A and O
Beyond resuscitation with Pocahaunted
By Daiana Feuer
Pocahaunted will soon utter its first word. The band’s been together for almost three years and released 27 albums, but this week marks a milestone in its musical evolution. Never before have they used actual words – with consonants.
Amanda and Bethany (who don’t do last names) began in vocal primordial ooze – 16-minute drones, chanting “A” and “O” sounds, and distortion. If their discography were chronologically assembled for museum display, we’d start with one tone sustained so long it eventually gives into the natural order, mutating and evolving into syllables. It travels across continents, mingling its genetics with different rhythms and taking souvenir chromosomes to the next destination.
“It’s very much a Natural History Museum evolution,” Amanda says. “We can’t just go straight into Coldplay lyrics. At the same time, we try so many things, it seems like this might be a good thing to try.”
Pocahaunted’s musical seed-spreading comes on vinyl, cassette, and CD-R by way of Not Not Fun – the label Amanda co-helms with husband and musician Britt Brown – and other underground niche labels specializing in limited-edition experimental juju. L.A.’s Teenage Teardrops just released Pocahaunted’s Chains. And Passage arrives this month from New Jersey’s Troubleman. Passage is Pocahaunted’s ragga album: “dark ragga, North African Sahara, sitar-y stuff. We tried for an eerie sound,” says Amanda. So they found endless sand dunes, a lone camel, passing windswept mantras, and a hookah room in the middle of the Casbah. This album, as well as recent release, Island Diamonds, bats around world music like a kitten at play.
“Right around the time we started recording Island Diamonds, I started listening to a lot of spacey dub and buying Soul Jazz box sets, trying to sink my teeth into that aspect of electronic music,” Amanda continues. “Real soulful, heavy on bass, Jamaican stuff. I said to Bethany, one day we have to make a dub album. Of course, it sounds nothing like a dub album.”
Correction: it sounds like a Pocahaunted dub album.
“Bobb Bruno wrote these electronic beats and we would sing to them, then we’d be like, ‘Now we want gunshots and cash registers and sirens!’”
Amanda now announces that next is the opening of Pocahaunted’s funk chapter. This comes with an evolutionary left turn – young co-founder Bethany has moved to New York City for school. While Bethany answers the call of the wild, Blackblack’s Diva Dompe will add voice and bass to Pocahaunted’s permutation. The current lineup includes Amanda, Dompe, Robedoor’s guitarist Britt Brown and Ged Gengras on drums, who also plays in Antique Brothers, and Cameron Stallones of Magic Lantern and Sun Araw playing organ.
Though nervous without Bethany, Amanda is excited about the music.
“It’s funk. We think it’s funky. Diva plays funk bass. You can dance to it more than you could dance to any other Pocahaunted stuff. And we’re singing words! We’re going to show up in Texas and people are going to say, ‘What on earth?’ You also hope that people are like, ‘Whoa ... good!’”
Before SXSW, the band’s Echo Curio performance will be the first show without Bethany, the first with the new lineup, and the first where they plan to play more than one song.
“We have always, from the beginning, always played one piece. And if it’s nine minutes then it’s nine minutes. When we opened for Sonic Youth, they were like, ‘Um yeah, you have to play for 25 minutes.’ The thing is we like to build ourselves into a total frenzy. When you’re doing that, you’re starting off calm and ramping up, up, up. By those last few minutes, you’re sweating and flailing. People are like, ‘More!’ There’s no more, man! If you are beyond resuscitation, then you did it.”
Their longest and best set, according to Amanda, took place after midnight in a stranger’s tiny basement in Baltimore, Maryland. Harsh, strange conditions awakened Pocahaunted’s neo-primitivist mystique. The temperature was about 100 degrees.
“We took off our shirts and we were wearing bikini tops because it was so hot, we were pouring water on ourselves. So we were wet, we were in bikini tops, the band was going crazy and we sang and screamed and danced our heads off for 25 minutes. No one knew what to do. We don’t make the kind of music where people are dancing or clapping. We make ‘artful music,’ so people are mostly sitting there, staring at you. So if you’re flailing and going crazy, they’re still just going ‘Hmm,’ like a panel, ‘this is interesting.’ Then you hope that on your last note everyone’s like, yes!”
Pocahaunted, with Robedoor, Sun Araw and Super Minerals, at Echo Curio, 1519 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park; www.echocurio.com. Sun., 9 p.m. Visit Pocahaunted at notnotfun.com/pocahaunted.
Published: 02/25/2009
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