the first band signed to that label. He basically made Beggar’s Banquet happen. When we got signed I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m on Gary fucking Numan’s record label, this is so cool.’ We met at a Nick Cave afterparty five years ago. I introduced myself and said, ‘Hey, I’m Dave—we’re labelmates.’ I got to say it! Since then, we’ve been touring around the world nonstop.

Nightmare Air is supporting Gary Numan on tour in the fall. Are you looking forward to a different role on this tour?

I’m doing everything. I’m doing the whole fucking thing. Fade Out came out in March, and Gary still had to tour for the year. I was like, ‘Dude, I have to go with my own band now.’ They were like, ‘Well, just start opening for us.’ I’m really busy on these tours: between tour managing duties, working front of house, and two-hour meet and greets, I don’t really have time. We did a few test shows: one at the Teragram and one at the Fillmore. It all went swimmingly so we did the six-week tour in Europe. It’s fucking nuts. Everyone at the clubs are like, ‘We’ve never seen this before. You’re tour managing and singing in the support band … what is going on?’ But it worked out. It’s honestly a little energy boost. When you’re playing in front of thousands of people it’s a rush, so by the time Gary goes on, I’m pumped.

With the way Nightmare Air’s sound has changed from High In The Lasers to Fade Out, opening for him is a good fit. The synths are way out front on this album.

I started touring with Gary Numan five years ago and I was screwed from that point forward. [laughs] No, I will say that was an influence, but I have always been a synth guy as well. After High In The Lasers I bought a shitload of synths: a bunch of Prophets, Viruses, Moogs ... I just bought things in an effort to create a new vibe and a new sound.

I already know I can make my guitar sound like a synth, just run it through a hundred pedals, and I was like, ‘Let’s try something else.’ My guitar pedals have dwindled down to more refined tones as a result. It’s not as much of a wash anymore. Now we’re getting comparisons to early Cure.

Did you play favorites with your synths when you were making Fade Out? Yeah—some of those synths I bought didn’t even make it on the record. I teamed up with a guy out of Toronto named Doug Romanow to finish the record, and he is a synth maniac. I’m talking hundreds of synths. I went up there three times and we just layered sounds until we found the synth tones I liked.

Fade Out was recorded, mixed, and mastered in three different countries.

What effect did that have on the sound of the record?

It made it come out like two years too late. We recorded in Ireland because we won a songwriting competition randomly on Sonicbids. That’s where you apply for SXSW—you can make a little electronic press kit to apply. There’s also contests on there, and one of them was to win two weeks of recording at Grouse Lodge. I was like, ‘Fuck it! I’ll just submit.’ I sent in ‘Escape’ from High In The Lasers, paid 12 bucks, and didn’t think anything of it.

Three months later, I got a call saying we won. So we went on this all-expenses paid trip to Ireland and went to this dope studio where Michael Jackson recorded and Muse recorded, and that’s where we recorded. It was in an old castle and we didn’t leave it for two weeks. It was fucking awesome, but because of that we put off recording in L.A. for six months. Right after recording, a tour came up, and then another thing came up, and so we were working over the phone for months. Everything got delayed because of that process. Doing things remotely sucks, but I don’t regret anything. The record is what it is because of the time we took. But it definitely took too long.

Nightmare Air’s lyrics are simple and succinct. How do you come up with lyrics?

I have a list on my phone of words and phrases that I think sound cool. For example, here’s the last thing I wrote: ‘golden chicken.’ [laughs] Okay, that’s not a good one. What the hell was going on there? Anyway, I have this list. The phrase ‘high in the lasers’ is on it. If I think of something that might invoke a message, I’ll write it down. That’s where a lot of the lyrics come from. I write most of the lyrics.

Swann will come in and add or alter if she wants. Jimmy came up with a few things this time around. I come in with lyrics, but I’m very open to interpretation. That was the thing with this record—I wanted everyone to feel part of it. It’s such an endeavor to make a record without a label, without support, without any money, without anything. We all worked so hard at it, so everyone should feel that they are a part of it.

Which song was most memorable to record?

‘Way We Fall’ because that was the most unrealized song when we got there. ‘Sweet Arrows’ as well. We took our time with that one since we couldn’t find the groove on it for a while. Memorable meaning ‘had the most problems.’ Those are the ones I’m going to remember. But it all should be difficult, right?

I saw the video for the title track, ‘Fade Out,’ and it is a perfect match visually for this new synth-heavy sound. How did you get that experimental, glitchy look?

We worked with Tachyons+. He’s a dude I met on a tour in Florida years ago. When it came time to make this video, I called him up. We filmed on my little point-and-shoot INTERVIEW

in front of a white screen in our practice space, then we sent him the tapes and he ran them through his setup. That’s how we did the ‘Who’s Your Lover’ video, too. We just took turns filming each other and edited it up quick and sent it off to someone else to sauce it up. We’re on a budget! We need another video though ASAP. We’re working on tour videos right now, so there will be a new one by the fall tour.

You travel a ton, and have moved around a lot in your life. In an interview you said, ‘keeping my feet moving has been a wonderful curse.’ What makes it a curse, and what about it is wonderful?

It’s a curse because I can’t stop. And I don’t want to, so maybe that’s why it’s wonderful?

It’s exciting when you are moving forward towards your next destination. It gives me purpose. I can really be myself when I’m traveling and moving because I’m not surrounded by day-to-day problems. It is a curse though because you aren’t around for the rest of the day-to-day things. You aren’t around your family. You leave your friends and you are a stranger in your own town. But I’m going to be on a boat in Greece for two weeks in July, so that part is awesome.

I saw a picture of you in front of the Pyramid of the Sun recently.

I went to Mexico City a month ago. It was so cool! I had never been before. We played a festival down there and then decided to stick around and spend the week there.

Talk about magical ... the pyramids were just like, ‘Wow.’ We stayed at an AirBnB and there were buskers out in the courtyard playing in the morning and families out

dancing around. It’s a really family-oriented vibe down there. You gotta go.

It’s on my list. I also saw a picture of Nightmare Air on the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.

That was just a couple months ago! We had a day off in Belfast, one of our rare days off.

Are you familiar with Houses of the Holy?

That’s what’s on the cover. It was so cool.

It was freezing cold and raining, but cool.

Ireland is radical. We recorded there for two weeks and spent a week after that just driving around. The people are so nice and the country is so green and alive. We also got a private tour and they took us to all these Game of Thrones sites. They film so much of the show there!

Are you a Game of Thrones fan?

Yes—to the max! That White Walker dragon is so fucking cool.

What’s the best snack you’ve had on the road that you can’t get in the United States?

Bitterballen, from Amsterdam. It’s basically these fried balls of gravy about the size of a golf ball, and they give them to you in a little basket and you dip them in Dijon mustard.

It’s one of my favorite things in the fucking world. They’re all over Amsterdam but you can’t get them anywhere else.

Even though there’s no Bitterballen in these parts, is there anything you miss about Los Angeles when you’re not here?

I’ve been living full time in L.A. for nearly 13 years. I’ve always loved being in L.A. and I have great friends here, but because of touring so much—and being a traveling fool like myself—I’ve been one foot out of L.A. this whole time. I get to see all these

great parts of the world and that almost makes it harder to come back to L.A. So, why do I keep coming back? It is always nice here, and all my closest friends are in this city. Whether I want to admit it or not, this is it. I live in L.A. You pressed your album to vinyl, which I personally appreciate. Do you collect records?

I just started a few years ago. Because of all the touring and traveling, I decided not to collect records and decided to collect guitars, amps, and pedals instead. All my friends when they moved would have cars full of records, and I just said I would rather have guitars and drums. But now I’m fucking cursed. So yes, I have a record collection.

Of all the records you have, which is your most prized possession?

Before Dinosaur Jr had their resurgence, their singer J Mascis was in this band called Witch. He played drums and their singer was this guy named Kyle Thomas who is King Tuff now. There was a local guy from New Hampshire in the band too—this was all back in Massachusetts. I have a 7” that they put out ten or eleven years ago, and I got all of them to sign it. I think that’s a very special record. It reminds me of a really special time in my life, being back east and hanging out with those guys.

In your younger days, I heard you used to frequent arcades. If someone were to challenge you to any arcade game, which one do you think you could really throw down on?

I’m really good at Star Wars, the original vector graphic game. I played the crap out

of that. As far as other vintage games, I’m really good at Tron. All my friends were into Galaga but I wanted to be a little different and I didn’t want to wait in line, so I played Tron instead. I used to work at Chuck E. Cheese and that’s where I got good at it. I wore the mouse costume and skateboarded around.

I am speechless. What’s it like inside that costume?

Sweaty. [laughs] It’s been a long time since I’ve worn it but I remember you can’t really see that well. You get your bearings eventually, and it’s kind of fun until the kids are dicks. I went back to a Chuck E. Cheese in the South Bay with a friend a little while ago, but really quickly I was like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ It’s a kid thing. But I do love arcade games. I love smoking a joint and going to the arcade.

It’s not a cabinet game, but do you like air hockey?

I’ll kick your ass at air hockey!

Challenge accepted.

NIGHTMARE AIR PERFORMS WITH GARY NUMAN ON TUE., SEPT. 4, AT THE OBSERVATORY, 3503 S. HARBOR BLVD., SANTA ANA. 7 PM / $35 / ALL AGES. OBSERVATORYOC.COM. AND ALSO WITH GARY NUMAN ON SAT., OCT. 6, AT THE FONDA THEATRE, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 9 PM / $40 / ALL AGES. FONDATHEATRE.COM. NIGHTMARE AIR’S FADE OUT IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM NEVADO MUSIC. VISIT NIGHTMARE AIR AT NIGHTMAREAIR.COM.

mary lattimore Interview by christina Gubala photography by stefano galli Somewhere along a drive through rural Kentucky en route to Graceland, avant-garde harpist Mary Lattimore pulled into a funeral home parking lot and gave me 45 minutes of her time. The fiercely independent musician has been crisscrossing the continent with her harp in tow, penning wordless meditative pieces that serve as cathartic diary entries and performing for rapt audiences while gracefully and gradually expanding her sound. It’s not unusual to find Lattimore on a bill alongside acts like Iceage or participating in collaborative art experiments that feature musicians like John Weise or $3.33, but even within the context of the experimental scene, she remains markedly unique. Her album Hundreds of Days is out now on Ghostly International and her swimming habits, Southern upbringing and connection to Prague are just a few of the details she was kind enough to share with me as she paused her journey to reflect while overlooking the flowers blossoming in the graveyard.

I’ve stopped in a little town called Carriage, KY, and I’m pulled over at a funeral home parking lot. I have to make it to Arkansas by tomorrow night, so yeah, just going to stop in Memphis. I’m going to try to go to Graceland in the morning.

That’s a dream of mine! You grew up in North Carolina. I grew up in Atlanta, and The spirit of Elvis is so pervasive down there it’s almost sinful I haven’t visited yet.

Same here! I’m old and I’ve never been. I also like kitschy, glamorous stuff. It opens at 10 so I’m going to be there at like 9:30.

I wanted to talk about your most recent record—it deeply moved me. I felt like it evoked the image of sunshine through lace.

That’s so beautiful! Thank you!

Lots of writers have been coming up with different elemental ways of explaining what you make: ‘No, this is not heavenly, this is earth.’ Or someone else: ‘This is a very aquatic record, like water washing over you.’ What feels most accurate?

I do like the water comparison. People have told me, ‘This is like floating in a flotation tank,’ or whatever they’re called. And I do a lot of swimming, especially on tour. I love swimming laps. It’s very cathartic, very relaxing. That’s how I work things out in my brain from driving around—swimming.

I swam for years competitively and I used to think that was the only place I could get any thinking done at all.

Yes—I love it. You just meditatively work it out. I love it. And that’s really nice—I think that since it is instrumental music, that does give people sort of permission to take it to their own special place. A place with water, if they want to do yoga, if they want to—it’s out of my hands in a good way what people do with it, and it’s really cool. I like that human connection. Since there’s no words, that’s my way of connecting with people—playing for them and they take that and translate that in themselves, you know? It’s cool! The things I wrote about—death, and broken heartedness and things—if you can listen to that and absorb it to be something that you kind of want to meditate to or do yoga to, it’s great!

It’s like taking it out of the darkness into the light. It’s really cool a song can have that kind of revolution.

You’ve said it’s like selling people your diary sometimes. As a fan I’m grateful that you feel that we have this jurisdiction to take it to our own emotional places. Do you ever feel vulnerable once you’ve published something? Or let me rephrase: after you’ve created something, is it a catharsis or is it a sore spot? And do you ever listen to your old tracks that you’ve created?

Sure! I listen to them, definitely. It is like my diary, or like my scrapbook. It’s like looking back and thinking about ‘Oh, these songs I made in Philly,’ ‘This is me when I was 32!’ or something like that. It’s not a sore spot because this is the way that I get through things that are 19

hard. This is my way of coping and working it out, and then I offer it to other human beings who are going through the wild arc of being a human. I have to say that sometimes when people tell me, ‘Oh, your music is the top thing we listen to in the yoga class,’ I do think it’s kind of funny. ‘Oh, that song is about my blind dead dog that my family couldn’t find.’

So I have had those feelings—my sadness that I put here—but then I do remember that I let it go once it’s put onto a physical object. It’s a really cool way of letting things go, mentally and literally—just like giving it away.

I’m DJing a wedding tonight so it’s funny reading your interview about the harp and how everyone pigeonholes it as ‘angelic wedding music.’ I’m like—very accurate!

I did play a wedding! I play a lot of weddings.

It’s a hustle! As a freelancer, you have to have ways of making money, and doing what you want to do.

I want to ask about the PIANO-GRAPHS: New Music for the Player Piano project at the Getty. As I was reading, it looks like a super group—John Wiese, Celia Hollander, Dean Spunt, Jeremiah Chiu, Corey Fogel, William Tyler and yourself all involved in this! How did the harp fit in?

I wasn’t even there—it’s so weird to play a show and not even be there!

How? My friend—she’s a super close friend of mine, Sarah Cooper, and she works at the Getty.

She had this thought about having some musicians who were involved in different kinds of instrumentation each write a piece for the player piano, and she would get it pressed into a roll. She asked me and I thought it would be really cool. The way that I loop stuff, it already sounds like if I were going to play the same song but didn’t have the looper—it’s like I would have to have ten different hands. A player piano can play faster than a human being and more notes, and it already seemed intriguing, like, ‘How would this sound on piano? Without having to think of the difficulty of humans only being born with two arms?’ I wrote this piece using the loops and had this image of sweeping cascading arpeggios that would sound pretty on the piano, and it was amazing. I didn’t know how to put the hard piece into MIDI form so [Sarah] got a friend of ours to put it into MIDI so it could be translated into the player piano roll. He sent me some samples on how the piece would sound played on a MIDI piano, and I was like, ‘Wow, it sounds so different than it does on the harp!’ That was an interesting middle layer. It was really fun! I really can’t wait to hear how the other ones sounded. Like William Tyler’s guitar and hearing how that would come through on the player piano … just like personal style. How does your personal style translate into playing an instrument that you don’t even know how to play? It’s funny because it’s technologically removed times three. You create it on your instrument and then it gets routed through so many manifestations and then shows up on the other side on an instrument that’s been a part of mankind for, what—three centuries?

The old-timey saloon player piano! It’s funny you mention your looping pedal.

When I think of player pianos, a looping pedal almost seems like a modern version.

20

I’ve read you’re quite partial to your Lyons 6—that other musicians have worn that pedal out and they’re tired of it, but you love it because you know it back and forth.

How much do avant-garde musicians really influence each other’s equipment choice?

Do you swap notes on the latest tech?

I don’t really at all. Gear stuff is very new to me, and I kind of want to not listen to anyone and go my own way and find a path for myself. I feel like I’m still getting to know the thing I have to work with. It might be late-bloomer style, but I really want to get to know the one thing I have. I do have other pedals, like the Moog pedals and things that I really love. But with this I’m still taking my time to get to know it. Eventually I’ll move on to exploring new things, but I try not to listen to that because I’m already such a collector of stuff. I can’t even think about it!

It overwhelms me, all the technology that could be incorporated. I was talking to my friend Brian and he was like, ‘You should learn how to use Ableton.’ I feel like having too many options might stop me from being so true to myself, take me into a synthetic direction … I’m trying to translate emotions into music, and I feel like that might kind of take me away from that in a way that I’m not ready for yet.

It’s translating emotions into a language that you barely speak.

I want to learn this language first— —and speak it fluently so you can use it in a poetic manner. I’ve only DJd vinyl for many years. I’m trying to work mp3s into my life, and it’s been exactly that— Totally!

—I feel divorced from what I love!

Things advance for the sake of advancing and so many little details like the emotionalism gets left in the dust. People just keep on wanting to keep up. I try not to listen to people who say, ‘Oh the Lyons 6, I had that when I was 13!’ Certain dudes that I know— —I think I know the same dudes! You said you don’t want to pay attention to what others are doing, but it seems like you draw a lot of inspiration from literature. You referenced Joan Didion in the title of your record from 2016, and you composed a song on the day that Denis Johnson died.

I definitely love words and language and I feel like my music is trying to emulate language and word choice without using words, a little bit—like all the different choices you can hear? I really love to read, and I love elegant writing and simplicity. When I’m struck by something, an image created through words, I always am inspired to emulate that through melody in a way. And so [Johnson’s] Jesus’ Son is one of my favorite collections of stories.

When he died I was at this artist’s residency in Northern California and I was really bummed out he died so young and that he wouldn’t be giving us any more of his writing. I decided to write a song about it as like an ode to him, and then I got his newest story collection. It was so good—definitely like a beautiful final project that I really loved so much.

You’ve been using your voice as a texture— do you foresee yourself as a lyricist— No. Never? Do you want to expand on that perfectly succinct answer?

[laughs] I love when people are beautiful lyricists, and I love words so much that I would be really hard on myself. I’ve tried to write lyrics and it just sounds so corny and I’m not a very good singer at all, except when I can sing wordlessly through a bunch of effects to kind of mask my voice. So definitely with this record even though there’s singing on it, I do not claim to be a great singer or guitar player or anything like that. It’s all for the sake of having more textures than just the harp.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t want to try to get too good at the guitar—it’s not really my thing.

You’ve been touring pretty hard in the last couple of years. Is this new?

This is newer. I didn’t start playing solo until maybe 2014 or 2013. And so mostly before that I played with other people’s bands, so this is a new thing for me to be on tour by myself.

Before that I toured with Thurston Moore for almost two years, and I did a couple other tours—especially last year and this year, I’m really getting into it. I just love being on the road and feeling really free.

You performed on Thurston Moore’s record Demolished Thoughts—I love that record and I’ve really been enjoying your solo stuff. I also saw that you used to work in a record store. I deduced you were involved in classical music and took it quite seriously from an early age, and at a certain point, things started becoming more with avant, noise, and rock ’n’ roll.

I had always listened to non-classical music—I enjoy classical music, especially harp, but even more so being young, I’m sure you felt the draw of the Athens scene, R.E.M., Pylon, and for me it was Chapel Hill. Because sometimes growing up in the South, it doesn’t feel so cool.

At all! And those were like nice touchstones that reminded you that cool shit could come from the South even though there were a lot of kind of conservative towns surrounding where I grew up. I was just listening to a lot of different kinds of music, not just classical music, and then I went to a classical music conservatory and I was playing classical music, but I was working at record stores in Rochester when I went to school, and I worked at the college radio station. It’s always been something I was able to let nourish my brain as much as my classical music training.

You were a college radio DJ? WRUR—‘Your station for variation!

Rochester, New York!’ and I was a DJ at WXYZ in Chapel Hill when I went to school there. I loved college radio lots, and learned a lot from working at the stations, and was the Assistant Music Director. It’s really fun!

You’ve been playing the theremin recently– what is the strangest instrument you’ve ever picked up?

I don’t think I’ve really played that many unusual instruments. The theremin was given to me—it’s called a Theremini and it’s a Moog theremin, and they gave it to me because they were like, ‘Let’s see how she sounds on this thing!’ I really enjoyed playing it. It’s super weird and super fun.

Something so sensitive to your presence.

Yeah! A friend of mine has a French horn, and I tried to play that but it seemed so so hard, controlling your breath and using that to make a sound like that. I couldn’t really

get a cool sound to come out, but yeah—I really like messing around with instruments I don’t know how to play and seeing if I can get something cool to come out.

Your second harp lives in Prague—why?

I bought this harp a couple years ago from an American girl who was living in France. I was touring with different bands and each time I went on tour in Europe I’d rent a harp from someone. And shoving a harp into the back of a van … you’re liable to get scratches on it.

You want to be very careful, especially when you’re loading it with drums and guitars and drunk people are helping you with it—you’re so paranoid that you’re going to put a tiny scratch on this person’s beloved instrument that you’re going to have to pay for or that they’re going to be really sad about. So I had the opportunity to purchase this harp. I won this fellowship in Philadelphia that gave me some money and I thought that this would be a good way to have peace of mind in the future. If it gets a nick on it or a scratch, that’s just a sign of me having a great tour. It’s a surface thing that marks the time. I’m not very precious with my own instrument surfacewise, and it might sound really shitty to say it, but I feel like if it’s a well-loved instrument it’s not going to be totally pristine. I probably could treat my harp a little better, but I mean … I know the rules about heat and cold and being too hot or too cold or whatever. It’s nice to not have to worry about ruining someone else’s harp, and the company that we usually rent from is a backline company in Prague, so they said they’d store the harp in there because that’s usually where the tour starts anyway with the band. So my little harp—Harpy Junior—lives over there, and I’m going to be reunited with it in the fall. I really do love Prague. I feel lucky I have a physical thing that connects me to it.

Have you ever had a show where it wasn’t what you were expecting? Or what the audience was expecting?

The feedback with the harp and the loops is sometimes a problem because the harp is hollow and the feedback gets caught in the loop, and if there’s not a solid sound check to get out those frequencies it really makes it a nightmare. In the nightmare, the feedback keeps getting worse and worse every time the loop comes around, and that’s where my problems lie. But it’s just me to worry about, and I know how to fix problems or get out of situations where I get into sound trouble. I can always play a more noisy set. Another one of my terrifying things is the stairs. In New York they have basement steps with cellar doors— opening those and having to bring the harp down is scary, especially by myself on tour.

Every time I encounter those, I’m like, ‘Oh man!’ Usually it’s fine—everything is fine. I love it. It takes a lot to rattle me, I think.

MARY LATTIMORE WITH DYLAN CARLSON (EARTH) ON TUES., AUG. 7, AT RESIDENT, 428 S. HEWITT ST., DOWNTOWN. 8 PM / $12-$15 / 21+. RESIDENTDTLA.COM. MARY LATTIMORE’S HUNDREDS OF DAYS IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL. VISIT MARY LATTIMORE AT MARYLATTIMORE. NET. INTERVIEW

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MICHAEL RAULT Interview by RON GARMON ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE VAN PATTEN

Even on his phone while stuck in traffic on his way to the record label office, Michael Rault is more concise, funny, self-effacing, and informative than most rockcrits can manage in 1.5 lifetimes. The Edmonton, Alberta, singer-songwriter came to attention in 2014 with Living Daylight, a seven-song ep later expanded to ten for U.S. release on Burger Records. This debut delighted critics with a early rock sensibility, so small wonder so many take note of the sophomore release on Daptone subsidrary Wick—It’s a New Day Tonight—in terms of this onetime hepcat’s lengthening hair and new-minted classic Britrock-inflected psychedelic sound. Since a foolish consistency is the mark of no mind at all, I found this metamorphosis delightful, dreamy, funny, instructive, and indicative of a Man on the Move too bemused to even consider slowing down. We join him here as the pace really begins to pick up …

Tell us about your approach to songwriting. What’s your particular process?

Except for the occasional times when I have a lyrical idea or a title that springs into my head previous to starting, I usually start unconsciously—writing with no real idea of where I’m going. Sometimes its just random noises and if I’m lucky, I see ideas and patterns start to form like a Polaroid developing. If there’s something, some sort of reaction that begins to make sense or seems recognizable, then I start exploring that.

‘It’s a New Day Tonight’ sounds like one of those songs with a story behind it.

It is. It’s an exception to the rules I talked about. I went into it thinking I could write a song with that title. I heard a hockey player being interviewed and he said—randomly regarding a loss the night before—he said something about the past being behind us and there’s a new day tonight. It can be seen as a joke since it was the nighttime and he wanted a new day. Then I was like, ‘Or … it could mean something more profound.’

Like working hard all day doing stupid stuff and getting a second life in the nighttime.

Kind of Lennon-esque, like ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ It subverts its own meaning.

Exactly. The thing is, I really admired that about the Beatles—the way John would take advantage of jumbled things he’d heard.

INTERVIEW

That’s something they inspired—be on the lookout for odd turns of phrase and bits of speech that can be turned into songs.

What’s the story behind ‘Pyramid Scheme’? It’s a slow and drifty standout and probably a basis for all those George Harrison comparisons I’m reading.

I do love George Harrison. That one was one of the subconscious variety. I found a book on Illuminati conspiracy theories at some random used bookstore and I thought it would be funny to read it. I never went into it with expectation of serious learning and I soon stopped reading it. What I took away were images of how civilizations are made but soon it became about how chords are overlaid.

‘Sleeping & Smiling’ sounds like a personal meditation.

It was the next to last song I wrote for the record and we’d had ten songs already and we lost two and needed to add two. It was out of necessity. Having to sit down and write a song made it an interesting obstacle to deal with. I sat at the piano and started with the melody, then I began to go through some lyrical ideas I’d written down and ‘Sleeping & Smiling’ was somewhere in there. Melodies began to merge together, then the words shaped to fit and it all began to change into one thing. I was proud of what I’d accomplished under the gun.

It seems to come from somewhere very personal.

Yeah. I find songwriting tends to reflect bits and pieces of your personal situation, even if you start by randomly throwing things in the air.

‘When the Sun Shines’ concludes the album with one of those ten-mile-long Elton John fadeouts.

I was really excited to have Sam Cooke’s grandchildren and Bobby Womack’s nieces to come out and do those vocals while we were in Riverside, California.

A lot of songs about the sun on this record.

It comes up every day. There’s a certain amount of sun worship in the world that has never gone away in and still pops up in certain areas of the culture.

The folly of attempting to blot out the sun, mind! Where did you film the video for ‘I’ll Be There’?

Outside Toronto. If I remember correctly I was coming back from New York after finishing up the tracking and we wanted to get the video started. We did the majority of the shooting the next day in Toronto right before I had to go to Montreal and get on a plane to Los Angeles. We drove around to various places for the video director.

This looks and sounds less like one of those ennui-drenched life-on-the-road

songs and more an ode to the more hallucinogenic side of travel generally.

I wrote it to be about travel, but once I looked at the lyrics I decided it was about touring! A sense of having to accept things are going to be the way they are … you only have so much control over it and you’re just going to keep rolling so try to embrace it with a cheery attitude if you can. The other alternative is stop—which is not where I’m at right now. I’m just moving into the next place.

Not for you the complaining of Ray Davies of seeing that morning break and grieving the start of another day.

There are times when I’d rather be sleeping and not playing and forcing out words but I’m happy to do it. There’s an element of Ray Davies in this situation here but so far I’ve kept it slightly more covert than he did!

MICHAEL RAULT WITH LEVITATION ROOM AND DUSTIN LOVELIS ON FRI., JUNE 29, AT THE BOOTLEG THEATER, 2220 BEVERLY BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 8:30 PM / $12 / 21+.

BOOTLEGTHEATER.ORG. MICHAEL RAULT’S IT’S A NEW DAY TONIGHT IS OUT NOW ON WICK. VISIT MICHAEL RAULT AT MICHAELRAULT.COM. 23

delroy edwards Interview by zach bilson and chris kissel photography by alex the brown

A common thread through Delroy Edwards’ discography is the lack of a common thread—the guy just can’t sit still. Just a year after debuting on Brooklyn’s L.I.E.S. with a series of grimy club bangers, he founded his own label, L.A. Club Resource, which became a direct line for him to release what he wanted, when he wanted. Along with a series of friends’ oddball releases and Memphis rap reissues, Edwards himself dropped out the Slowed Down Funk mixtapes—self-explanatory—as well as Hangin’ at the Beach, a strange and beautiful foray into broken, romantic psych-house. Edwards spoke to L.A. RECORD in June of 2018, halfway through an already big year: his back-to-back Rio Grande and Aftershock LPs exist as almost totally separate bubbles on the Delroy Edwards Venn Diagram, though both are inventive, concise, and flat-out fun enough to land on a few year-end lists. (That is, unless he outdoes himself before the end of the year, which is very possible.) He was nice enough to break down the origins of his sound for us, along with his thoughts on motivation, nostalgia, and the dichotomous sprawl of Los Angeles.

Zach Bilson: First of all, I wanted to say congrats on putting out two great records back-to-back—were the sessions recorded all at once, or did you do them separately?

I did the first one, Rio Grande, a while ago … that one’s kinda been kicking around for a bit. Not that long ago—I did it maybe three or four months before I did the L.I.E.S. one. But I did them all in a couple of weeks.

ZB: What was your mindset on each one?

They have different character—Aftershock seems hard, closer to other stuff you’ve done on L.I.E.S., and Rio Grande’s more laid back.

That’s the vibe. I was getting really into westerns and stuff when I was working on that. That was where I was at—when I was in my studio, I would have a couple of John Wayne movies running. A western frontier kind of vibe. I’ve always kinda dug western movies. I guess I was at a point where I was re-watching some of them, and then it just kinda went from there. I didn’t really think about it … I was recording stuff with some friends of mine at the time, and then I was also deep into that thing, revisiting those movies. The look of them is just cool, you know?

ZB: I know your music is very much inspired by Los Angeles, and at the end 24

of the day, California is a desert—there’s a very desolate feeling to a lot of those movies.

Definitely, and a lot of gunslinger stuff. If you go not too far outside of L.A., there can be pretty run-down old towns. There’s some stuff that brings that vibe to the desert. I was just thinking about what this place used to look like a while ago. I drive around a lot, I go on road trips. I wasn’t on any at that time. I was just into the flicks and stuff, and trying my best to make … I was kinda making music for them, but I was working with synthesizers, you know? I guess in a perfect world it would be ‘western music,’ with, like, orchestras. Really triumphant stuff. I was making the four-track version of what I thought that might be like.

Chris Kissel: You’re talking about how the idea of a western is something that inspired you when you were approaching these pieces—how much of the music you make is intuitive and how much is from you going in with a manifesto? If I make a couple of tracks that are along one line, and I feel like it’s still going, I’ll decide I wanna make an album out of them. Then once I have the idea that I wanna put them together in an album … Except for other times in the past, where I’ve definitely dug through old shit. The L.I.E.S. one, it’s different, not as much western-influenced,

more just a house record. I was working on the tracks and I came up with three or four, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna keep doing this until it doesn’t feel right anymore.’ Then usually it’s done at that point. The recording process for me is very therapeutic. Taking it really simply. I mean, I could do a lot more with all the technical capabilities that there are today, but I just feel like … with this sort of thing, it comes off a little more human.

CK: I don’t know if it’s the tools that you’re using, but your music has a ‘lofi’ vibe. How central is that mood to your composition? People say it has an 80s sound—but do you think of it as a nostalgic sound yourself?

I definitely do because it brings me back to times that I enjoyed in my life. One of the oldest memories that I can recall … I grew up in the 90s. I was still coming of age in 95, so it wasn’t like the 80s. But my family had a lot of cassette tapes, and I remember that warm sound. My mom had an exercise tape or some shit like that, and she would do her workouts to it. Now I listen to it and it’s all Linndrums and all the shit that I like. I was like, ‘Whoa, this music is really blissed out’—I remember thinking it was a thing. Even if the music doesn’t sound like this anymore, it’s still a thing. So there’s definitely a sense of nostalgia, you know?

It makes people think about … weird other shit. Like rock music can be a genre, nostalgic music can be a genre too.

CK: I think you and I are about the same age—my parents always had cassette tapes and stuff too. I think when you hear the sound of ‘your’ records, if you grew up in that time period, it’s like a mainline to your emotions. My parents don’t understand that. If you’re outside of that pocket of time, I don’t think it speaks to you in the same way.

Exactly. I mean, that tape in particular sounded very much like the style of music that I do now. It was a thing I’ve always held on to. But we always listened to a lot of rap music on tape and stuff, growing up—then my folks switched to CDs, and then I was buying CDs. But the tapes had this different sound that I liked a lot. My aunt and uncle had dancehall mixes that they made, and they just sounded better on tape.

CK: Yeah! They even smelled different.

Just everything about it.

Yeah, it’s a bit sadder. It’s a bit darker like that.

CK: It’s like it’s coming from some other place, like it’s a transmission from across the chasm of time.

I like it for a lot of different reasons—it’s easy to use and shit. But it sounds crunchy, and I’ve always been into crunchy tracks.

INTERVIEW

ZB: When exactly did you start working with that medium? Was cassettes something you started out with?

The first thing I got was … a friend of mine gave me a couple of old Korg drum machines. I was using that for a while, going into my computer. There was a program called Audacity I used a lot, up until not too long ago. And then I was in high school, 10 or 11 grade—I was in a Goodwill with my friend and he found a cassette four-track. He was like, ‘I’m gonna buy this,’ and I was like, ‘Dude … you’ve got to let me have this.’ And he let me have it! Cassettes were way easier to get then.

I mean, you can still get them, but they were a lot cheaper—now more people are recording on them.

ZB: There was definitely a time when you could find even 8-tracks in thrift stores.

A few years ago I got something like 300 cassettes on Craigslist for like $20.

Yeah, they were just around. And they’re so easy. I love it. But I don’t record on cassette anymore. Aftershock was the first record I did on a reel-to-reel. I got it right after I finished Rio Grande, and I was really into it. That’s what I’m using now. It’s a similar layout—it’s a 4-track, but it sounds a little more clear. I mean, if you want it to—you can make it sound kind of dirty, too. The preamps on that sound really good when you run ‘em all the way hot.

ZB: Aftershock is your first release on L.I.E.S. since 2013—why did you go back?

I’d been talking to them. I can’t say enough great things about Ron [Morelli, L.I.E.S. founder]. Best guy. He taught me everything I know, pretty much, when it comes to house music. I didn’t know shit about him ‘till I met him. He’s the man. I did some records back in the day and then started L.A. Club Resource, and was working on that for a while, then I was like ‘Hey, wanna do some stuff?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah man, I’m down.’ It was whatever—I was just busy trying to put out records myself, and try that out a little.

ZB: What led you to split releases between L.A. Club Resource and L.I.E.S.?

We didn’t even plan it that way, I just had a really productive 12 months, I was working a lot. I had 16 or 20 tracks for him—I pretty much send him anything I do, but I sent him those and he was digging them.

But around the same time, I wanted to put out Rio Grande first, and he was cool with that.

CK: How important is it to you to put out your own records, or put out your records with friends? It’s not important, really … I mean, it’s important for now. I would love to reach a real mass audience with this kind of music. I think house music is great stuff, and I would love to have it be in a lot of peoples’ hands. I thought that if I did it myself I could reach an audience that other people hadn’t reached, maybe.

It’s all about trying to get as many people to hear it as possible, so if that means doing it with some big body or something … if they wanna let me do my thing, then I’m down with it completely. th

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CK: Where do you see things growing, or how would you like to grow? You’re putting out records on your own terms— which is great, they’re great records. But are there other things that you want to do that you see as your potential in the next couple of years?

I’ve been working on a lot of material that’s not this sort of stuff, so I’m trying to cultivate that. I’ve been making a lot of pop music recently … not like, pop pop, but I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different types of songwriting, using my production to make different types of music. I just wanna keep making music cuz I enjoy it. Usually when people really enjoy it, it’s worth something. I just want as many people to check this stuff as possible. I like to try my hand at everything.

CK: People always say that your music is L.A.-rooted—being in L.A., living in L.A., the vibe here … does that affect the music that you make?

By landscape and environment, I think it definitely does. I really got into the Chicago house sound, so I think I kind of embraced that, but I just wanted to represent for L.A. I felt like we didn’t really have a strong dance scene out here. I’m just personally inspired

by L.A. [Especially] the look of it—it’s a little bit of everything. It’s kind of strange, kind of seedy. I guess my music is in that creepshow, red light district-sounding type of shit. L.A.’s got that in spades.

CK: One of the crazy things about L.A. to me, which you hinted at too, is that it’s really big. It’s twenty different cities.

What was the L.A. that you grew up in?

Aside from the 4 years that I lived in south L.A., I’ve lived in Silverlake my whole life. I grew up in Silverlake. My folks moved here from New York before I was born. The L.A. I grew up in back in the day wasn’t as … people will move into Echo Park and just be like, ‘Cool, I’m in Echo Park.’ They don’t really venture out that much, except to go see some kooky thing here and there, or go take in a day in Long Beach once in a while.

But when I was younger there was just shit everywhere. My pops liked to go to this one spot to get his shoes or whatever, but there would be ‘one spot’ in San Fernando, or Long Beach or Compton or my cousin’s out in Whittier. We were just going everywhere, all the time. Car trips weren’t short. People will be like, ‘I don’t wanna go to the west side cuz it’s going to take 45 minutes.’ I just remember being in the car forever, going to places that were so fuckin’ far by today’s measure. You ask somebody to go to Torrance ‘cause you’ve gotta run an errand, they’re like, ‘HELL no!’

CK: It’s like going to Nevada!

Yeah, exactly! That’s how it seems. So I know the city really, really well. My parents had friends all over the city, and back in the day, people didn’t just live in one area. So that was what I got down with, knowing all the different parts of the city.

CK: Do you wonder how the city you live in affects who you become as a person?

You don’t meet a lot of people who’ve lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives.

Yeah, you don’t. I’m always the odd person out when people talk about how they grew up—’I moved here, I moved there.’ I never really did any of that, getting up and moving. I traveled a lot as a youngster, but we never lived anywhere else, for a little bit or anything. It does make the way you think different, I think. Especially when you would go to all these places and there was all this shit going on.

ZB: I’m definitely interested in some of those far-out spots—a restaurant or record store that someone who spends most of their time in Echo Park might not be hip to.

I wish I was the right person to ask these days, but I don’t leave my house too much!

I used to live in West Adams and spent a lot of time over there. Gotta say wassup to Jucy’s Natraliart, the best Jamaican restaurant in Los Angeles. But there’s great shit everywhere, you’ve gotta just go out.

ZB: I’ve lived here my entire life, and I’ve only seen probably 30% of the city.

There are so many pockets of people with completely different lives than you in the same city.

Do you have extended family?

ZB: Most of my family’s from New York, I grew up in Venice and went to high school downtown, so most of what I knew growing up was everything in between that.

Funny, I was the opposite—I went to school in Santa Monica, at New Roads, and lived in Silverlake.

ZB: Oh seriously? So did I, for a year.

That’s wild, man. I went to New Roads for all of high school, I graduated in … 2009 I think.

ZB: We definitely overlapped. Super funny. Santa Monica’s a whole different bubble.

I think it’s just about having people everywhere. Like, I had family way out, so when I would go hang out with them I would go to their spot, so we would just be in Inglewood for the day, or Whittier, like I said before. Having people all over and seeing different walks of life. I had family who lived on opposite sides of town, places where people don’t go too much and you see some crazy shit going down.

Carjackings and shit like that. [Something] I think a lot of is that L.A. is pretty and violent at the same time. I’m into those two things together.

CK: It’s like your music—your music is dark but listenable; it has a lot of party moments, but it’s all subdued under tape hiss.

Yeah, that’s a big connection. It’s grimy but it’s very nice to be in.

ZB: So you’re recording all the time and sending it off to Ron and other friends.

Do you ever get burnt out, or just need a week or two off of the grind?

You know, I really don’t. Occasionally I’ll go a few days without making music, but you can ask most people who know me—I just stay in and work. Like I said earlier, it’s therapeutic. I can’t really sit down, I get bored doing most shit. Even if someone’s like, ‘Hey man, you’ve got to come to this

thing! This person’s giving away free money!

Today! Let’s go!’ I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s great! But I was gonna sit around and work on music…’ You know what I mean?

It doesn’t matter what the fuck it is, man. It’s just incredibly boring to me … not boring, but I’m just not into it. I’m not a social guy.

ZB: You said you think a lot of the best musicians over time have just been called to music—it’s not really up to them, it’s something in their blood. Do you feel like that’s the case with you?

Definitely. I feel like it’s what I’m meant to do. Hopefully it’ll pay off in the future— hopefully a lot of people will be able to hear it, and give me more ability to create more things. It’s a grind, trying to survive on music, but if you really enjoy it, it’s just a thing that you have to do. It’s almost like sleep.

CK: You’ve carved out a space for this sound that you’ve created, especially with these two records and the record before this. How has your perception of what you do changed?

I guess the only thing is that I’ve gotten more people to listen to it and know about me. I think that’s the only thing. That gives you a little bit of an adrenaline shock, you know?

You want people to really dig the stuff, but you’re like, ‘Aw man, I’ve gotta make this pretty far out’ because that’s where we’re at now as a community. I’ve always had that.

Nothing’s really changed for me except for learning more about music, and different types of music.

CK: Are those listeners always in your mind—or in the back of your mind— when you’re creating?

Not always—music is my thing, you know?

I take it pretty personally—the music that I make is my thing, like, me. It takes from other types of music and other artists, sure, but … I dunno. I mean, I do think about people a lot because I’m making dance music a lot of the time, and it’s DJ music, too. People don’t gotta love this shit, but I hope they enjoy it. It doesn’t take up a lot of my mindspace, but also, I run a business, you know? I’m trying to fuckin’ sell records, too. I want them to sound good, and I want people to buy them, because if people don’t buy them I don’t get to eat or make more records. It’s the only way I can—I can’t hold down a job. I used to be a line cook in restaurants, like, crazy restaurants …

Michelin star restaurants. I was really into cooking for a while, working such long days, feeling terrible. As soon as I stopped I could never hold a job again. The day I stopped, I told the people I was working with, ‘Man, I’m gonna go try and do music for a little bit.’ And it wasn’t working out for a while, so I tried to go back, and I absolutely could not. I couldn’t do it. Once I had gone to the other side, I couldn’t go back. This is the only thing I can really do.

DELROY EDWARDS’ RIO GRANDE IS OUT NOW ON L.A. CLUB RESOURCE AND AFTERSHOCK IS OUT NOW ON L.I.E.S. VISIT DELROY EDWARDS AND L.A. CLUB RESOURCE AT GENESLIQUOR.BIZ. INTERVIEW

serpentwithfeet Interview by daiana feuer illustration by Makan negahban

With tattoos and piercings framing his eyebrowless face, a wild wardrobe that seems he just rolled through a theatre costume closet, and almost always carrying his favorite Brandy-inspired doll, New York City-based Josiah Wise—a.k.a. serpentwithfeet—has a presence. After emerging with his 2016 EP, blisters, and growing into this year’s soil, that presence has bloomed into a voice with a thrilling capability for fearless expression. He met Tri Angle Records’ Robin Carolan in 2015, and Carolan signed him to the label and introduced him to Bjork, and Wise gave her a private serenade over brunch. In this interview, Wise shares details behind that encounter and ensuing friendship, as well as his thoughts on intellect, experience, romance, and of course, the many reasons to love Brandy ‘that-boy-is-mine’ Norwood.

Soil as a concept makes me think of roots but also mess, dirt, worms, bones … what does it mean to you? How does it connect to these songs about devotion and love?

I think you just nailed it. It’s about digging, worms, it’s about pulp and juice and growth—all of that. I’ve always been very inquisitive. Since I was a child, people have always let me know I was talkative.

At some point most kids grow out of it but I’ve remained talkative through my adult life. I’m talkative. I also have a lot of questions. I also have a follow-up question always. I started to realize with the men I was dating that this wasn’t favorable for them. They would prefer if I wasn’t like this, because everybody doesn’t necessarily want to go down that spiral with me. I’m always interested in that one more question. What will be revealed or unveiled if we unpack this one more thing? I’m always interested in getting to the bottom of something.

Not interrogate just to interrogate. I’m interested. I’m a chatty person. I enjoy unpacking things, even with friends. It’s exciting to me. So I wanted to make an album where I let my ideas loiter. What would happen if I let them stand around and be outside my door? What if I let my thoughts do their thing and not police them.

This is a roundabout way of explaining but that’s how I ended up in ‘soil.’

Digging as deep as you want to go without holding back?

INTERVIEW

Yeah and also letting the dirty ideas show themselves. Which [is] on songs like ‘Slow Syrup,’ ‘Messy,’ or ‘Seedless,’ where I kind of suggest that certain things that I want maybe aren’t the popular choice. But I want to give them space too. I also wanted to think about how with the guys I was dating, this isn’t necessarily the best fit for you, but I don’t want to shit on myself because we maybe aren’t a pair. I just want to observe like, ‘OK, you like your way and I like mine and that is OK.’ You’ve gone through a physical transformation over the last few years— more tattoos, more piercings. Is that tied to this idea of inhabiting yourself fully?

It has been about unleashing and knowing that there is no such thing as what I’m supposed to look like. I don’t have to be so judgmental of myself, and I’m sort of challenging others to do the same. I can give myself space. When I got my inverted pentacle tattoo, people have different ideas of what it means and I’m not interested in explaining it anymore. I think before I got it, I was really concerned with ‘what if people think the wrong thing?’ Now I just chuckle when people ask me if I’m a devil worshipper. I haven’t thought about the devil being a real concept since I was 19.

I’m just like, ‘LOL, I guess I know what they mean’ but it’s such a non-concept for me. I just want to give myself the space to do what I want. All my tattoos mean

something specific to me. Like, ‘suicide’ means for me something different than it means to someone else. I’m not trying to trigger anyone or damage someone else’s feelings, but this is my body. It can be unpopular but I’m gonna feel what I feel and I’m gonna feel it deeply and be loud about it. You can always get in your car and roll up your window. I think this album is about that. I have my politics, I have my romantic politics, and you can completely disagree and, bye, walk away, go home.

Why is articulating feelings and being loud with expression important or necessary to you?

Because I know what it means to be unnecessarily quiet. I spent a lot of years in silence and I spent a lot of years not feeling that what I had to say or that my feelings had merit. I love the memes and the tweets [where] a lot of folks talk about how white people can often silent Black people, queer people, and Black gay people, and they don’t think our experience is a reality or that we’re over-exaggerating. I think often about the micro- and macro-aggressions that I face daily and it’s important for me to talk loudly. This is happening to me. And even beyond me, this is happening to other people and that is the legacy that I’m part of. I’m always thinking about race. I don’t have the privilege not to. Every second. And I’m always thinking about the way the racial climate affects the way that I date—it affects

the way that I love, it affects the way that I have sex. It’s a large ongoing conversation.

Over this album I’m not specifically shouting, ‘As a Black man this is my experience,’ but I think it was important for me to talk to my experience and body in a way that I wasn’t before. It’s really liberating and it’s important to remember that I’m part of an entire conversation with a lot of people who have experienced similar things. I really enjoy documenting and I really enjoy reading documents because I think, ‘Life, we’re all here to enjoy life.’ I’m not religious. I don’t think there’s some big master plan or heaven or hell. I think we’re here to enjoy life and master the art of living. People become wine connoisseurs or learn the subtle differences in cheeses, or they become tea mavens, or all these things—they are people that enjoy the art of living. But a lot of people are robbed of that joy. They’re robbed of that opportunity because they’re trying to make sure they get clean water or that they’re not going to get shot walking down the street. So for me it’s important to talk about the art and joy of living but then also how a lot of people— myself included—you’re almost punished if you do start having fun. I just want to talk about the real pursuit of happiness.

Some say writing is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised or it gets weak. How do you keep your tools for expression sharp?

Do you have a habit or a bag of habits when it comes to that?

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I do! And I completely agree with that statement. I think it’s important to constantly be sharpening the tool. I’m constantly writing, I’m constantly thinking about writing, and constantly working out ideas in my head. Most great writers are obsessed with writing. I remember reading that Toni Morrison told her students that even when you’re not writing, you should be thinking about writing. If you’re in a room, you should be finding the thread between all the items in the room. You should be constantly working on an idea. You need to stay dexterous in that way. When I read that I was like, ‘OK, got it.’ So when I’m on a train, when I’m walking down the street, I’m working out ideas. That’s kind of what happened with soil. I would write down little ideas and then revisit them, until I could figure out how to make them work.

Is reading as important? People read less books these days. But if you don’t read about ideas, is that going to make you less likely to engage in them?

I think people have different ways of reading. In this generation as we figure out our relationship to intellectualism, some people say ‘I’m anti-intellectualism.’ I say that’s stupid. You need to be intellectual.

There’s a battle going on. A lot of it is in the name of the Internet. There’s all different ways we can read. You can read online or you can read a physical book. You can read stories, articles, e-books, poetry, scholarly journals. I love JSTOR. Or maybe you read body language or tarot or between the lines. Maybe that’s how you read. Some people may be book-smart but socially they

might be inept. They might not see that the person at the bar was actually flirting with them. They think, ‘Oh, nobody likes me, nobody talks to me,’ but actually someone has been trying to all along. Those are important ways of reading. I saw online the other day that this disabled woman’s dog ran up to someone and was trying to get their attention. Her owner had an accident and couldn’t get up so her dog went for help and people were swatting the dog away. She made a post: ‘General announcement, if you see a service dog come up to you, and it’s trying to get your attention, I’m in need of help and it’s trying to find a human that can help.’ Luckily she was ok. So yeah— even knowing how to read animals. I’m really interested in the many different ways that we can read.

Let’s talk about Brandy. Why Brandy?

Oh—why not Brandy? She’s brilliant. She is. She is one of the architects of modern R&B as we know it. This generation of R&B folks, there’s many people we owe so much to but Brandy is definitely one of them. Her work on a textual level is always incredibly generous, so emotionally accountable, so sweet, so clever. Obviously ‘I Wanna Be Down’ and ‘Sittin’ Up In My Room’ from the first album, but the second album, Never Say Never, I’m thinking about how clever the songs were. ‘Angel In Disguise,’ ‘Learn The Hard Way,’ ‘Have You Ever,’ ‘Almost Doesn’t Count,’ these are heavy hitters emotionally. They aren’t just saying ‘Boy I miss you, you didn’t call me.’ She was really exploring the nuances of love, which she was also doing on Moesha,

playing this young, middle class Black girl in California. Navigating being an A student, liking boys, juggling everything and having a social life. And then moving on to Full Moon, Afrodisiac, and Human.

There was always this extreme emotional accountability, which I think is incredible.

And the singing—she’s unrivaled. She’s a singer of a different ilk. It’s sensitive. In the classical world we have this thing called bel canto singing, and Brandy is that. Sweet singing—the lyrics are always sweet. She might be saying ‘I’m not fucking with you anymore,’ but it’s still really compassionate.

It’s influenced me as a songwriter, as a vocalist. Even on my most inflammatory days I still want to be able to say, ‘I really don’t like you and I don’t want to ever see you again,’ but I want to say it with a certain elegance. There’s a line on ‘Finally’ off Afrodisiac where she basically says, ‘I would have made it OK for you to do me wrong. I would have made it OK to play the role one more day, if I didn’t hear my conscience say …’ and then she goes on … and I just think it’s so amazing. It’s that line, ‘I would have made it OK for you to do me wrong.’ It’s a different spin on saying, ‘You done me wrong.’ That particular elegance is just amazing and incredible to me.

Why the dolls?

Because I like them. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that.

Bjork called your music ‘moist.’ You sang to her. How did this even happen?

I met her before my EP came out. I met her physically in February 2016 and my EP blisters came out in September. We met,

hung out, and then she said to me, ‘If you would like to come over and workshop one of your songs, I would love to have you.’

So that’s what I did. I came over. It was her and her engineer. We set up shop and had a session. We had a big brunch, and we ate, and then she kind of gave me a recording master class. I recorded right in front of her and I sang it over and over and over and she gave me really wonderful critiques and suggestions and different ways to articulate and it was really exciting and terrifying. I have been a fan of her since I was 11 years old. To have her right there sitting across from me and listening intently to each song … I was terrified. I finally relaxed into it.

She took notes! I will never forget. She had a purple marker. She was amazing. She took notes on each take and wrote out the things she liked. We just tried stuff. Since then she’s come to my shows and afterwards she gives me her pleasant notes. She is a mentor to me. I always tell her, ‘Please give me feedback. You aren’t here to say “that was amazing.” I want to hear what you think.’ I don’t have a legend around just to tell me I did a good job. I want to get better. It’s been beautiful having her in my life. serpentwithfeet WITH KATIE GATELY ON TUE., JULY 17, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$15 / 18+. serpentwithfeet’s soil IS OUT NOW ON SECRETLY CANADIAN AND TRI ANGLE RECORDS. VISIT serpentwithfeet AT SERPENTWITHFEET.BANDCAMP. COM.

INTERVIEW

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eddington again Interview by senay kenfe photography by gari askew

For the griots of our ancestors’ time in the motherland, movement was just as important a medium of expression as the sounds from the drum circles. The message finds many ways for itself to be delivered, and L.A. native Eddington Again fully comfortable being a conduit for the message—he’s always had an effortless ability to incorporate dance in his musical projects both past and present. In time for the release of his Sweet EP (on local Newbody Records) and in preparation for his coming full-lengh 9 this summer, we sat down and chatted about the perils of early fame, the joys of Solano Canyon, the beauty of freestyling, and the legend of Tommy the Clown.

Here we are in Chinatown, Eddington— you say you live nearby.

Yup, it’s like a Chinatown neighborhood near Elysian Park—Solano Canyon.

The thing I like about Solano Canyon in particular is that it’s in the middle of a forest, and that’s my vibe. I catch a lot of my vibes around trees and nature.

What’s on the mood board? When you’re making music?

Uh, colors—purple is my color. That’s my birth color. Grape royale. Like Prince!

Royal!

Yup! [And] I wanna say like all my influences—like Dipset, Death Grips, Clipse, Santigold—I’m like infatuated.

More music makes more music for me.

And you’re a very accomplished dancer as well. You got some moves.

I grew up in the krump era—we was krumping in the streets.

Krumping was very big out here. A lot of people who are not from L.A., they don’t know. I think I might have seen you in a couple videos krumping.

Probably! I used to dance with Tommy the Clown. And I danced with Tiny Kids Crew a few times, I was good enough, but I was too young. And I was living in the I.E., and everybody in the I.E. was wacker than the people in L.A., so they was eating us up. I’d come up here and try to battle and get my skills up.

But you weren’t successful.

Nope.

Tommy the Clown was a local legend, the man who took all the kids around, krumping at birthday parties.

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He’s still doing it!

Taste of Soul, last year, his new cast— Yup, new generation!

Is that interesting for you to see that lineage? ‘I was doing that at that age.’

It’s interesting because now it went all the way back around. The moves that we were doing in like 2004, 2003 … they went from that and then evolved to this hypertechnical dancing, and then from then, it went right back to original clown dancing, which is what they’re doing now. They incorporate krump sometimes but for the most part, what they do is just entertain.

It’s real simple moves and shit, so it’s like hella interesting. But I still get the same hype when I see it. I turn back into like 16 years old.

How do you incorporate elements of movement into your music? Is there a connection?

For sure. It just all comes down to the actual instrument and the beat because that’s what I go off of. All of my music, I base if off of the beat that I want to first, and then the shit I write … I write shit just off the top sometimes. It could be considered poetry because there’s no instrumental behind it, but once I find a beat, then all that shit just comes back up. I was dancing before I was recording. The beat is always what inspired me. I hear the beat, and I just go in.

I feel like dancing—I guess in a technical sense they’d call it modern style, but the fluidity of it, it’s very much stream of consciousness-like. Which I feel flows into you, because you are an exceptional freestyler.

How did you know that?

We may or may not—in yesteryear—have been in a session or two!

That’s true! For sure, for sure—I forgot about that!

Freestyling is a very big element, here in L.A. especially. How did free-styling help you discover your voice? How did you go from that into the structure of writing songs and lyrics?

I want to say freestyle helps me to pick out different melodies I’m going to use, like something that’s like catchy to myself. At the same time, I’m really involved in just art and creating in general, so I’m making like pop, catchy, and avant, so I take it like pop—something that reminds me of an older song, something that feels familiar— and then I like stretch it out, like, ‘Oh, this is dope.’ And with free-styling, free-styling is just fun—you can do whatever the fuck you want, just get into and just let it flow, and that gives you the confidence to keep going. And I’m low-key lazy too, so if I don’t feel like writing, I can just freestyle.

And you’ve done that?

That’s how I made Sweet.

Great record. Let’s talk about it. Where did that come from? Where was that recorded?

Downtown L.A. I used to live with Dylan from FRIENDZONE, and I just came home from partying one night and I was like, ‘Yo, can I get on the mic?’ I just sang it. And he be doing shit … like every time I freestyled, like if he liked it, he’d fuckin’ make the shit and then release it the next day without telling me. Like I’ll log onto my Facebook and be tagged in some shit.

Luckily he’s talented as shit! So he did the same thing with Sweet. I didn’t even care. I was just into it, and he was like ‘This is so good!’ and I went to sleep and the next day he’d finished it!

Do you feel like you have like so many concepts and ideas in your head that sometimes it’s crowded?

For sure! I feel I have a lot of concepts and ideas and I’m trying to make shit happen at the same time. Like strictly survival, and then it’s getting my music to people so I can survive off music. I feel I have a lot of backed up ideas I can’t execute without money, and that could be my own doing.

Like telling myself ‘I can’t do this shit for free’ because people need to get paid, you know what I mean? Which is true! But at the same time, there’s still people out here, if they feel it and they’re inspired, they’re willing to fuck it up.

How do you feel about the revolving door where artists have to be their own manager, their own booking agent, their own publicist, and also create the art?

I think that makes it harder but at the same time, I think that builds character. And it builds social skills, and it can bring you down. But when you fuck something up and you’re like, ‘Oh, damn—I accomplished that. I really went in and I booked that residency with me and a homie and we packed it out every fucking week!’ … that builds me up. That makes me feel like more of a person, you know? More recently I’ve INTERVIEW

been like not trying to dwell too much on success, as in like personal accomplishment because I feel like it’s so easy to get caught up in that and like, tell yourself you’re your own productivity—because you’re more than that. It takes away from the art but it also builds the human, you know?

There’s maturity in what you’re saying. Do you feel this comes from your experiences, and the music scene here? Like you were doing Red Bull Sound Select—what did you learn from such a visible showcase, and what comes afterward?

That’s when I was in my group Oddience.

And that shit popped up really weird because I shot the video with my friend Pablo [Balderas]. I met Kevin through Pablo, I shot this video for another project called Oddience, and I linked up with Kevin, and my sister was like struggling—living in Compton, she almost got kidnapped and some shit like that. I was like, ‘Yo, move in my room out here in L.A., and I’m going to move in with this dude that was staying next door.’ So I moved in with him, and she moved out here, and she wasn’t really doing nothing but like smoking weed and hanging out with her ex-boyfriend, so I was like, ‘We about to make a group, TK 10:10]!’ and we started doing music and we shot a video to it. I didn’t know what to think about it because this was like my second group I was in, and I was just experimenting like I always do. We made the video and the video came out great! I didn’t know how I felt about the songs because I ain’t never really like made music with these people, and I just emailed it out—email blasted my friend who used to work at Interscope as like a runner, so he had all these email addresses. He gave me the email addresses, and then I blasted the video and the next day I got a letter from this dude from the Recommender, which is this blog that like writes shit in London, and I didn’t know that everybody in the industry listened to him. He wrote this long ass thing about how we’re the next up and coming thing!

I’m shook, I’m like ‘What the hell?’ and all the emails started coming in—Interscope, Capitol, Universal, it was this whole spiral.

They flew us out to New York to meet with some people. I forgot they name cause at the time they mentioned Ariana Grande—this was like in 2012, so it was like those type of people! And I hooked up with people in New York and then we hooked up with this other manager who was managing like Lykke Li, Arcade Fire, Paul McCartney, and we signed with him and from there he got us a deal with Universal, and from then on, we went to SXSW. Red Bull Sound Select hit us up separately—a pal recommended us—and Red Bull Sound Select basically signed us. So they were like booking us for shows and helping us promote our music, and getting us paid, you know? So all that shit happened at the same time. And to me I was overwhelmed, personally, because I didn’t expect that shit to happen—it just happened in like six months.

That’s heavy.

It was heavy as shit, but then it lasted like two years. And Red Bull Sound—we ended

up getting dropped from the label cause we split with the manager and they didn’t know what to do. They were like, ‘This dude brought you over here and you all dropped him so we’re going to drop you.’ Which is fine because they ended up paying us out.

But at the same time, I still didn’t know what the fuck to do, and we still had Red Bull Sound Select, who booked us for Bilal and we wasn’t even ready to do that shit—we just did it because they asked us to, and the crowd was mad rude! Hella rude! They was not feeling us at all. People were, but you know how Black people get, man. If they don’t like that shit, they—“Where Bilal at?’ ‘Do you all get to open for Bilal? Shit, I shoulda gotten to open for Bilal!’ I was like, ‘I cannot believe this shit.’ And I forgot, too, because I’m from here! Ooh, that shit was rough. So anyway! It was like a crash course, honestly, on how the industry works and how to deal with stuff and how to deal with so many people at once … and like try to maintain your sanity, how to stay creative, and stay centered and grounded through at all. That shit was crazy as hell. And then I came and started doing my solo shit. It’s been slow and steady, but I have all this information and knowledge from that experience to where I’m not like too thirsty for anybody because I’m like, ‘I don’t want that shit to take off like that again’ unless it’s real people who are really inspired—not hype.

So you’re appreciative of the pace you’re at right now because it’s a pace that you’re dictating.

Yeah. I’m down for things to pick up, but up until now, I didn’t have a solid idea as to what Eddington Again was and where it’s going. Now I do.

I feel like the mental pressure of early success, that explosion … do you feel like a lot of young artists are not prepared to deal with the stress?

Hell yeah! Everybody think they want that shit but it’s not even—you could end up fucked up. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up an alcoholic, you could end up broke, all kinds of shit. It fucks with your confidence, it fucks with your mental health, you get paranoid. They had us going to SXSW—we ain’t never even did a show before! They had us on a plane, flying us out there, for showcases and shit— stupid, drunk, not even knowing what the fuck we doing, sounded horrible, and then they were lying to us when we get off the stage. ‘That was great! That was beautiful!’

But you knew it was trash.

Hell yeah I knew it was trash! Because I’d just gotten off the plane and I was hungover and drinking again—shit, the DJ was late.

And these are people that outside of your sister, you don’t even really know.

No, not really. We all just met!

So that jam that connects you all is relatively new. It wasn’t prepared.

It wasn’t prepared at all. Swear to God, from the first video we dropped, I was like ‘Damn! Well, I guess we a group! I guess we together!’

How do you feel about navigating social media? Now more than ever—obviously, I think you’re talented—but with talent

and music and the way it’s marketed and commodified, if it’s packaged in the right way on social media, it will blow up exponentially. And it will hit a certain level that used to take five or ten years of touring.

I don’t know, man. You got Bhad Bhabie, and there’s people that don’t need to be in the public eye, making the kind of music that they’re making. And then I kinda feel like people just make music to be famous and it’s not about the quality of the music, it’s not about the art, it’s not even about the passion or the purpose, it’s just for the Instagram followers. So you get a lot of artists that kind of like sound alike, and they got little bops—it’s good or whatever, but you know that shit’s not going to last.

There’s no substance. Everybody’s saying the same lyrics. And then you got these people who feel like purposeful and passionate about creating magic, and they’re looking at this shit, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’

And people don’t want to talk to you if you ain’t got 15,000 followers … but the people with 15,000 followers got 15,000 followers cause they got some curvy-ass thick girl who’s like thirst-trapping everybody!

Or it’s paid followers.

Yeah.

So what’s the next move for you?

I’m working on my album right now. My first album.

What’s it gonna be called?

9. I was born nine pounds nine ounces on 9/9/86. So nine is just a recurring number in my life and I figure since it’s my first record, call it 9, make it nine tracks. So I’m going from there. I just dropped a Sweet video, I just dropped a lyric video for ‘Who Knows Today,’ this track I made with these two kids from the Bay Area that this label hooked me up with. They just appreciated my music, and said they don’t want to sign me but want to be involved? I think they just watching me to see if I blow up, which is fine.

That’s how it typically goes. They want to see what can you for yourself before they can do something for you.

Exactly. And they got some dope acts. And I got a show coming up at Resident on July 30—that’s gonna be dope. I’m just enjoying my community, enjoying my people. I think everyone is doing really dope-ass, really creative, beautiful stuff, and I feel really confident and almost comfortable? I’m still anxious all the time but I feel comfortable with the people who are around me.

Everyone’s making magic and I’m happy doing the same.

EDDINGTON AGAIN WITH ALICE TM, JUPITER BLACK AND CALLIE RYAN ON MON., JULY 30, AT RESIDENT, 428 S. HEWITT ST., DOWNTOWN. 8 PM / $10 / 21+.

RESIDENTDTLA.COM. EDDINGTON AGAIN’S SWEET EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM NEWBODY. LOOK FOR EDDINGTON AGAIN’S 9 LATER THIS YEAR. VISIT EDDINGTON AGAIN AT EDDINGTONAGAIN.BANDCAMP. COM. 35

CUCO Interview by BENNETT KOGON PHOTOGRAPHY BY GARI ASKEW

Omar Banos, the dream-pop sweetheart who performs under the name Cuco, never found his niche within our city’s ‘DIY’ music community. His parents weren’t Hollywood producers or famous musicians—instead, they’d immigrated from Mexico just prior to Omar’s birth in Hawthorne. And Cuco was born out of Banos’ sheer loneliness, his desire for earnest expression, and a dedication to stay true to himself. Thanks to a video that went viral, Cuco found an audience, and seemingly immediately the now nineteenyear-old found considerable success, too, as both a personality and performer. He’s earned billing on America’s top music festivals and opening slots for massive artists like Portugal. The Man, Kali Uchis, and Rex Orange County—and deservingly so.

That video of you playing slide guitar literally went viral overnight—that was probably when your bedroom project started to feel ready for more than your actual bedroom.

That was a bit unreal to me. It was like my first chance at fame. I was kind of like, ‘Oh shit, this is it. Now I’m getting this attention all of a sudden. It’s time to make moves.’ I noticed that I started to get a lot of traction with Twitter and a bunch of people started checking me out. It was pretty eye-opening to realize that social media has had a huge impact on what I’m doing. I feel like … you know, I really need to take it upon myself to expand this horizon that exists within my music and what it means to me. It allows me to really take things to the next level.

In a sense, yeah—it does feel like it was overnight. But there were also a lot of hard nights that I spent working. So maybe it was one really long night. It happened so quickly, but also a lot went into it.

Do you feel that you’ve had to grow up quickly to keep up with the shifting environment around you?

Dude—100%. I had to really heighten myself up and brace myself for whatever was coming. It was totally, totally, totally unpredictable as to where anything was going. There have been a lot of pressures.

I’m trying to keep things relevant, but still stay true to myself at the same time. I’m not trying to get fucked over in the industry.

You’ll always find the good and the bad in 36

people and that’s hard sometimes. It goes into saying, ‘It’s not who you like the best, but who you hate the least.’ You just have to feel out everything that exists in the industry and learn from it. I’ve never had that many people around me my whole life, so I know who and what I want to include.

It’s very crucial to have that aspect of distrust towards anyone around you, so you can make your situation the best it can be.

At a certain level, do you feel like you’ve still had to ‘sell out’ as well?

I never really felt like I was part of any community, so not really. I didn’t even know about the DIY scene until I started playing shows and it was over pretty quickly. It was fun for a cool minute, but even then we’d drive all the way to parts of downtown from like Norwalk or Whittier and then afterward we’d just pack up and dip. I’m from the South Bay—I didn’t know shit about any scenes. Except for maybe hardcore. I was in a hardcore band for a bit, but we didn’t play that many shows. I didn’t really know much about L.A. until I started doing music. I never really left from where I’m from. It was very few times that I went to downtown, or even like Santa Monica or something. I was just always here in the South Bay. But I guess this area is kind of like the epitome of what other people think about the city as well. This is where a bunch of the beaches are at. There’s a very L.A. thing going on down here. It’s not like all the saturated shit, like over in Fairfax or Echo Park. This is just all I

know and am familiar with. I’ve never had a positive or negative view on it, either. It’s just kinda been like, ‘I live here, and I am gonna look at everything that’s going on.’

As the son of Mexican immigrants, do you feel a sense of obligation to uphold your heritage within your songwriting?

I mean … that’s who I am, you know. It doesn’t feel forced or anything because it’s all been so natural to me. I don’t feel pressured to have to represent anything. Growing up was a little lonely because I didn’t have siblings or many friends or anything. The South Bay was a very ‘chill’ place to grow up.

It wasn’t like a bummer all the time. I don’t know, the environment kind of made me want to get into music, which felt natural to me. I’m just showing who I am, as like a Chicano kid. I wasn’t like born and raised in Mexico. I’m growing up here, in L.A. I’m just being myself, which itself shows what my roots are and what inspires me—from both my Mexican and my L.A. cultures.

I’m not trying to be something I’m not. I’m not like the super most-woke person ever because I didn’t get like a college education or anything. I’m still learning about all the shit that’s been going on. I’m just trying to be real and hopefully that can be a good example for kids like me. Being a Mexican musician is a form of activism. Hopefully I can give an opportunity to those voices that actually have something more to say.

Many people describe you as a ‘modern day heartthrob’ – do you like that?

I don’t know how I feel about it to be quite honest. I’ve never been like, really happy with that description of myself. I guess it would feel pretty cool to see myself as one.

What description would you like?

Literally just a real-life artist. I don’t think I want anything other than that. An artist sometimes needs to be a role model. Or just to be like … inspiring. That’s all I really want to do, just inspire. Do the best I can do.

What would a so-called ‘modern day heartthrob’ do on a first date in the city of Hawthorne? Honestly, probably like a Dino’s date. I think Dino’s is like the fucking firest burger joint ever. Then probably leave Hawthorne and go down to like Manhattan Beach. That’s all me and my girlfriend do, hit Dino’s and go to the beach. And maybe like the movie theater.

What’s more Hawthorne now—the Beach Boys or Space-X? I think Hawthorne right now is more of a Space-X town. Elon Musk is like really killing it I guess out here. Shout out to Elon Musk though—I ordered one of his flamethrowers recently.

CUCO WITH PORTUGAL. THE MAN ON FRI., AUG. 10, AT THE SHRINE AUDITORIUM, 665 W. JEFFERSON BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / $29.50$69.50 / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE. COM. CUCO’S CHIQUITO EP IS OUT NOW. VISIT CUCO AT FINEFOREST. BANDCAMP.COM. INTERVIEW

la luz Interview by DAIANA fEUER photography by MAXIMILAN HO

Los Angeles is a city where good and evil mingle in every golden sunset and beautiful moments seem to shine more brightly by breaking through the toxic. This setting inspired the songs on La Luz’s third album, Floating Features, written after Shana Cleveland, Marian Li Pino, Alice Sandahl, and Lena Simon moved to L.A. from Seattle. Singer/guitarist Cleveland started having intense dreams—even nightmares where dark figures came out of the wall and pinned her to the bed. As the city seemed to take over her subconscious, the stuff of dreams became a focal point for the lyrics she brought to the band. When the songs were ready, the band decided to take a little trip to Nashville to record with a certain guy that’s kind of famous. Here Cleveland explains why that’s not the main headline of the story.

Dreams are ever-present on this album.

Talk to me about dreaming.

Shana Cleveland (vocals/guitar): When I was working on this album I always kept a notebook by my bed. I was having all these crazy dreams. ‘Walking Into The Sun’ was halfway written in my dream. It was playing in my dream and I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds nice,’ so I woke up and sang the exact words I heard in my dream and the melody, and later picked up a guitar and tried to figure it out.

Then I started to realize that this narrative of dreams was taking over the songs I was writing and I tried to hone in on that and explore it.

We spend half our lives dreaming. It’s a potent part of existence, and sometimes the line between dreams and reality is so tenuous.

And they can both be present. I’ve had so many dreams where I wake up and I’m disturbed for the rest of the day. I sort of still think that the things that happened while I was asleep are real, even though I’m telling myself they’re not. The feeling is still there so they are sort of real on a subconscious level.

Were you having a lot of nightmares?

Yeah. ‘The Creature’ is the most realistic song in the sense that it tells exactly what happened to me when I was half asleep, so it’s surreal at the same time. It was a sleep paralysis experience, which is this crazy phenomenon that a lot of people have experienced where a dark figure walks out of the wall and looms on top of you and you can’t move. ‘The Creature’ is a direct retelling of when I had that experience.

Scary!

Very. Then there’s ‘Lonely Dozer,’ which is about a dream that was not positive or negative but is sort of confusing and feels enlightening. I didn’t try to make much sense of it. I just tried to follow it put it to music as best I could.

INTERVIEW

I noticed that the last line of the whole album is ‘I don’t wanna die.’ Was that deliberate?

Wow—that’s funny. I didn’t really realize that. It must have been a subconscious thing.

I guess I was thinking about this other song that we play at almost every show and the chorus is ‘Now I kinda wanna die,’ and so this is a nicer thing to sing.

What’s ‘Greed Machine’ about?

It’s about not caring about making money.

I’ve never really cared about money. I just want enough to not have to struggle. I’ve been touring for the past decade almost. I’m always running and trying to have this life where I’m free to do whatever I want. But the greed machine is always at your back. Because we don’t have universal healthcare in the U.S., what if something happens to me on the road? Then I’m just screwed and I’m not free anymore and I lose everything I’ve worked so hard for? I wrote this when it looked like Trump was going to be elected and I was stressing out about what that might mean for me and my ‘free-wheeling’ artist lifestyle.

Is it important to you to live life by your design—to be ‘free-wheeling’ rather than follow a prescribed path for success? Like ‘get a good job, insurance, married, kids, house, etc?’

In some ways that question reminds me of a lot of times people ask me, ‘What’s it like to be a woman in music?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been a man in music.’ I never have thought about doing anything else than what I do. I’ve always wanted to be as free as possible, to move around a lot, to never settle down, and be free. I worked a really horrible job before I was able to just play music. Part of the reason for it was that I never wanted to get a job that would feel too comfortable. Instead I wanted to get a horrible job that I would hate so I would have to find a better way.

I’m lucky it worked out otherwise I’d still be working at Cost Plus Market. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I would not be happy.

Are you happy right now?

I feel lucky and very happy. It’s not like I think the world is in a good place, and I get pissed off at a lot of stuff but for me, personally, I’m doing what I want. I love playing music. All of us feel that way. You have to be insanely passionate to do this. You’re not hirable between tours. It’s hard to keep a relationship going. It’s even hard to keep friendships going when you’re on tour. This has to be what you love above everything else, and for us it is.

So if ‘home is where the heart is,’ do you have a mobile home in your heart? Do you feel home anywhere in particular?

I feel really at home in California. I always wanted to live in California, even growing up in the Midwest. Even when we were living in Seattle before we all moved here, whenever we played here it felt right. It felt like the place that understood us. We all feel at home here.

But I also feel that I’ll always have to travel around. I need both those things.

You’ve got a bit of wanderlust.

I do. Everyone who tours a lot gets post-tour depression. No matter how amazing the place you come home to is, you just get intense blues when you’re stationary for a while. It gets addictive. It’s not even always fun. But I think it’s because you’re always forced to live in the moment when you’re on the road. You have to roll with the punches, which is hard to come by in day-to-day life—to say, ‘I’m here fully in this moment.’ That’s what’s missing when you’re back home.

But you settled down in Los Angeles and wrote Floating Features.

This album is so much a Los Angeles album.

It was written when for the first time in a while we weren’t touring that much. We had just moved here and we were trying to figure

out our lives. It had been a while since our last album, Weirdo Shrine, had come out.

It really feels like it’s drawn a lot from the landscape of Los Angeles. What I like about L.A. and what I find so inspiring is that it’s a city but it has so much space. You can go up a hill and get a view of the expansiveness of the city and the experience always has two stages. First you’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at this huge space with all these people and cars and sidewalks and it’s awe-inspiring,’ and then you’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at all that smog—am I breathing that?’ So it’s beautiful and then you notice the ugliness of it immediately. I find it to be surreal. The smog creates this filthy mirage. Everything is obscured but you know there’s so much out there. When I listen to the album it gives me the same feeling of like being at the Getty and looking out and being full of all this wonder and also disgust.

I get that. The songs might be mellow and you can feel the ocean-iness, but then they’re full of monsters.

Totally. L.A. also has so much space to let your mind wander. I feel like in New York, or in Chicago where I used to live, there’s so much that’s inspiring but there’s also no way to escape it. I wrote a lot of poetry in Chicago because I could write it on the bus or in line at the grocery store, but I never wrote songs.

There was never that space where I could have these ideas and inspiration but let them breathe and mutate into something else—into a song. It’s not enclosed here. There’s so many great parks and there’s the ocean and so many pockets that you can escape to. That’s to me what makes it unique as a city.

So it seems like talking about being a woman is a touchy subject. I hadn’t planned to go there but you made a few comments about it and now I want to know what’s bugging you.

39

I wouldn’t even say it’s a touchy subject but it’s one we get so many questions about and it feels weird because it doesn’t come up with men. There’s no good answer. I never read an interview with a guy where they ask, ‘What’s it like being a guy?’ Maybe we should come up with a great response and use it every time.

We’re constantly described as an ‘all-girl band,’ and to me it feels condescending because you wouldn’t describe, say, the Meatbodies as an ‘all-boy band.’ Really, are we still back there?

Another thing is people say, ‘They’re really great—it doesn’t even matter they’re all girls.’

Ugh. They try to act like it doesn’t matter but by mentioning it, you’re kind of saying it does.

It’s a weird topic because you want to think we’re past that point.

Will we ever get past it?

Probably not during our lifetime but hopefully one day. Maybe when we’re all robots, or when we’re all hive-mind and gender doesn’t exist because we’re digital beings. Probably not too soon. We’re making progress. It feels like the last few years there is a lot more open discussion. Maybe I shouldn’t be so pessimistic. It’s tough because we obviously don’t mind people noticing that we’re women.

But it’s weird when we get back-handed compliments. Like someone tells Marian that she’s the best female drummer they’ve seen in a while. With our group of friends and people we associate with, it’s never a thing. The guys never say things like that. But when you go on the road you realize how people out there are behind the times.

I couldn’t really find any info about where you recorded.

We recorded the album in Nashville at a studio with Dan Auerbach but we don’t want that narrative to take over the album.

I know it seems like we would want to use that to get exposure. But we thought about it, and as a band of all women, when there’s a guy involved, especially when it’s sort of a famous guy, that can tend to take over the narrative, and we wanted to keep the focus on the work that we did, so it’s not shifted to ‘Oh look what this guy did for this band’ instead of ‘Look what we did for ourselves.’

It’s the first album where we didn’t just play with our live setup. We stretched out a lot more and tried out different instruments and did a bunch of overdubs. For example instead of Alice just playing her organ, she got to play a Hammond B3 and all these different synths that we wouldn’t normally have access to. We used a Leslie speaker on the organs all over the record, and on my vocals for ‘Walking Into The Sun,’ and just got to try out a lot of things to fine-tune the sound we wanted.

How much time did you spend recording?

We came in super prepared. We spent a lot of time in L.A. working on the songs, making demos ourselves and formulating ideas of overdubs so when we went into the studio we were able to get right to it. We spent a week tracking and a week mixing so in two weeks it was done. We were excited about working with a producer, especially Dan, but we have never wanted to work with anyone who would take over and form their own sound out of our songs. We’ve always had a clear idea of where we wanted to go. Our main vision was to branch out in the studio in ways that we couldn’t necessarily pull off live. Though

now that we are getting ready for tour, we are trying to incorporate some of the elements we created with overdubs. But the idea is that when you’re listening to a recording it can be a different experience from the live show. There’s a certain energy in a room that’s exchanged between us performing and the audience, it’s a cyclical thing that doesn’t exist when it’s just a person listening on headphones, so we wanted to flesh things out and add things to the songs that would bring a different energy and experience for the one-on-one listener.

Lena calls them ‘tasties,’ the little things you hear in your headphones. They don’t need to be there live but they make the headphone listening experience more cinematic.

You’ve played together so much—have your bandmates’ styles changed the way you write?

Definitely. I had an idea of what the band would be before the band existed, and that changed over time, having been together for five years. I always start the songs alone.

I try to get out of the city and head out in the country to get in my headspace and work on lyrics and demos. Then I bring them to the band and we throw around ideas, then everyone writes their own parts. But when I’m writing songs, I can tell, ‘Yes, this is a La Luz song.’ When I’m thinking of writing a song us, I have an idea of who we are as a band, how our styles interplay, how our voices harmonize together.

Harmonizing is such a great mystery. I get it conceptually but whenever it happens to me it feels like a lucky accident.

It’s like that scene from Spinal Tap where they’re all at Elvis’s grave and they’re singing

‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and they’re trying out harmonies and sound ridiculous. I think we still have that moment half the time we try to write harmonies. It’s like, ‘We’re doing the Spinal Tap thing right now,’ and we just start laughing. I’m lucky to have the girls. I might bring a harmony idea and they’ll be like, ‘No, that harmony doesn’t make any sense.’

Especially Lena and Alice—well, everybody in my band is more schooled than I am. Like I often won’t know what key I’m playing and they’ll just figure it out and work out any chords or notes that fit. So yeah that happens with harmonies a lot. It’s a lot of trial and error and figuring it out together.

But when you become one voice, it’s just amazing!

Yes! Vocal harmonies are so cool. They feel like magic every time.

Does a certain era inform your harmonies?

For most elements of this band I look towards the 1960s. Not even just in America. A lot of my favorite harmonies come from Indonesian groups in the 60s. Definitely bands like The Everly Brothers, country bands, soul bands, early rock and roll bands. It just feels like for whatever reason that was the golden era for vocal harmonies that I just keep hoping will come back.

When you can access everything, it’s hard to speculate on what will come back.

It’s exciting though. We have access to all music so it’s unknowable what direction music will go, or what will get left behind.

LA LUZ’S FLOATING FEATURES IS OUT NOW ON HARDLY ART. VISIT LA LUZ AT LALUZ.BANDCAMP.COM.

42 album REVIEWS Edited by Kristina Benson and Chris Ziegler

52 FILM: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU sweeney kovar

44 THE INTERPRETER: monalisa Curated by KRISTINA BENSON

54 COMICS EDITED by Tom Child

48 WAYBACK MACHINE RON GARMON

56 BOOKS: PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS sweeney kovar

50 LIVE PHOTOS EDITED BY DEBI DEL GRANDE

60 MAP Where to Find L.A. RECORD KING TUFF at THE TERAGRAM PHOTO: DEBI DEL GRANDE

ALBUM REVIEWS

ADRIAN YOUNGE Voices of Gemma Linear Labs For those familiar with the exacting old school style of producer/curator/selector and visionary Adrian Younge, the sumptuous aural glory of this Linear Labs production comes as no surprise. However, unlike the thick funk of his Luke Cage soundtrack or the Delfonics tracks he so deftly recalibrated, Voices of Gemma floats into territories previously explored by bands like Rotary Connection, Stereolab and Broadcast. The soprano-range vocal harmonies of Brooke DeRosa and Rebecca Englehart swoop and flutter, cherubic yet as sensual as a siren’s song, serving as heralds through an endlessly arpeggiated instrumental landscape of cellos, piano, bells and flutes. Each instrument is recorded with such tenderness and attention to detail that one can lose themselves in a track by simply picking a focal point at random. There’s a rococo flair to the record that manifests in tender moments of operatic vocal melisma on “Come Back” and “Heaven’s Found,” but Voices of Gemma is deliberately and pointedly difficult to wedge into any previously defined genre, in spite of its precise moments of respectful historical genuflection. Gemma is springy and lush, curious and unique, unpredictable and yet timeless in its own way. Younge has hatched something fresh and beautiful.

—Christina Gubala

ALBUM REVIEW SUBMISSIONS 42

THE BLANK TAPES Candy People In A Position To Know After so many years, I’m amazed that the Blank Tapes’ Matt Adams can come up with pop melodies that seem so indelible and natural and timeless, while not actually being rip-offs of previous hits— like how was this not already a song before he came up with it?

How is he able to come up with new combinations of notes and chords that feel so organic and catchy and hooky without basically sampling or stealing old hits?

It’s one (maybe easier?) thing to make an experimental avant-garde album sound different and unique, but to record pop songs that don’t obliviously mimic past singles is pretty impressive. It’s just damn catchy music, and he’s been reliably doing it for a while. On Candy there are connections to—but not copies of—longtime Adams inspirations like the Kinks and the sweeter Doug Yule-era Velvet Underground, especially on the title track, but then there are moments that bring to mind the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Darklands (“Feels Like Summer”) and even those oldschool Pink Floyd/Grateful Dead cosmic instrumentals, too. Candy starts with “Paradise” and ends with “Other Places,” and if you want to take that as an indication that the Blank Tapes figured out how to go past even paradise, I wouldn’t argue too much. By the time the album is done, we’d both probably be floating in space, anyway. Candy isn’t exactly

groundbreaking but I don’t always want groundbreaking—what I want now more often than anything is an expert songwriter’s understanding of hooks and melody that can get to the center of my brain and make me feel like life could be OK, if only for the short time I’m listening. Not everything has to be Brechtian alienation. Some things just make you feel better, and that’s what the Blank Tapes do best.

—Tom Child

CALLIE RYAN Health Outside Insight Shattered glass, skitters, clatters, the hollow bark of a dog and a pitch-shifting voicemail alive with familial love in a Guatemalan accent—these are just a few of the mosaic tiles Callie Ryan has fitted together to render the fertile landscape of Health. “Are you comfortable?” she pleads across her opening track, and in her tender, longing vocals, a deeply feminine theme unself-consciously unfurls.

Over the course of Health’s nine songs, Ryan spins personal vignettes into life: the tactile imagery of rosewater dripping down thighs, the lucid dream of the prayers of a woman still hearing herself as a little girl, the painful adult affliction of simply missing one’s mother, the presentation of one’s guts to an outsider and the eager request for feedback. The outright power of these pieces sneaks up subtly, perhaps best typified on “Orange Notes”—the aforementioned voicemail coos, “We love you so

much … and don’t worry, OK? We’re here,” over a starry little melody, and the lump in my throat swells into an irrepressible emotional reaction to the pain of growth. Ryan’s voice—in reverse, in multiple languages, in various octave ranges—is like an everexpanding plant sending tendrils in every direction, reaching up, out and beyond the fertile samples she’s nurtured. Health is a garden, not just of remedies but memories, too.

—Christina Gubala

CLOWN SOUNDS Preacher Maker Recess It might be hard to believe, but San Pedro’s Todd Congelliere has been actively making music for over a quarter century. In that time, Todd—or one of the many bands he plays with, including F.Y.P, Toys That Kill, the Underground Railroad To Candyland and Stoned At Heart—has released nearly one record a year, sometimes more. Now Todd’s newest project Clown Sounds—also the title of his 2010 solo album—have released the full-length Preacher Maker. For anyone already a fan of Todd’s music, the album is a stellar addition to a nearly flawless catalog of work. For those unfamiliar, this record is a good place to dive in. With two drummers, three guitar players, and a bassist drawn from Underground Railroad to Candyland, the Arrivals and a deep pool of Pedro’s powerhouse musicians, it might seem that Clown Sounds could come off indulgent and excessive, but rest assured—the band’s tone is colossal

but potent and clean. The record is brimming with the hard-driving, poppy melodic punk that’s defined Todd’s projects over the years. It’s more a natural continuation of the sounds the Underground Railroad To Candyland was exploring, rather than the more aggressive Toys That Kill material. More than anything, Preacher Maker sounds fresh, passionate, and exciting. The songs—even when they’re dealing with darker themes±are vibrant and captivating, and add even more to Todd’s already impressive body of songwriting.

—Simon Weedn

CMON self-titled EP Artist Files CMON is the acronym for Confused Mix of Nations, the collaborative, creative effort of musicians Josh da Costa and Jamen Whitelock. The duo met in 2009 as two-thirds of the indie rock group Regal Degal, and da Costa went on to play drums for Chris Cohen and Drugdealer, and serve as producer on Dinner’s 2017 record New Work. Splitting themselves between Los Angeles and New York, CMON’s debut self-titled EP was the product of much back-and-forth between the two. And the result fucking rules.

Unlike the often darker, post-punk elements that made Degal great, CMON experiments with the upbeat, the glossy and the surreal.

A blend of sleek 80s dream pop and the otherworldly rhythms from an urban (or beachside) landscape of some futuristic era, the EP appeals to the new with

L.A. RECORD invites all local musicians to send music for review­—anything from unreleased MP3s and demos to finished full albums. Send digital to fortherecord@larecord.com and physical to L.A. RECORD, P.O. Box 21729, Long Beach, CA 90801. If you are in a band and would like to advertise your release in L.A. RECORD, email advertise@larecord.com ALBUM REVIEWS

guidance from the old. Inspired by Italo disco, new wave, Afro boogie, house and “whatever unusual music we could get our hands on,” the duo presents their own unique combination of spacey layered vocal melodies, vibe-y guitar hooks and textured synth environments, all with an unrelentingly upbeat drum-machine backbone. I just wish they put out a full length!

Definitely check out their tracks “Mindboggling” and “Celluloid”— those two are catchy as hell.

—Bennett Kogon

like showing off: “Yup, check it out! We could do this in our sleep.” (Which kinda puts you to sleep.) But fantastically, Live is what it it’s supposed to be—a punk rock show experienced from the front row, and every messy nasty moment sounds great.

—Chris Ziegler

CUCO Chiquito EP self-released THE COATHANGERS Live Suicide Squeeze The partially relocated-to-L.A. Coathangers cut this live album at Alex’s Bar, and I do mean cut— this is raw and ripping stuff, like a lost segment from the first Decline of Western Civilization or those Live From The Masque CDs from primordial pre-Internet times.

It’s got a similar Geza X-style commandeered-chaos sound, and does that sound truly suit them.

Live makes the Coathangers songs sharper, meaner and even “punker,” with apologies for the iffiest adjective ever. But truly you can hear ricochet echos of Crime, the early crazy pre-label Go-Go’s, Australia’s Victims, the “Basher”Lowe produced Damned, the particularly murderous Cramps and more in this set—it’s got that much-desired but rarely accomplished sense that things are about to fall apart, which you really can’t get in the studio short of a needless physical confrontation with the engineer. When this thing gets going—“Getting’ Mad and Pumpin’ Iron,” which is positively roid-raging here, or “Shut Up,” which is like the Scientists gone mad—it’s some of the most potent stuff they’ve done. Even the nominally post-punk-y ones (“Burn Me,” “Adderall”) sound like something from those 80s comps where they’d put the “art” bands on side B. So many bands freeze up when they do live albums, or they’re so over-experienced and over-polished that it comes off ALBUM REVIEWS

Cuco doesn’t have to make his records in his parents’ house anymore. The record label deals are well documented as are the major festivals and sizable venues he’s played across the U.S., and surely you’ve seen the ads featuring his cartoon visage plastered all across town. But it’s still that type of intimacy—a hometownkid kind of intimacy, goofy yet utterly sincere—that is the core of Cuco’s appeal. It’s also the cornerstone of Chiquito, which like Cuco’s prior releases (the Soundcloud EPs Wannabewithu and Songs4u) was recorded in his bedroom in Hawthorne. Those releases propelled him to his current heights, and he adheres to the same aesthetic here. His songs are love notes scrawled in pencil, heart-felt and handmade.

“Dontmakemefallinlove” and “Mi Infinita” are true millennial soul ballads, the 21st-century embodiment of lovelorn classics like “Always and Forever” or “La-La Means I Love You.” But these tunes float on vintage synth tones, rather than layers of horns or strings; instead of the silky voice of a classic balladeer, we have Cuco’s low-affect deadpan.

Yet they are, somehow, similarly smooth: “Sunnyside,” a typical proclamation of undying love (“Every time I look for you / You’re nowhere near, it makes me blue”) is as dreamy as Elvis singing “Blue Moon.”

It’s a curious contrast, between the immense gravity of teenage love and Cuco’s hangin’-at-home attitude, but it’s an endearing one. Cuco’s music is not, in fact, unsophisticated—check out the

smooth guitar breakdown that closes out “Sunnyside,” at once groovy and sweet, like Eddie Hazel tearing into an Anita Baker track, or the blissful synths of “Summer Time High Time.” But more than anything it’s that feeling that Cuco is someone you know, the slacker from your chemistry lab or the kid skateboarding down your street, that makes listening to his music so fun. To that point, the highlight here is “CR-V,” a simple ode to a ubiquitous facet of suburban life. It’s a sweet tune, a teenage goof-off with a sing-along hook. It’s the type of song you’d record for a friend, as a joke or a funny gift—something to listen to while cruising the neighborhood in your mom’s SUV. —Chris Kissel

the title, tracklist, and artist on a bare white background. At the end of the day, that’s all you need to know: these are 22 great songs

by Delroy Edwards, whether you’re approaching Rio Grande as dancefloor weapon, mood music, or a document from one of L.A.’s most exciting outsider artists. It works from every angle.

—Zach Bilson

Less than six months since their debut EP damber, Los Angeles’ dimber have returned with a brand new 7” for all those clamoring for the band’s explosive and socially aware progressive pop punk. The A-side “Take Me Out” rockets out of the gates with catchy riffs, rock-solid rhythms, and honest lyrics about drinking to forget how overwhelming the world can be. B-side “Sons And Daughters” is a volatile track that deals with the insecurity and anxiety created by corporate environmental destruction and the terror inflicted by modern militarized police forces. While some bands have difficulty capturing the energy of their live performances in a sterile recording studio, dimber has no such problem. In fact, their recordings showcase just how the band sounds live, preserving the band’s intensity and power perfectly.

—Simon Weedn

With an ability to transcend genre and form, challenge gender constructs and society’s ideals of beauty and the grotesque, and tackle a large breadth of social and political issues in whatever language is fitting, Dorian Wood is an artist in the purest sense of the word. He’s equipped with a vast back catalog that spans performance and visual art as well as music and art modeling, but when it comes to music, Wood has a voice whose strength and range strikes hotter and more deeply than almost any instrument you will ever have the pleasure to hear in your life.

Wood’s newest musical release— the three song EP Segua, which was accompanied by a special artist zine on Record Store Day this year— starts at a fever pitch.

The title track roars into existence with a fury of bebop-inspired drums and bass as Wood’s voice presents itself with both a delicate beauty and a wild kind of anger and desperation. When someone truly knows how to capture the fullest abilities of their voice, not much else is needed to carry a song. Segua continues to great effect the move that Wood made to begin singing in Spanish on the album Xalá. This act alone can be one of defiance to the established standards of the music industry, but with an artist whose identity is crucial to all of their endeavors, it is wonderful to see them express themselves exactly how they see fit. The following tracks are two achingly beautiful string quartet renditions of the originally piano driven songs “Put Me Under, Now” from Brutus and “Corpulenxia” from Xalá. Both of these songs ably demonstrate Wood’s ability to show how sometimes one can be powerful by being gentle. This EP is just the latest of the many remarkable releases Wood has put out to date. Do yourself a favor and listen to not only this but his entire discography.

—Zachary Jensen

DORIAN WOOD Segua EP Atonal Industries

THE FLYTRAPS Sunset Strip RIP EP Burger /Power Plant

dimber “Take Me Out” 7” Chain Letter Collective

DELROY EDWARDS Rio Grande L.A. Club Resource Delroy Edwards’ catalog covers more ground than most musicians twice his age. His early EPs for Brooklyn label L.I.E.S. trafficked in grimy, no-nonsense house and techno, while his own L.A. Club Resource has served as an outlet for re-imagined Memphis rap (the Slowed Down Funk mixtape series) and noisy psychedelia inspired by the California coast (his first proper LP, Hangin’ At The Beach). His latest full-length Rio Grande turns an eye to the South for a collection of laconic funk that feels simultaneously playful and laser-focused. Where HATB found a sun-soaked kind of joy in cramming as many styles as possible onto one LP, Rio Grande feels utilitarian in its commitment to drum machine grooves and wispy pads—sometimes just the former, as with the hard-as-nails “Raw Beats” two-parter. And while Edwards’ signature tape hiss is still present, it’s noticeably dialed down, letting the punch of tracks like single “When I Think” and the AFX-y raver “Knock Em Out” take center stage. Even the album art is both artful and piercingly direct, with three separate fonts spelling out

43

THE INTERPRETER

MONALISA Interview by Kristina Benson Photography by Maximilian Ho Monalisa still relishes the feel and experience of vinyl—her apartment is filled with stacks and stacks of records—and still goes to record stores to dig for music. She is a successful and celebrated selector with a regular “Paths of Rhythm” show on Dublab, and is a member of Umoja HiFi Soundsystem, KPL All-Stars and Spinderella’s Backspin DJ Crew, and she’ll be DJing Wonderful, a Stevie Wonder tribute at Levitt Pavilion in MacArthur Park on Sat., Sept. 1, at 4 PM opening for DJ Spinna.

BRICK BRICK (bang, 1977) “‘Dazz’ put them on the map, but I bought this record because it had a catchy song called ‘Ain’t Gonna Hurt Nobody.’ It was on the radio and it was on Soul Train. My mother gave me money, and my relatives would give me change on the holidays, and I collected all that money and went to Music Plus and I got it. The flute player in the group is Sleepybrown [from Outkast]’s father. I started a fan page for them on Myspace and someone who owed them some money contacted them and they got money they were owed! It’s my favorite record of all time.

I’ve had it since I was a kid. Sometimes it’s tough to find, sometimes there are copies everywhere. I have all the pressings—I’m just missing the Japanese pressing.”

RASA EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS ME (GOVINDA, 1978) “I was drawn to this record by the cover—a picture of the sun and faint vision of a bird in the background. I couldn’t figure out why I was so drawn to it. Some of the people who created this record are kids of Eugene McDaniels—Chris McDaniels and a London McDaniels.

I found that out years after I bought the record. I always raved about this. I would pass it to people at the record store like ‘Check this out!’ and someone was like, ‘I know that record. It’s Eugene McDaniels’ kids.’ It also been sampled, by Common and KRS-ONE. It’s a spiritual record—it has a Hare Krishna background. ”

MTUME UMOJA ENSEMBLE ALKEBU-LAN – LAND OF THE BLACKS (LIVE AT THE EAST) (STRATA-EAST, 1972)

“I got a bargain on this one. There is a cast of amazing musicians who played on this one. It’s really rich, got a lot of layers, a lot of warm sound, very spiritual—very Black. The Mtume Umoja Ensemble is the whole name of the group and Mtume—he’s more known for funk music. He had the hit ‘Juicy Fruit’ and produced a lot in the 80s but he started out as a jazz musician. His uncles were very famous jazz musicians as well, and he transitioned into more of the funk later on. The personnel are all well-known jazz musicians and well-known vocalists. There is a lot of great talent on this record. It starts with a long speech. If you listen to Kamasi Washngton’s record Epic ... this reminds me of Epic.”

MANDRILL JUST OUTSIDE OF TOWN (POLYDOR, 1973)

“There’s a song called ‘Mango Me,’ and it’s sampled by the Jungle Brothers for ‘Straight out of the Jungle.’ The Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest were my intro to jazz. I never liked traditional jazz because it was noisy and it didn’t have a rhythm. It went all over the place and it drove me crazy. But the Jungle Brothers and Tribe sampled jazz I could listen to. So by getting into Jungle Brothers, I got in to Mandrill, and once I found ‘Mango Me,’ I went down the rabbit hole.

Mandrill—Ric [Wilson] and his brother Carlos—came in the store.

I told them I was a huge fan. They were like, ‘What records do you have?’ ‘I got all of them!’ They were super cool. They invited us to shows and I got to sit down and meet them. I felt like ... once I got to know them, who needs an autograph when I have the relationship?”

INTERPRETER

D.J. ROGERS LOVE MUSIC AND LIFE

(RCA 1977)

“D.J. Rogers is one of the best vocalists to ever record music, and one of the most unheard of and slept on in my opinion. I can’t put my finger on it but I want to say based on how the music business works that he didn’t get as big as he should have because his music has a gospel base to it. You can tell he came up in the church because of the way he sings and the power in his voice. There’s no denying it. His music is really spiritual. He talks about love but the love is spiritual love—love for God or Jesus. More of that love because as he goes further on he gets more into that message. By the time he did his last commercial record, it was mostly gospel. His career just took him in that direction and after he put out records he starred performing in church. During his career, he had background singers like Deniece Williams and Maxayn Lewis— Maxayn is a very powerful singer and she covered a D.J. Rogers song on one of her records. Wah Wah Watson played on this record too. My favorite song is ‘Love is All I Need.’ Deniece Williams, you can hear her on this record. She stands out. It’s really beautiful—so many songs on this record with the word ‘love’ in them. It tells you where his head and his heart was at: ‘Love Will Make It Better,’ ‘Hold Out For Love,’ ‘Love Is On The Way,’ ‘Saved By Love’. It’s a loving record.”

DIAMOND AND THE PSYCHOTIC NEUROTICS STUNTS BLUNTS AND HIP-HOP (MERCURY / CHEMISTRY, 1992)

“It’s a great record start to finish—one of the best hip-hop records ever made. The production, the intricate samples, the way they were looped and combined and layered ... I’ve always loved this record. The record itself was just reissued overseas in Europe and that has all of the skits and songs that you could only get on the CD before. I’m hoping to get that soon. I’m usually into getting the original, but if the repress has something on it missing from the original I’m down to pick it up.”

THE PERFECT CIRCLE THE PERFECT CIRCLE (INNER CITY, 1977)

“This is from an indie label active in the 70s and there are quite a few hard to find records on this label. This one is hard to find, too. There’s a song called ‘Spread the News’ sampled by J Dilla and it was sampled for PPPs ‘Shotgun.’ I think that’s one thing that has driven the price up aside form the label. Those two factors—the fact that it was sampled and the fact that it’s on a rare label make it a sought-after record. There’s a great song on here called ‘Hands of Time,’ but unfortunately it skips on my copy. You can get through 3:30 of the song though—the meat of the song—before it skips.”

LOGG LOGG (SALSOUL RECORDS, 1981) “This record was created by Leroy Burgess. He came from Black Ivory, a soul/disco group in the 70s. After Black Ivory, he just created groups based on different combos of people. Logg is one of those combinations. There is a another called BumbleBee Unlimited, another called Conversion—so many. I can’t even describe him. I wouldn’t do him justice. He’s one of the godfathers of disco because of the sounds he made. If you listen to a record from back then you can hear his influence. His percussion with a high-hitting sound in there, and it’s very much all the same tempo—112, 114. ‘I Know You Well’ is 116 BPM, and another song ‘(You’ve Got) That Something,’ is almost the same BPM. If you played this record in your house, it would just go. The strangest thing about the cover is that there is a guy using a jackhammer and a woman on the back with logs between her legs and her legs in the air. It’s the strangest thing. What does this cover have to do with anything? Larry Levan remixed a lot of the records he made. Leroy just made records and then put them out and then found something else to work with to make another group and put it out.”

SOPHY YO SOY MUJER Y NO SOY UNA SANTA (LIBERTY, 1970)

“This one was sampled by the Beatnuts and RJD2. It’s a great record to sample. The instruments are really rich, it’s got good percussion, and every song—not just the ones that were sampled—has a good amount of ... I use the word ‘thick.’ It’s exteremly funky, too, because it’s from Puerto Rico. I’d been asking people if they had seen it and one of my friends was at Record Jungle and he had actually seen that there. I love that store—I love that he goes above and beyond the call of duty to find records for people. His drive is above anyone’s I’ve ever seen.”

45

The ladies of Flytraps take a trip back in time with this new fourtrack EP, invoking searing neon images of the Sunset Strip’s bighair glory days. The appropriatelytitled opening title track is all speed and needles-in-the-red power—it’s a pun ’n’ roll scorcher that hits like a battering ram.

Vicious vocals give way to chants of “Sunset Strip, RIP!” as the song explodes into a catastrophic racket. The thrashy riff of “Lead Foot” is exactly what you’ve been craving if you’re nostalgic for that “Welcome To The Jungle” era.

You can practically sink in to the booths of the Viper Room as the Flytraps howl, “I got a lead foot, baby / Don’t you want to take a ride with me?” Even Wanda Jackson’s classic “Fujiyama Mama” gets an 80s rock ’n’ roll makeover, with vocals alternating between hiccups and fiery shrieks. The EP is rounded off by “Cat Tongue,” with flamethrower guitar and scorching vocals. It’s the sound of all-night anarchy and leatherclad debauchery—the spirit of the heyday of the Sunset Strip they’re memorializing in the title. If that’s what you’re looking for, climb on in and get ready to take the ride.

—Madison Desler

GREEN GERRY Today How To Hail Beauty Cozy Space Mugs/ Like Young Green Gerry can’t keep anxiety from ripping his pop songs apart.

“I Am Beaming,” the first track on Today How to Hail Beauty, starts out dreamy and subdued. Then suddenly, it bursts open: “I got tunnel vision,” Gerry shouts to the sky. “My heart is thrown on the fire.” For the remainder of the album’s ten tracks, rhythms alternate between heavy pulses and panic-attack jolts. “Snip at my eyelids / My heart beats viciously,” he sings over the loping “Cowboy Song,” a warped western tune on the edge of cracking wide open.

Even the album’s softest moments are a bit rattled: “This is What 46

My Heart Sounds Like,” feels like walking through a carnival while wearing earmuffs, observing a universe full of life from an uncanny distance. Today How to Hail Beauty is Gerry’s fourth fulllength in eight years, and each of his releases has gotten bigger on the production side. His last, Electric Iron, employed many of the same type of impressive flourishes he uses here, including the occasional harp sample, the adroitly-placed beep of an answering machine, or arpeggios played out on what sounds like a buzzing digital harpsichord. That level of inventiveness of doesn’t always carry over to the songs, some of which don’t quite find the big melodies the production demands.

Instead, Today How to Hail Beauty centers on its own centerlessness, fractured and unsettled. Its major accomplishment is its overall sense of unease—finding expression in Gerry’s lyrics, like so much internal monologue—and the unraveling structure of the pieces themselves.

—Chris Kissel

HIT BARGAIN Potential Maximizer Buzz Words fail to capture the power of Hit Bargain. Dark, sharp, and raw as hell, their music is deeply satisfying for the rightfully angry. The group says they set out to “create new shapes from the building blocks of a wellworn genre” and if their debut LP Potential Maximizer is any indication, that’s just what they’ve done, with a menacing post-punk sound and thoughtful lyrics about sex, gender, power, and capitalism. Nora Singh’s vocals alternate between sardonic commentary, emphatic wailing and melodic projection, and with Mike Barron’s electrifying guitar work, Anton Hochheim’s agile but steady drums and Sean Monaghan’s ominous bass, this group has the musicianship to back up their message. Opening track “Hell is Real” goes off like a bomb, and the intensity doesn’t

falter for the rest of the album.

The songs blend seamlessly into one another, especially “Tourist of My Desire” and “Tourist II,” which are powerful on their own but even more potent back to back. Closer “I Was Born” finishes the LP perfectly: this driving music and nihilistic lyrics about how “there is no future” make for a captivating manifesto of an album.

—Julia Gibson

music. “Throw The Sun Away” sounds like something that Cage The Elephant could have referred to when recording their “Trouble,” though of course the track wasn’t public at the time—it was more a case of Wasif being ahead of the curve by four years. There is even a great cover of the Kinks’ “There’s A New World Just Opening For Me” that takes a barebones acoustic song and makes it entirely new.

The track still leads with the fingerpicking rhythm of the original but shifts into a reverb-drenched psych track with precisely timed electric guitar, minimal tambourine and overdubbed vocals. This album has aged remarkably well and is great from start to finish—but I will always wonder what impact it would have had on music if it came out when it was originally created.

— Zachary Jensen

IMAAD WASIF Great Eastern Sun Nomad Eel For an artist, there is always the struggle between producing something honest and real and the desire to reserve some piece of your inner self for personal spaces. Art and music can often be a form of catharsis or record keeping, but that doesn’t mean that the artist will be ready to share—either at the point of creation or maybe at all.

This was the case with the album Great Eastern Sun by Imaad Wasif, recorded in 2012—with the help of Bobb Bruno (Best Coast) on bass and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on drums—and held back for six years simply for being too painfully personal. Wasif is a profoundly remarkable musician whose music that is at once timeless and dedicated to the moment, built by mixing elements of classic rock, folk, psychedelia and even a hint of metal. His songs can seem gentle and quiet yet undeniably powerful in their sentiment and proclamations—but at the same time, he often works with a very subtle hand. This album is heavily steeped in the theological references and issues of romance, solitude and change that Wasif is already known for, but there is a sense of existential questioning here that takes Sun to an intense and private place. “Thorn” begins as a mixture of Biblical parables and Aesop’s Fables and slowly shifts into a desire to be seen and discovered while also being afraid to open up.

It’s really interesting to hear these tracks now, as they seem to predict much of what was to come for indie

of life across greater L.A. county, from street names to native species to backyard weed smoking that it makes you feel like you’re catching up with longtime friends. (I really dug the songs with where Victoria Jacobs takes the vocals—mixed it up a bit from Hawks’ usual sound.)

Really, I’m just happy these folks have been making music as long as they have—they’ve kept their humor and their humanity all this time, and I’m always glad to hear from them again.

—Tom Child

JJUUJJUU Zionic Mud Caroline

I SEE HAWKS IN L.A. Live and Never Learn Western Seeds I See Hawks in L.A. have a version of Americana that I think is pretty unique to Southern California.

(See in particular Dave Alvin.)

It’s defintiely not straight forward country, nor is it straightforward folk, although some of this is like a much less cynical Loudon Wainwright. Instead, it’s the musical version of the coyotes and corvids and cacti that persist in the city—I mean, just look at the band name. I See Hawks are a persistent species themselves, a nominally country-rock band with a highly developed literary capability they like to temper with an affable justconversation kinda feel. Think writers like Charles Portis, who wrote like he was telling you a story at the bar, and think of Guy Clark and Terry Allen but also Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, too.

I See Hawks knows there’s poetry in all of them, but they still write and play like they’re telling you a story at the bar, too. This album is so damn soothing and warm— something I could put on the patio stereo while I drink some beers with my dad—and they specifically reference by name so many aspects

People are pretty generous with the word “psych” as a descriptor for music these days. Crank up the reverb? You’re a psych band!

Play a squirrelly guitar solo?

Psychedelic, man. Sing like the Beatles if the Beatles couldn’t sing? Sure, why not. Which is all fine, really, because … well, who cares? BUT if it’s a truly skullsplitting, spine-straightening sensory journey into the Drone Zone you seek, then you need some JJUUJJUU in your life. The L.A. ensemble ably walks a tricky line on its debut album Zionic Mud, showcasing an impressive sense of restraint while at the same time riding a potent blend of motorik rhythms (“Bleck”), heavy boogie (“Camo”), restless postpunk (“Zionic Mud”), ambient sounds (“Level”) and, yes, psychrock (“Rest”) to a higher plane.

And when they’re not busy crescendoing, JJUUJJUU detours into a couple of weird interludes— ”Positive Transfer Sonic Drip” is particularly mind-bending— that prove they’re interested in getting outside the groove and exploring, too. Zionic Mud is a true psychedelic experience: it zigs when you think it’ll zag, it pulls back when you think things are about to spill over the top, and it’s immersive without overpowering.

JJUUJJUU knows what it’s doing, and Zionic Mud is disorienting in the very best way.

—Ben Salmon ALBUM REVIEWS

KING TUFF The Other Sub Pop

JON HASSELL Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Vol. 1) Ndeya At the tender age of 81 Jon Hassell is making the most noise of his career. The avant-garde trumpeter, whose “fourth world” blend of ambient and world music has graced records from Talking Heads’ Remain In Light to Frou Frou’s Details, breaks a nearly decadelong studio hiatus with Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Vol. 1), which layers his understated playing with dissonant, mutated electronica. In case you wondered: a pentimento is the trace of a previous idea in the final painting, which could describe Hassell’s signature trumpet technique, processed and layered beyond recognition. But here, similar techniques are applied to the canvas he paints on—”Al Kongo Udu” mixes in Autechrelike glitches over organic percussion while synth pads sputter and high frequencies ping like pebbles kicked up by a passing car. This newfound chaos inverts the relationship between Hassell’s playing and his surroundings—formerly the vital variable in his music, his Milesindebted lyricism now acts as a life vest in the churning sea of “Manga Scene,” a full sentence in the cutand-paste cacophony of “Ndeya”.

These landscapes exist far from the blissful Dream Theory in Malaya and Possible Worlds—they’re dense, complex and in no way “easy listening,” but more rewarding for it. Pictures isn’t just uncharted territory, but a remarkable aboutface for someone 50 years into their career. That “Vol. 1” feels right.

—Zach Bilson

ALBUM REVIEWS

The most beautiful thing about King Tuff has always been his journey. With The Other, Tuff (a.k.a. Kyle Thomas) takes the band on the most honest and sincere travels you’ll have heard from him yet. In an attempt to find a creative salvation of sorts, Thomas has said he used this album as a chance to delve deeper into the musical exploration he’s taken with his listeners over the years. Having delved in 70s and 80s nostalgia as well as glam and punk aesthetics, this was a chance to for Thomas to represent himself in exactly the new way he wanted. This is the “grown up”—in the best way possible— sincere version of King Tuff. The lovely acoustic “Eyes of the Muse” and “Staircase of Diamonds” are by far the prettiest that Tuff has ever sounded. It seems that Tuff has shed the (lovingly) cheesy and gimmicky aspects of the act for more heartfelt work, all the while not letting go of what has always made this band fun. The wonderful Jenny Lewis even shows up to—in some ways—validate the growth of this artist. These are ten songs that remind us why we love music— because there’s always a chance for something unexpected and new.

—Daniel Sweetland

LA LUZ Floating Features Hardly Art La Luz, the surfy psych-y indie rock band of every beach bum’s dreams, has delivered again. Having moved from the mecca of the northwest to music central L.A., the band has seemed to settle into who they are in a way they never have before.

The purity of what La Luz does is what makes them so good, like their courageously direct love songs and stories of growing up and being through being cool. On Features, La Luz sounds especially comfortable, and there’s something happening here that’s got people talking. Think

of it not like a re-invention but a rediscovery of what makes them special: this is an addicting set of songs by a cheerfully fearless band, full of nostalgic 60s guitars and propulsive drums. It’s melodically better than anything they have ever done, with a kind of aggression that didn’t exist before but for sure exists now—sometimes this feels like a set of oldies songs from hell!

—Daniel Sweetland

these songs completely. Psychic prediction is this will one day be as rare and chased-after as that first Chicano Batman LP, so get it or regret it.

—Chris Ziegler

PEACH KELLI POP Gentle Leader Mint/Bachelor THEE LAKESIDERS “Si Me Faltaras Tu” 7” Big Crown L.A. duo Thee Lakesiders (Marie and Necalli) just put out a single that’s a classic example of set-youup A-side and knock-you-down flip. Top is a cover of Venezuela’s Los Terricolas’ subtle 70s-poprock-ballad “Si Me Faltaras Tu,” done with new-generation power and energy. The drums hit a bit harder and the guitar burns a little hotter and the vocals are just as potent and heartbreaking as the original, though with less of its haunting thousand-milesaway feel. It’s not a mover in the dancefloor sense, really, but it might move you nonetheless, you know? The B-side here is what’s got everybody falling in love: a slomotion sweet soul song so dreamy it’s basically sleeping beauty, with precision arrangements lending crushing clarity to a tragic tale of romance once enjoyed but now destroyed. East Side Story fans or oldies fans in general will be on this if they aren’t already, but anyone with any iteration of those Gangsta Girlz Soul Harmony comps needs to freak out. I always thought the Swingin’ Bridgettes “Please Come Back To Me” (Girlz Harmony Vol. 1) was one of the saddest songs ever, but “Parachute” is getting close. Once that up-the-stairsand-back guitar phrase at the twominute mark leads the song into its long luxurious and lovely coda, it’s just total devastation: “Ooooh, what can I do,” sings Marie. “ … I’m falling without you.” L. Michaels (El Michaels) production means no rough moments or rude awakenings—you can trust

“Hello Kitty Knife” is the first track of Peach Kelli Pop’s new Gentle Leader and the most accurate description of the sound the band has sharpened the last few years. It’s cute but fierce and delightful yet dangerous, and it’s some of Peach Kelli Pop’s most propulsive pop punk yet. Just months ago, the band released the Which Witch EP, with songs offering flashes of a dreamier, more psychedelic sound. But this fourth full-length Gentle Leader finds the group returning to familiar punk territory. That isn’t to say that the group isn’t stretching their sound: “Parasomnia” and “Skylight” reveal what some of Which Witch might have sounded like if it was more fleshed out. Overall, Leader is bigger and more expansive than anything the band has released so far. The first Peach Kelli Pop albums were the sonic equivalent of being punched in the face by a rainbow, but PKP III, Which Witch and now Gentle Leader each reveal new depth and nuance in their still-sugary hits.

—Simon Weedn

THE PRETTY FLOWERS Why Trains Crash Dirt Cult

When I close my eyes and imagine what heaven might look like, I think of tacos at every meal, the World Cup every summer and never-ending electric guitar riffs.

And maybe the Pretty Flowers should be the house band up there because it takes literally seven seconds of listening to this L.A. group’s new album Why Trains Crash to know what these four dudes are all about. (That’s a good thing.) “Cream of Canvas” roars out of the gates like the great Texas punk band Radioactivity, with hard-charging power chords, smashing caveman-style drums, earworm melodies and, yup, crunchy electric guitar as long as the record runs. And that’s pretty much the M.O. throughout Why Trains Crash. Sometimes the Flowers let off the gas a bit (“Sitting Duck, CA”) or they get a little rootsy (“Chip My Paint”). Other times, they morph into a grimy powerpop band (“My Alchemist”) or show off their harmonies (“Temple of Gunpowder”). “Electrical” sounds like Superchunk playing a Springsteen song and “Corner of the Stars” packs a lot of crooked Replacements-y charm into three minutes. This is good ol’ fashioned punk, pop and rock ‘n’ roll, ready to spend the whole summer buzzing from your car speakers and spilling out your rolled-down windows.

—Ben Salmon

RAS G & THE AFRIKAN SPACE PROGRAM Stargate Music Leaving Ras G is the pilot of the Afrikan Space Program and Stargate Music is his latest journey, a trip where Spacebase is always the place and time moves at a slower, more natural pace. This may not be so much a concept album as it is a kind of astral travelogue.

Ras is documenting life in its various stages of birth, death, and rebirth, as well as the feminine forces preserving that cycle—the womb, he says, is the “stargate of 47

humanity.” The record begins in earnest with “Water Broken” and a pulsating beat that erupts into blasts of chest-compressing bass.

“The Arrival” is unmistakably Ras, a wobbly, jazzy song that could very well be the score to a celebration of extraterrestrial birth. “Quest to Find Anu Stargate” passes through that same cosmic glitch, swelling with synths in a kind of otherworldly bedroom R&B. “Intimate Reconnections” is an endless swirl of electronic space dust; “Is It Lust or Love” takes a smooth, funky beat in jittery, backwards steps.

The album falters some in its later stages, but only in compelling ways.

This is a record about all of us, about universal and fundamental

truths—it’s the human condition as seen from space.

—Miles Clements

REARRANGED FACE Arcane Free Drag Mock

Los Angeles art-punk band Rearranged Face’s sound is tighter and more polished than ever before on their new fulllength release Arcane Free Drag.

While these songs are more accessible than 2017’s A Refaced Ranger, they stay true to the band’s off-the-wall sensibilities— and the band’s bonkers brand of synth-driven post-punk is still the furthest thing from boring.

Arcane Free Drag sounds the way it feels when you’ve had one too many cups of coffee: jumpy and nervous, but inspired and exciting, too. From first listen, these songs are hard to forget.

The riff on opening track “120 Dogs” worms its way into your

God’s Children Music is the Answer: The Complete Collection Minky Thee Midniters ruled the East L.A. rock scene from the mid-1960s to 1969 but that was just for starters. They wowed the entire city with a insanely vigorous Yardbirdsderived R&B prototype that sounded in their prime as if Jackie “Mister Excitement” Wilson had deigned to front the Doors for a few furlongs around the track. A couple of singles sold so well locally they wound up grazing the far end of the national Top 100, quite a feat for any non-Midwestern regional act at the time. Singer Little Willie G. (for Garcia) was one of those freakishly talented few who built himself Elvis-like out of the popular culture of where he was, stitching together pieces of rock, soul, salsa, gospel, and doo-wop for a signature musical raiment. After Thee Midniters disbanded, Little Willie found little problem stitching together another band—taking on Lydia Amescua, ex-Midniter singer Lil’ Ray Jimenez, elements of the redoubtable L.A session masters the Wrecking Crew, and even a forty-piece orchestra—and recording a few singles that were released on Uni to little effect. It seems the band wanted one thing and the label another Blood, Sweat & Tears, so God’s Children’s plans for an L.A. Latino rock renaissance had to wait for another era entirely. The tracks here follow the Children’s evolution and disillusionment and the goods on this joint are really good. Garcia was heavily sunk into rock culture at this point and took influences from Hendrix to Doug Sahm to Jesus rock to thee durable Midniters blues sound. He’d also gone full-bore hippie, singing of peace and spiritual enlightenment like an Eastside George Harrison. “Music is the Answer” is a neglected masterpiece and a key track in another rock revolution that never happened. “If You Ever Go Away” with vocals by Lydia Amescua is like one of those delicate pop laments that showed up on many a European movie soundtrack during this era and not at all commercial for U.S. chart purposes. Lil’ Ray sings lead on “I Just Wish,” which might not have been out of place on Love’s Forever Changes, except that it sounds too commercial for Arthur Lee’s palate. “Brown Baby” should’ve been a classic and probably would had been if War or El Chicano put it out later on and totally cuts Sam & Dave’s “Soul Sister Brown Sugar” in the hymnal of R&B. All in all, this is a magnificent cross-section of radio-ready hits from some other, better early 1970s.

Isaac Hayes The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) Craft Recordings-Stax This four-disc career introspective from one of the founders of soul music runs an impressive gamut. Hayes’ legacy extends into areas the causal listener little knows and South Park fans little care. Hayes began at Stax as a session man and fast-growing writing and arranging chops found a home at Memphis soul powerhouse Stax Records as one of its resident geniuses. The first disc compresses his early work as songwriter and producer, with credits on ferocious instrumentals by Mar-Keys saxman Floyd Newman (repped here with 48

skull while stand-out “Picture in Duke” is a dissonant gem reminiscent of early 00s postpunk. Even when their sound veers towards straightforward punk like “Shadows,” that spasmodic thrashing synthesizer is still front and center. Many of the tunes, especially “Salt,” seem to channel early Talking Heads with their frenetic guitar and a David Byrne-style cadence.

Even so, the band robustly defies comparison and categorization.

Rearranged Face delivers some of the best art/post-punk to come out of Los Angeles and will always leave you guessing what their next move might be.

—Julia Gibson

SMOKESCREENS Used to Yesterday Slumberland Used to Yesterday, the second album by Smokescreens, unfolds as an animated portrait full of the

“Sassy,” b-side to 1963’s “Frog Stomp”) and Booker T. & the MG’s (the mighty “Boot-Leg,” with Hayes a one-time-only stand-in for Booker on the keyboards) and soul ballads as tender as the likes of Johnnie Taylor and William Bell can make them. “I’ll Run Your Hurt Away” showcases Carla Thomas’s considerable talents much the same way he’d later treat Sam & Dave’s and still later his own, by laying down a slow and majestic groove and then letting the singer lean into it. Other beneficiaries of the Hayes treatment include countryrock originator Charlie Rich on “When Something is Wrong with My Baby” and ultra-suave 40s crooner Billy Eckstine on “Stormy,” both mid-60s standards of the kind Hayes would revisit may times. The second volume is devoted to singles and likely somewhat familiar to casual music fans but “Do Your Thing” and “Theme from Shaft” are welcome in any context. The third disc surveys Hayes’ imposing talents as a cover artist, highlighted his famously epic pass at Bacharach & David’s “Walk On By”plus a stupendous live version of T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday.” Disc Four is titled “Jam Master” and that’s where the set really takes off, as “Ike’s Mood I” and “Black Militant’s Place” waft us into 70s dreamland. The long-forgotten “Groove-A-Thon” is a blast of pure energy and the stupendous revision of “Do Your Thing” plays us out with thirtythree minutes of cosmic brainmelt you won’t believe you’re hearing. Surpasses all other Hayes compilations.

Various Artists Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies and Other Melodic Delights Numero Group What fun! Here for your delectation are three discs documenting the brief but well-remembered exotica music craze of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The term itself was coined by a label exec to sell Martin Denny’s bestselling Exotica LP and who rode the ensuing wave but this variegated horde of gidgets, gremmies, movie actors, erstwhile polka wizards, Midwestern jazz combos, and cocktail-bar jazzbos, along with serious students of the musics appropriated and reconfigured. Most of the talent on this peerless comp went on to varying degrees of local and worldwide obscurity as the Tiki fad evaporated so the extremely high quality of composition and musicianship presented here is almost unbelievable. Not even period specialists have some of these tracks and the whole wad taken in one sitting lulls the higher faculties in the manner of surf roar and Harvey Wallbangers, making it a kind of Pink Floyd for hodads.

Guitar freakouts, Hammond noodling, and bop soloing abound, as chanting and bubbling sounds occasionally float by in this happy miasma. This is one beautiful piece of creative curation and even at about two and a half hours, seems too short a ride as individual tracks disappear into a single slow-flowing vibration.

Of the acts that appear on this comp, subjects for further research include Jimmy McGriff, Gene Sikora & the Irrationals, and onetime RKO Pictures starlet Pony Sherrell, whose “Tobago” is a cheerfully funny repudiation of civilization and its ever growing discontents.

ALBUM REVIEWS

characters and desires that define a life, and reveals a sound alive with possibility and anticipation.

From the first notes of “Someone New,” the shape of the album is evident. An expansive world opens unto you, rendered in the powerpop palette. Used to Yesterday is darker than most pop-informed records, offering a nuanced take on the form that celebrates its cracks and inner connections, and suggesting directions the genre could potentially visit.

They’re like the West Coast cousins of Galaxie 500 or even Luna, and yeah, I know, Dean Wareham, but this could be Smokescreen’s Penthouse—except instead of cold, detached and aloof, Smokescreens are inviting and vibrant, although somewhat reserving an uncertainty beneath.

The guitars glisten and waver like stars in the distance, and the songs surge with yearning and mediated doubt. There is exhilaration in sifting through the insights and observations here, like “Steel Blue Skies,” a soundtrack for a drive along the 134/210 corridor, tracing the mountains with each key change and suggesting the contours of a city magnified or erased based on alwayschanging perspective. With Used to Yesterday, Smokescreens have built a template for possibilities in power-pop.

—Nathan Martel

SOSUPERSAM Priority EP 143 If you’ve driven by a Silverlake club recently and heard a few hundred people screaming Ja Rule & Ashanti’s “Mesmerize”, you probably have SOSUPERSAM (a.k.a. Samantha Duenas) to thank. The veteran DJ (and former backup dancer for the likes of Miley Cyrus and Kelly Rowland) has spent the last five years recontextualizing 90s and 00s R&B at her monthly 143 party, mixing nostalgia-heavy classics with ahead-of-their-time club bangers. Only recently has she begun dropping her own ALBUM REVIEWS

tunes into her sets, and this second EP Priority feels like a direct descendant of the sleek and sultry pop she’s made her name curating, updated with touches of 2010s bass music. Lead single “Drip” is a classic tensionand-release slow jam where Sam reminisces on “a misadventure that ended with skinny dipping as the sun was rising over Bangkok” between growling bass slides and water drops. Producer Nick Pacoli is flashy but tasteful here, hitting peak-time pleasure centers while never overpowering Sam’s affirmations of self-worth. “I’m a goddess, I’m a prize, I’m the best you’ll ever have,” she murmurs on “Good For It,” MIDI strings and sparkling chimes dancing underneath her. Priority may only be her second project, but it carries a decade’s confidence, strength and expertise.

—Zach Bilson

and by themselves—an entirely subjective process to be sure. The album seems to be an expansive expedition into the under current of late sixties. It recalls the melodic tendencies of Motherlode seasoned with the psyche-funky-soul-adelic act Archie Whitewater’s storytelling ability. “Saturday Far Away” is reminiscent of Brenton Wood, if he ever tried to add mind-altering substances to his soul songs. If Triptides have any contemporaries, the closest might be the Stepkids. But even then, there are a few—many?—degrees of distance in the comparison.

It’s easy to fall victim to psych rock clichés, yet Triptides manage to avoid such missteps. It kinda evokes the feeling of psychedelia in a digital age, while also rejecting simple genre conformity—Visitors abandons the sun-drenched vibe of yesterday, in favor of a tension that is understated yet palpable nonetheless. Psychedelia has always had an elusive quality to it, but the more successful of these types of bands offer a kind of accessibility. Put simply, Triptides invite you to take the trip with them—or to at least stop by for a short visit.

—Nathan Martel

TRIPTIDES Visitors Requiem Pour Un Twister I was watching Tron—not the regrettable 2010 reboot, but the original—while listening to this album. Visitors happened to be the perfect soundtrack for those 1982 acid trips and the resulting illuminated cyber cityscapes, the anthropomorphized computer programs and the bizarre narrative constructions. Tron, if examined as a philosophical treatise, is essentially wrestling with the notions of humanity and connection (as well as personal fulfillment) in a world increasingly dominated by distraction. On Visitors, their fifth album, Triptides also contemplate this distressing predicament, as a persistent droning rhythm anchors layered vocals in a haze of powerful fuzz guitar and cavernous organ riffs.

The title tune seems to suggest a distance from others and worst, the self. The album as a whole is an assessment of how and what meaning is for an individual and the process by which one goes about creating meaning for

melancholy undercurrent masked by bright arrangements. Really, Ethereality is based on an artful examination of post-millennial emotional confusion.

This generation is becoming very able at presenting a calm demeanor that masks the chaos just beneath the surface, and Winter expresses the beauty and turmoil of lives lived today, adeptly displayed by the subtle aggression of “Best Of It” or the draggy nonchalance of “Sunshine Devine.” This is music speaking to the experience of youth in the world today, particularly interpersonal relationships—a reservoir of turmoil that never runs dry.

Ethereality seeks to address these concepts in a uniquely individual way, not as an observer but as a participant. This is an album about searching—for self, for love and for others who understand.

There is nothing ironic about this endeavor. Ethereality is an earnest attempt to find kindred spirits.

—Nathan Martel

VUG ARAKAS Restless EP CBCV WINTER Ethereality Everything Blue At its best, Samira Winter’s Ethereality recalls the songwriting of Weezer’s blue album and the feeling of Last Splash-era Breeders and Malkmus’s pop distortions.

On the song “Blue Eyes, “ she even explores some of the terrain mapped by Beach House. Utilizing soaring, anthemic dynamics and universally relatable topics of young adult insecurities and struggle, she’s pushing the limits of her guitar playing and stretching the conventional confines of what a pop song is supposed to be. It’s easy to describe this as “dreamy” or “sun-drenched” pop … but there’s something more elusive happening. While this album might seem easy to interpret at first, repeated visits reveal a

The Replacements’ tenure as an active recording band can be neatly divided into three distinct epochs: The impetuous, booger-flicking punk of Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash and Hootenanny; the gorgeous, though still slightly askew, indie rock of Let It Be, Tim and Pleased To Meet Me; and the sterling but sonically straightjacketed powerpop of the band’s final two records, Don’t Tell A Soul and All Shook Down. That final period of the ‘Mats recording career isn’t eulogized as often as the first two, but it’s obviously the one singer-songwriter Vug Arakas draws the most inspiration from on his new EP, Restless. Arakas’ paeans to youth evoke Paul Westerberg at his most wistful and straightforward. The title track is the clear standout here, an anthem for the worldweary replete with Springsteen-y “oohs” and a guitar solo that bridges the

gap between classic pop jangle and contemporary Nashville twang.

In addition to showcasing the formidable talents of a budding songwriter, Restless is brave in its unabashed embrace of modern pop production values. The result is a collection of infectious and concise rock songs that occupy that rare, middle piece of the Venn diagram separating artistic integrity from commercial viability.

—Morgan Troper

VARIOUS ARTISTS Night Palms Hobo Camp Night Palms is the soundtrack to a particular vision of Los Angeles, one in which palms flutter in a constant breeze, the sky dims to a perpetual sunset, and waves lap at the shore in a loose rhythm. This is the first compilation for L.A. modern funk label Hobo Camp as well as an ode to the label’s fallen friend and local designer of note Trevor Tarczynski. Brian Ellis’ “Tides” rolls out first—it’s a slow burn, like a steamy neonoir scene unfolding in the carpeted confines of a houseboat.

“Modern Confusion” by Boy Dude takes you to the dancefloor with a snappy, plaintive boogie.

XL Middleton and Ghost follow with the vocoder-laden “Forgot About Each Other,” a smooth, wistful head-bobber that finds a way to glide into a captivating synth solo. “Bay Breeze” takes you back out to open water as Mat/Matix brings the dark depths of the ocean into shimmering, neon-tinted view. Moon B’s “Marina Player” is a series of synth-y, seaside vignettes driven by the same bouncy bassline.

Jomeo Pugz drops you into the “Hidden Zone” before Elegant Borzoi finally guides the way back to shore with “Deregulate.” Night Palms will send you searching, maybe for a waterbed or an aquarium or your own vision of Los Angeles. This is now your life aquatic.

—Miles Clements 49

LIVE PHOTOS SPRING 2018

ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR DEBI DEL GRANDE

POW! April 2018 Jeffery House

Wiz Khalifa April 2018 The Smokers Club Festival

Maximilian Ho

Manrique Marcos

Shame March 2018 The Teragram

The Marias April 2018 The Glass House

David Fisch

Jerry Paper June 2018 The Lodge Room

Manrique Marcos

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Maximilian Ho

Kevin Morby April 2018 The Troubadour

David Fisch

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Cat Scan June 2018 The Echoplex

Debi Del Grande

Talib Kweli March 2018 The Regent

SEXTILE June 2018 The Regent

Steph Port

Hovvdy May 2018 The Hi Hat

Lucy Blumenfield

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Debi Del Grande

Kate Nash April 2018 The Fonda

Steph Port

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Sorry To Bother You is a comedy. Maybe. It’s a story about a Black telemarketer in Oakland who succeeds by adopting a Caucasian voice in a world that’s more dystopian by the day. The white voices are ridiculously overdubbed and there’s recurring scenes of old white people in durags.

Or is it really science-fiction?

There’s some crazy deranged shit that happens in the last third of the film—that I’ve been contractually obligated to not mention—that could only be labeled science-fiction. Plus, there’s lots of world-ending shit. So that makes this film is a sci-fi comedy. But is it actually a satire—like Putney Swope?

It’s hard to witness a story about a Black character struggling to survive in ultracapitalist Oakland and the consequent existential conflict without seeing the parallels to our own lives. Shit. That’s actually a bit dark, almost like a drama. Come to think of it, the film is really about how no matter what our lives contain, for the vast majority of us the powers that be only see us as workhorses: either a Clydesdale to move that productivity needle a bit higher or an Eeyore to fill a rebranded prison.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what box to put Sorry To Bother You in. I just know that the film, written and directed by Boots Riley of the Coup, fucked me up in the best possible way. It is humane without being saccharine. It’s incisive without being preachy.

It’s lighthearted without being shallow. It’s powerful without taking itself too seriously. I am not sure how to introduce Sorry To Bother You because it feels like something new.

Special thanks to Movement Generation for the plug.

Interview by sweeney kovar illustration by SAFETY FIRST ©

LILAH ASH @lila__ash

OHARA HALE

54 JOHN TOTTENHAM

COMICS

DAVE VAN PATTEN

EMILY TSENG @emily.tseng

COMICS

curated by tom child

Most people who would listen to your music might think that your first film would be overtly political— Boots Riley (director/writer): Our music has never been that! It’s only been thought that way by people who write about it who don’t really listen to the lyrics. First, we always got accused of not being political enough because our music was funky and fun and danceable.

You have to remember that when we first came out, ‘political’ meant the Bomb Squad sound or something like that. We were never that. Our music was always optimistic and our music always talked about stuff from a personal perspective, like ‘Cars and Shoes’ or ‘Repo Man.’ We never were like an Immortal Technique, who is really cool but just different to us. We were never coming with a list of information. It was about everyday life. Even when we have a song like ‘5 Million Ways to Kill A CEO,’ it’s a dance song and it’s funny.

The fact that you’re saying the right thing doesn’t matter if the person you’re saying it to doesn’t give a fuck. For instance Rage Against The Machine—who I love and obviously I’ve worked with Tom Morello extensively—their thing is anger. But me coming from being an organizer, I know that anger doesn’t get people to actually do things. It’s the ability and viewpoint that they can actually change things that gets them to do things. That’s always guided my music and guided the aesthetic of what I wanted to do. If I made it doom-and-gloom, I’m never going to get anyone to do anything.

You talk about being an organizer and I thought this felt like a film made by an organizer. It’s clear that it’s made by someone who understands the way to connect with people isn’t beating them over the head with problems or even a solution but it’s about being able to form relationship. Everyday people deal with all these ‘issues’ simultaneously but most folks don’t over-analyze their lives—they just live their lives!

That’s the ultimate goal. If I’m going to be an artist then the form of the art and the way it’s done has to take priority. If it’s just the content that takes priority, I might as well just be making speeches. My goal is to connect emotionally with people, like you said. That’s the most important thing. Hopefully while I’m making that thing, I’m honest with myself about what I think about the world and what I think about people, [and] it’ll come across without me having to mechanically say this piece of art is going to do this or that.

How do you manage the way that different audiences interact with it? I watched the film in a screening with about a dozen people, mostly white, and it was very interesting to see how people reacted differently to different parts of the movie.

I’m trying not to give anything away but basically it felt a bit weird to watch some parts of the film with white folks.

Well, we played it at a lot of places and I’ve been in the viewing of it with a lot of different demographics. I don’t know if you went to an industry screening…

Yeah, it was.

Those are usually different. Those people are thinking, ‘Does this work? What does FILM

this mean in the marketplace?’ They’re not reacting to it fully. We played the film to crowds that are largely people of color and crowds that are largely white. One of the best reactions we had were at the Salt Lake City in Sundance which you can guess is mainly white folks and the other was at South by Southwest which was still majority white. It’s hard to gauge that from industry screenings because those are always weird. I think everybody will have different ways into it. Sometimes people are laughing at it and sometimes white people are looking like, ‘Is it OK to laugh? How should I be feeling about this?’ Which is fine because there are lots of things in the movie where people might be thinking, ‘How should I feel about this?’

Because they’re trying to take everything seriously, which is good. It’s going to make you laugh at some point anyway, no matter who you are. Some of the stuff is just going to be really hard to deal with. That’s the point.

I want to have people engage with the film.

Part of the reason why it’s different is to have people on their toes and not necessarily think they have it figured out. Sort of like real life.

Sorry To Bother You is the kind of film I’ve wanted to see for a long time. Watching it was an emotional experience.

I’m glad you felt it. It’s great to witness people taking it in and processing it. It’s one of the most artistically satisfying things in my career.

Maybe it’s the most artistically satisfying thing I’ve done in my career.

So many moments felt like I was watching a Coup skit ... [laughs] The truth is those skits also had a lot to do with film. We got really into a lot of those skits on the albums, from the sound design to the story and the editing. That was, in my mind, very similar to making films.

At one point I even thought if I couldn’t get anyone to make this movie, maybe I could do it in an audio format like an old radio play.

The last Coup album was supposed to be a soundtrack to the film and you published a version of the screenplay in McSweeney’s Quarterly. How does it feel at this point?

Just before it’s really out?

It feels good. It feels satisfying to be able to watch your work processed by people and to get people’s reaction to it and see it sit in the cultural sphere as opposed to being an idea that you know certain things about but you don’t know what it means until it bounces off of people. I did that to a certain extent during the whole process with the script. I was not secretive with the script. Obviously we put it out on McSweeney’s to ten or twenty thousand people and we got reactions from there. But before that … even when I was only 30 pages in I was letting people read it and tell me what they thought. I went through labs and bounced it off people there but this is the ultimate—seeing people that I don’t even know processing it. With music it’s a little different. People talk about it in a different way and people experience music in a different way. They might not be done experiencing a song for ten years and it happens little by little while they’re sitting around with their friends or at a party or whatever. With a film, I’ve captured people for two hours and made them have this experience. It’s gratifying.

What did you get from having such an open process for so long?

I got to look at my characters and my story more three dimensionally. You feel it differently when someone else has a question about something. ‘Why is this character doing this?’ It may not be something you thought about before but it makes you see them in a certain way. One of the biggest things was going through the labs and having all these master writers comment on my work—some that I agreed with and some that I disagreed with, but it ultimately gave me a process to think about.

Your interest in film dates back to the early days of the Coup. Why was now the right time for a full-length film project?

I went to film school and then we got our first record deal. One—movies cost a lot more back then. There wasn’t the same technical quality of film that you could produce back then. There was also this question: you make this small film and how many people see it? So I weighed it out. Our songs were getting play on BET and people were getting the album.

Even beyond the people that were getting the album, it was something that they used in crowds and other spheres. I felt that the art that I was doing at the time was getting to people so I had a certain satisfaction from that, especially when you combine that with what I thought it would take to fund the crazy ideas I might have had through the 90s But by the way, we did do film stuff during that time. I co-directed ‘Me and Jesus The Pimp In A ‘79 Granada Last Night.’ I was very involved in the other videos. I’d usually write the treatment and sometimes storyboard it. I was very involved in choosing the locations. I was very involved in lots of ideas for framing and compositions. I’d usually be camped out in the editing room if it was somewhere in the Bay area.

How did the stars align around this idea being the project to see through as a film?

This movie was just the idea that, when I downloaded Final Draft, I started typing first. The opening scene is an interview scene that’s based on something that my friend Rob used to do. I always had it in my head that I would put that in a movie. It wasn’t much more than that. I knew that I was going to take something, start with it and put a lot of my ideas into it.

Another aspect that makes it feel triumphant is that you directed it.

I always wanted to direct it but I didn’t think that I could. I didn’t think the funding would align around me directing it. I thought I’d let someone else direct, it could become a hit and then I can direct the next one. But for one—like Richard Ayoade told me—nobody else would be able to capture the voice, and two, if I went the first route people could just think of me as a writer and it may actually be harder to direct a movie. So I learned all I could about directing. I watched interviews with directors talking about their process. I got Dave Eggers from McSweeney’s to set me up with a three-hour master class with Spike Jonze, where he just told me everything he thought I needed to know. I read all the books I could read about directing. I read this book Acting for Directors, which deals with

communicating with actors. I even took a Skype class from Judith Weston, the woman who wrote the book. Then I took a similar class with Joan Darling. I watched a lot of ‘making of’ things because I’ve been on sets before so the space wasn’t totally new to me, but there are certain processes and protocols that you wonder about. One resource that ended up being particularly helpful was a behind the scenes version of a film—The Two Faces of January, which stars Viggo Mortensen. 80% of the footage was them showing the crew and the behind-the-scenes process of making the movie. There’s also websites I would frequent like mentorless.com, filmschoolrejects.com and nofilmschool.com. I also made people be my mentors. I found Guillermo Del Toro at a dinner that San Francisco Film Society was hosting. I pitched him the idea of the film and he loved it. I told him I needed a mentor and he said he didn’t have the time, but he gave me his email. He never did not answer my questions and never didn’t help me. He even helped us while we were looking for certain practical effects. Same thing with David Gordon Green, who was an advisor at Sundance. I told him I needed a mentor and he said, ‘Well, you better start shadowing me then.’ He invited me to shadow him while he directed the TV show ‘Red Oaks.’ I made a lot of lists. I made so many lists. I made a look book. All these things were as much to organize my thoughts for myself as they were to communicate my ideas to other people.

What’s next for you in film?

This year I’m going to be writing a feature and a TV pilot. That’s what I’m working on next.

You’re one of my favorite MCs. Are we going to hear more of you rapping and making music?

The Coup did a whole new soundtrack to the movie that will be coming out this summer.

We did all the diegetic music that happens in it. tUnE-yArDs did the score. The new Coup album is called The Sun Exploding, which is brought up in the movie if you remember.

We’re living in crazy times. In your eyes, what is the role of an artist in times like these?

The role of any human being at any point in life should be to engage with the world.

In order to fully engage with the world, you have to change it. If everything is exactly the same whether you were here or not, then you didn’t really engage with the world very much. Changing the world and being part of some sort of movement that changes material conditions eventually is something that all humans should be a part of. Now, if you’re an artist, what you do is communicate. You should be involved with a movement and that would probably affect your work. As an artist you make things that have to do with what you know about the world and how you see the world … but what you know about the world and how you see it should be changed drastically by what you’re involved in in the world and how you’re involved in the world.

BOOTS RILEY’S SORRY TO BOTHER YOU IN SELECT THEATRES ON FRI., JULY 6, WITH A WIDER RELEASE ON FRI., JULY 13.

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patrisse khan-cullors and WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST Interview by sweeney kovar photography by dana washington

“That’s not art, that’s political art.” “This art exists outside the political debate.” “Art is just, like, free man.” “This is art, but with a message” We often talk about culture and politics as separate realities. Or at best, we talk about culture and politics like two neighboring countries that might be friendly at times but still have borders between them. I believe culture and politics are more like two family members—two aspects of one ecosystem. Patrisse Khan-Cullors knows that politics and culture are inextricably linked, that each has a unique function in the struggle towards the liberation of oppressed peoples. Through her lifelong work as an artist, activist and advocate—most visible for her foundational role in establishing the Black Lives Matter global network—Khan-Cullors has helped literally helped us see the humanity in ourselves.

When we speak for this interview, the San Fernando Valley native is measured and confident. She’s earnest as we discuss the process around her recently released best-selling memoir, When They Call You A Terrorist, co-written with the brilliant and fierce asha bandele. She’s vulnerable and open when we discuss empathy for oppressors, anti-Blackness in non-Black communities of color and why showing up for Black lives really means showing up for humanity. She discusses her ongoing campaigns against mass incarceration and the punitive state with the Reform L.A. Jails effort and she gushes over being a new mother. Our interview fills me with follow up questions but the conversation does give me one idea that feels solid and concrete: our liberation, physical and otherwise, will grow inside the bonds and commitments we form with each other.

I’d like to ask you to expand on a few thoughts from the book. When you talk about the election of Trump, you write about being angry at your own naivete around thinking it wouldn’t happen. How do you manage that kind of feeling and not become disenchanted with your work?

For me it’s always been really important to be curious about what’s out there and to dig deeper. The more I discover, the more that becomes an important part of my study and my political education [and] the more I realized added another puzzle piece to the puzzle.

With more information, I have more clarity on why I fight. With more information, I can be a more effective strategist. That’s how I’ve approached my learning and my re-learning and my deeper clarity around things.

You also talk about fighting for the humanity of the people you’re fighting with. I thought that was such a powerful statement. How do you maintain that empathy for folks you are fighting against?

I think a lot about what it takes to try to fight and get as many people involved and be on our side to win. While sometimes what I believe isn’t popular or the beliefs of our movement aren’t popular, I’m always thinking about how I get people to empathize—how do I make people understand the impact this is having not just on Black people but on everyone?

When we fight for Black people—when we fight against the ways that Black people are traumatized, humiliated and not cared for— we’re actually calling for everybody to access their own humanity. We’re asking everybody else to show up for themselves because when you show up for Black people you’re showing 56

up for yourself. That’s the way I try to talk about it, and not just talk about it but that is how I feel. This is something that I deeply, deeply, deeply feel and I believe it. I try to bring that to every conversation and every space to ground us in that, to ground us in that question: are we really going to allow ourselves to be witnesses to death or are we stand up to it?

As a non-Black person of color, I see the hesitancy in many when it comes to showing up for Black lives. What do you see as some reasons for that lack of solidarity?

I think people feel like, ‘What about us?’ I think it’s a selfish, ego thing. I think often people don’t understand the nuances of antiBlack racism. They don’t understand why it should be a part of the conversation ... and honestly I think that some people don’t want to stand up for Black lives. There are different variations of what happens in people.

To belabor an important point, why should non-Black folks be in solidarity with Black lives?

Because part of what happens when you live in this country is that the way in which whiteness exists is predicated on the humiliation and death of Blackness. Once more people started to emigrate to this country what we started to see is that there really is two ways of being: white or Black. For some nationalities who were able to assimilate into whiteness, they benefit from anti-Blackness. For some nationalities who can’t assimilate—who end up being destroyed by anti-Blackness—it’s because of that anti-Blackness that they are not able to assimilate. So we have to combat it. We have to face it.

Can you tell me about Reform L.A. Jails?

Reform L.A. Jails is a ballot initiative that we are working on with Justice L.A. and other groups across the country and inside of L.A. county. It’s an initiative that is challenging L.A.’s current relationship to incarceration and honestly its relationship to the Sheriff’s Department. We’ve lived in a county that has really prioritized law enforcement, policing and criminalization. This new initiative we’re spearheading is called the Reform L.A. Jails and Community Reinvestment Initiative. It’s the first of its kind in the country. It will pave the way for reducing recidivism, preventing crime and harm and permanently reducing the population of people cycling in and out of the jails. The initiative would empower a civilian oversight commission to develop a plan to reduce the jail population and reallocate the dollars from the jail budget to communitybased prevention youth programming and treatment. This initiative will also give that commission subpoena power and investigative power because right now it has no legal powers to effectively provide oversight from the Sheriff’s Commission.

What does that campaign look like and what are ways folks can be in support of it?

There are three ways to support. We’re hiring folks to gather signatures. You can go to our website ReformLAJails.com and connect with us. If you want to be a volunteer signature gatherer, you can do that as well. The second thing people can do is donate. We need people to donate to the campaign. It costs money to run a ballot initiative so please, please, please donate. The third thing we need people to do is hold house parties. We want people

to get their friends and have a conversation about what it means to reform L.A. jails. We want people to show up for this initiative and show up for what we’re doing and what we’re working on.

In my day-to-day conversations talking to people about jails and prisons and that there’s a better way—even among folks that are in general agreeance—people often have a hard time imagining a world without police or prisons. What advice or insight do you offer for someone who can’t imagine the alternative?

The alternatives don’t necessarily exist in this country yet. We know people who have been able to stop jail construction. I think better models exist outside of the country. Sometimes you have to look outside of a place to really see its work. I think it’s really important that we’re able to introduce new ways of dealing with harm and violence and introduce new ways of dealing with social ills, whether that’s drug use or mental illness. We’ve been overly reliant on policing and incarceration and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.

What role does healing and restorative work have when we talk about work to end mass incarceration?

Healing is central. We can’t do this work without having a healing justice analysis and practice. We need all of our work—especially the work that’s dealing with the death of our communities. We need to be having strong practices in our organizations and with our membership on how we hold space for the trauma and how we hold space for resilience.

Why do we need arts and culture woven into activism and movement work?

BOOKS

I think having a creative approach is key. Part of the work is moving forward on integrating art and culture. Art and culture should not be seperate from our work. We should be developing Artivism [A term combining art and activism—ed.] as a central way that people see our work. It is also healing to be able to do art in your movement and your organization.

I think the way in which art is healing is that it provides space for people to transform what they’ve experienced. Art is transformative. Art is really steeped in healing and really steeped in what’s necessary for our healing. I would say it’s spiritual as well.

What are the advantages—and just as importantly—the disadvantages of having celebrities engaged in activism and movement work?

Good question. It’s important that our movements are popularized and it’s important that our movements are seen by more than just us. It’s important that mainstream people shout out ‘Black Lives Matter!’ from the mountaintops and I think it’s important to never rely on celebrities to lead a movement.

That has never happened. That is not how we get free. It’s people on the ground doing the work and celebrities being led by people on the ground that gets us closer to freedom.

Has there been a piece of art that has inspired you in recent years?

Solange’s last album A Seat At The Table really did good for me in the last few years.

It was right after Philando and Alton and all the killing of Black trans women, and it feels like a similar moment now where we need something to heal—to be the balm. At that time there was so much Black death and she came out with so much healing for us. It was both a personal narrative and a political narrative. It was important for my own soul.

What about a piece of art that was inspirational during your childhood?

I read a book called The Giver when I was in elementary school. That book changed me. It gave me a new perspective on what’s possible for me as a child. The premise is this whole world that is sci-fi where everything is constructed a certain way and everybody did everything the same but there was one boy who held all the terrible memories. They also held all the joyful memories. The only way that world could exist was if everything was flattened, everything was the same color. This boy was trained as The Giver, who would receive all the memories. As he started to receive them, it was too much to carry. I really started to feel a deep sense that there are other ways of living and other ways of being. It was a deeply reflective piece about humanity and it was so important as a child to read that.

You’re also a new mother. What further insights has motherhood given you that are applicable to the work you do?

So many things … I think one of them is how urgent it is to change this place. I feel a deep need to change this world, not just for everybody else but for my own family and my own child. Having a child has also put into perspective what so many mothers have felt for centuries being in this country, a fear of not being able to protect our children. It’s very basic to protect yourself and your family. It’s a basic human instinct. The fact that we’re 58

not able to fully protect our children—and not from natural disasters or anything like that but from the state, a state that hunts our children—is really painful.

What has been filling you with gratitude lately?

My family. It’s been really beautiful to raise a child and to have a partner. My mom stays with us some of the time. Just building with my family has been really good for me.

What was the catalyst for writing your memoir When They Call You A Terrorist?

It was watching the presidential election take place and recognizing that all of the work that BLM does was being demonized by the media and by elected officials. I wanted to tell a different story about BLM, about myself and about the people I grew up loving and caring about.

What was asha bandele’s role as a coauthor? asha’s been a mentor of mine for many years now. She’s also the author of many books. I came to her to ask for her support in helping me develop this narrative that is my story, but she’s a master storyteller. She said yes. It was not at all hard to convince her. I could barely get the words out of my mouth. She played an important role in shaping the narrative and listening to all my stories and be able to craft them. We developed a beautiful poetic approach to how we put the story forward.

We wanted two things to happen: we wanted people to see what I went through and what my family went through and what my community went through, and we wanted people to see what the government was doing in order to allow these things to happen in my life and in my family’s life.

Now that the book is released and you’ve done lots of events, do you have additional reflections on the relationship you formed with asha in the process of writing the book and sharing it out with the world?

It was uncomfortable deciding to tell a story about myself because writing a memoir is pretty self-absorbed. Why me? Why is this story important? I really try to challenge ego when I’m doing this work. I was conflicted but I asked a lot of different people if I should do it and they said yes. It’s important and it also sets up the path for other Black authors to also write their own stories. I learned a lot about the kind of confidence it takes to tell your own story and believe in it. asha was an amazing co-author and co-conspirator and she’s just a deep, deep feeler so I got a lot of validation and affirmation from her. In the last few months it was really powerful to see the book become a New York Times bestseller.

It was powerful to feel deeply connected to so many people who were like, ‘Thank you for writing this.’ It’s been an amazing experience.

PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS’ AND asha bandele’S WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST: A BLACK LIVES MATTER MEMOIR IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM ST. MARTIN’S PRESS. VISIT PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS AT PATRISSEKHANCULLORS. COM. VISIT REFORM L.A. JAILS AT REFORMLAJAILS.COM.

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FIRST AID KIT with M. Ward

9/26

BOY GEORGE & CULTURE CLUB

10/3

with special guests Nahko and Medicine for the People and Scatter Their Own

Fonda Theatre Shrine Auditorium El Rey 9/5

Fonda Theatre 9/6, 9/7, 9/10, 9/11 + 9/12

Fonda Theatre

JONATHAN WILSON with Amo Amo

9/20

THE MIDNIGHT

9/21

SUPERORGANISM JAPANESE BREAKFAST

9/22

GARY NUMAN

10/6

THE BUTTERTONES

10/10 + 10/11

with Nightmare Air

NATHANIEL RATELIFF & THE NIGHT SWEATS

Theatre at Ace Hotel

9/14

with Ought

7/31

with Whitney

7/25

ROSTAM with Bedouine

THE DECEMBERISTS

Fonda Theatre Fonda Theatre Fonda Theatre Fonda Theatre 10/2

Fonda Theatre Fonda Theatre Fonda Theatre

with The B-52’s, The Thompson Twins’ Thomas Bailey

Twin Shadow

COURTNEY BARNETT with Waxahatchee

10/5

BØRNS

10/24

with Twin Shadow