Gone Underground

Few smart people refuse an invite from Tequila Mockingbird. Though inbox and phone were crammed with Saturday night invites, lures, and inveiglements, no one else could’ve got me out of my house on the rain-sodden, deadline-riven eve of February 20th. The punkette aristo’s latest Fluffer party was being thrown at 01 Gallery downtown, but a (long) walk away for me. The South Los Angeles Street art space was already filling with a party-down cadre of art mutants I’d seen slurping Pinot onto half the cement floors in Gallery Row. The canvases ranged from the iconic (Overton Loyd, Gahan Wilson) to the witty (Gomez Bueno) to the trashy (the aptly named Mark Gash), and the vibe was getting looser by the second. Fellow CityBeat writer Mick Farren did a series of Bill Burroughs rants over electric guitar accompaniment, words and music walloped to mush by the concrete echo. The rest of it was like acidhead Ed Sullivan, with a chanteuse vying with a boy-ukuleleist for surrealism honors inside a room that was acoustically its own wah-wah pedal. DJs took over, the place began to fill with club kids, and a sweet thang tried to brace me for cocaine by the time I kissed the hostess goodbye and slowly made for the exit. Hollywood is certainly a town with no definite borders.

Long March Through the Galleries: As the aboveground L.A. rock milieu contracts to traditional nodes, the underground continues to flex rude tentacles into the trendy, ever-growing local gallery scene. That amplified noise and cheap booze attract eyes to gallery merchandise is old news to curators, but the novelty of DJs fades quickly, so live music has begun to be imported, along with the artier local rockers. The Il Corral on Melrose is no more, but the curators reopened weirder than ever as Zero-Point in south Downtown. Echo Curio on Sunset will pick up the pace of their avant-rock events in mid-March with appearances by advanced likes of Cat Hair Ensemble and The Clang Quartet. As nearby Spaceland and the Echoplex grow into twin bastions of the indie industrial complex, hole-in-the-wall art galleries now replace the hole-in-the-wall dive bars as venues to see four-or-five bands for your five-or-ten bucks.

A Man Named Carnage: Filmed during his frantic Monday nights at the old Il Corral, 40 Bands in 80 Minutes is director Sean Carnage’s compression-unto-pemmican of his stint as underground impresario. Bands like Faux for Real, Bipolar Bear and Dog Shit Taco did their gonzo stuff in condensed doses for his camera, like a three-day feedback festival experienced at B-movie speed. Carnage has transferred operations to Pehrspace, a gallery tucked inside an obscure strip-mall in Historic Filipinotown, where I saw Ema & the Ghosts. A tiny singer-songwriter whose odd, adorable ditties like “Whirly Kid” and “Rabbit Hole” bring to mind a milk-fed Syd Barrett, Ema paused briefly to introduce the empty stage as her “ghosts.” As she alternated on accordion and uke, a heavy-footed, mostly male crowd stood in awkward postures of fascination and love. Little could be further from removed from Sean’s 40/80 feedback howl, but the customers were poleaxed by a gifted performer just the same.

Carnage understands this oft-unspoken taste for the arresting and the novel very well. As a dropout art history student at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, he was decisively influenced by what he remembers as “these absolutely mind-blowing, life-altering Monday night concerts. I saw The Jesus Lizard, The Melvins, and Helmet all before they broke big and it totally changed by life. A friend and I published U.S. Rocker monthly for 10 years. The bottom fell out of the local rock economy and the paper folded. Cleveland had been a minor hub in the music industry and, until 1998, all the major companies were in Cleveland. In ’99, none were left.”

Out here in “L.A., the center of the universe, and music commerce,” the puckish Mr. Carnage transplanted his experience, applying Midwestern horse sense to scene economics. “Bar owners have certain commercial expectations,” he notes. “All-ages spaces and galleries aren’t like that. They’re looking for a percentage that’s pretty relaxed. This is how I keep admission low-cost, and it relieves me of the responsibility of finding blockbuster bands. The dirty little secret of the underground is that there’s more money to be made off eccentric noncommercial bands than there is in the subpar commercial acts. At the very top, there’s all the difference in the world, but the very top isn’t large.”

Mutaytor 2.0: As the house band for Burning Man, The Mutaytor enjoys an eminence approximately to that of Booker T. & the MG’s in the story of Memphis R&B. Like those soul grandfathers, these desert funkateers channel the swagger and sensibility of an entire milieu into one hyper-stylized musical signature. Poised as a Next Big Thing in 2005, the giant performance ensemble was hit badly when its founder was hauled up on Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series early last year. The only conceivable way out was for the principal songwriting team of Buck Downs and Atom Smith to come up with a masterpiece, and that’s what has happened.

Yelling Theater in a Crowded Fire is probably the most formidable work of art to come out of the Burning Man subculture so far, but that’s a secondary accomplishment. An unorthodox re-imagining of classic rock album structure provides the framework for a series of neutron-funk meditations on revolution, extinction, and fornication. A seamless musical Frankenstein with the heart of What’s Going On and the groin urges of One Nation Under a Groove, this album is as much a raised fist for Change as all those ubiquitous Obama posters.

“We probably started working on this record about two years ago,” Buck remembered, “Which coincided with probably the biggest touring year we ever had. Last year, with the media fallout, work began on it in earnest. Atom and I started dragging out our all-time favorite records, all the stuff considered the greatest, try to figure out how to make a very big and important sounding record.” The album will be available on the band’s site in a month, with proceeds from the first single to go to Burners Without Borders, a festival-related charity. Buck describes the difference between playing Black Rock City and L.A. as “like the difference between Holy Communion and the Last Supper. Everything we are goes back to that experience and context.”

Heavy Purrsonae: Whatever Mutaytor’s travails, their catalog places them at the top of a ramshackle subculture. Providing the soundtrack for a cultural experiment is a handsome niche, but there are others as impressive. More traditional rock has not fallen on such degenerate times that a band like The Warlocks can’t release a masterpiece like last year’s Heavy Deavy Skull Lover even after shedding half their previous lineup. Dense and strontium-heavy even by the gravid standards of 2002’s The Phoenix Album, this release’s monolithic drone is as comparable to trance or post-rock as Velvets-inspired drooginess. Their local disciples include Darker My Love, whose upcoming sophomore album was mixed by Tony Hoffer, who also did the honors for ex-labelmate Silversun Pickups’ apparently deathless Carnavas. The latter, a durable slab of pavement psychedelia with two years on the charts, bids fair to become the Frampton Comes Alive! of indie rock.

An equally startling venture into Sunset Boulevard Lysergia is Sabrosa Purr’s latest, To the Crickets and the Ghosts. Will Love is still twisting his conventionally pretty rocker’s voice into razor-gargles and lynx-snarls, but the band has gotten slicker and glossier, making up in chills what they give away in stoner detachment. The insistence on big ’80s-metal riffs is most un-indie of them, but they contribute mightily to the force of songs like “Suckerpunch Kiss” and “The Lovely People.”

The “Silver Lake scene” is probably a misnomer at this point. The hillside neighborhood has become too expensive for hardscrabble rocker kidz, as full as it is with respectably tin-eared bourgeois. What gives the name what cachet it still has is the undeniably brilliant haul of local indie rock still showcased at the Echo and Spaceland. Acts like The Minor Canon, Meho Plaza, and The Parson Red Heads would stand out in any assemblage and one like The Happy Hollows is no less than miraculous. The Hollows do upbeat pop of chipper angularity that makes light of weighty matters like the Panama Canal and the monsters hiding in your room. Vocalist Sarah Negahdari is cool as Kim Deal and squeals like her too, her little-girl ululations pumping yet more helium into the mix and giggling as the songs float away.

Of course, The Pity Party invites Romper Room metaphors too, but ones from the Wednesday and Pugsley Addams end of the playground. This duo makes and distributes its own weird EPs, using whimsically recycled packaging and gnomic art to hint at the lovingly crafted and deeply strange sounds therein. “Dronebots and Peons for Eons and Eons,” to pluck one Dayglo trifle, is enchanting and willfully strange, with Maurice-Robert’s guitar rivet-slamming behind redheaded moppet Heisenfiel’s blankly tremulous vocals. The lady also plays drum and keys, often at once. Given a third appendage, I don’t doubt she’d throw in a kazoo or Sousaphone.

The third show of their Monday residency was a gorgeous detonation in the Hindenburg manner. Film School was finishing up their polished shoegaze set in high style when I arrived and they were sent off with a brief roar of pleasure from the crowd, already drink-swollen and ornery. They clearly wanted to be Shown Something and, the Party provided it, plowing headlong into their set, the eldritch brio heightened by the singer’s flu-cracked voice. By the end, the guitarist walked off to blank faces, then thunderous applause as Heisenfiel’s head sank into her keyboard, making a minor chord that went on until she limped offstage. Punk as fuck.

When I called up the lovely Ms. H a couple of days later, she was coughing in deathbed decrepitude and heartsick over a romantic matter. “Yesterday’s catharsis,” she croaked, the frog in her throat now volleyball-sized. “Monday’s show was the worst show I’d played in a long time. I was sick and distracted, but I have a sense of humor about it. It isn’t a tragedy, just a fact.”

She and Maurice-Robert were theater kids who “like grew up together, did choir and music theater together and went our separate ways, he in New York and I here. We were talking long distance about a project we’d like to do, all very abstract. Neither of us had been in a band before.” Though clearly living up to experimentalist expectations, Julie insists “We have a lot of convention in us. Because of our backgrounds, we weren’t cool kids. We were listening to musical theater not Nirvana. We have a very structurally traditional aesthetic and do whatever we please tonally on top of that. We’re pretty conventional compared to some of the bands at the Smell and we were used to seeing the usual five-guy acts at Spaceland. So, we’re not crazy experimental. In some weird in-between land.”

“To me,” Ms. H. summed, “the “Silver Lake scene” is the bands our friends are in and there’s no sonic cohesion in all of those. We play a lot with The Deadly Syndrome and Eskimohunter and Great Northern. Who am I leaving out? I dunno. We just all love each other and that’s what makes it what it is. It’s a happy fuzzy-feelings concept of a scene, which is kinda weird.”