Twin kitties received instruction from Hope on capturing Isabelle Albuquerque’s dance moves and added their own feline twist. Perhaps Albuquerque will adopt the “lick your nose” step.  This isn’t just a coupla cats dancing. Details pin a story-line in abstraction—which suits Hecuba reality fine—a phone call, an engagement ring, a dangling sock. I want to dangle my sock like that.

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KCRW & LA RECORD PRESENT…

MANIMAL FESTIVAL 2009
OCTOBER 3rd & 4th
WITH
EDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS
CHAIRLIFT
WARPAINT
HECUBA
RAINBOW^ARABIA
FOOL’S GOLD
THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR
WE ARE THE WORLD
OTHER LIVES
VOICESVOICES
RIO EN MEDIO
CORRIDOR
MOONRATS
ALEXANDRA HOPE
HE’S MY BROTHER, SHE’S MY SISTER
JULIETTE COMMANGRE
LACO$TE
EXITMUSIC
AMANDA JO WILLIAMS

AT PAPPY & HARRIETS PIONEERTOWN PALACE (NEAR JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA)
www.pappyandharriets.com
TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE AT (VIA PAYPAL)
www.manimalvinyl.com/shows.php
$30 PER DAY OR $50 FOR THE WEEKEND…

MUSIC, FOOD, ART, FASHION, TEEPEES, HORSES, WILDERNESS, HIKING, CAMPING, HOTELS (WITHIN 20 MINUTES), MAGICK…

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Download: Gangi “Commonplace Feathers”

(from A coming out in May on vinyl from White Noise)

Gangi will be playing their final residency at Spaceland tonight so we are lifting this interview out of our archives. The vinyl version of their album A is almost out and they are already working on the follow-up Gun Show, with a title track that sounds like T. Rex and Funkadelic put together. They speak here months before when issues of toxic mold were much more on their minds. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is your new attic in Glendale healthier than your old bedroom in Williamsburg?
Matt Gangi (guitar/vocals/samples/drums): Definitely. I don’t know if it influenced the record, but there was black mold and mushrooms growing out of the wall—bigger than the size of my hand. And growing out of the ceiling. The place was rent-stabilized and the landlord didn’t care because I was just like a noisy kid paying cheap rent.
He didn’t care if you lived or died?
M: It was pretty terrible. They cut open the ceiling and this green and brown stuff was dripping all over my stuff. My neighbor came down and said, ‘That shouldn’t be exposed! I built your walls out in the ‘60s and that’s asbestos!’
Lyle Nesse (drums/keys/samples/vocals): Matt always called me thinking he was dying—that’s just his personality.
M: I’m a hypochondriac in general.
L: That’s an understatement! But I went up there and there actually were huge fungi and mushrooms growing out of the wall.
M: Completely non-edible.
Did you try?
M: We don’t go that far out, man! People in the building got really sick. In Williamsburg, people were getting all these cancers—sarcomas. Someone got cancer in my building, and the person who lived above me got nose infections from the toxic mold. And he got an autoimmune disease akin to lupus and had to take HIV medication. I was finally like, ‘Hey, man, the album’s done—let’s get on the road!’
When you came to L.A., were you like, ‘Ah, smell that fresh air?’
M: Exactly. Better that than aspergillus.
What are your favorite two songs to DJ together?
L: When we DJ out, Matt and I are pretty much switching every song. I usually bring hip-hop, Afrobeat, some gamelan music—so beat-heavy music and hip-hop and then Matt playing a lot of psych and reissues. So that idea of bringing together all of that and people who listen to all that music, and the people who listen to only that music exclusively.
Have you been to Low End Theory?
M: We’re really into Low End Theory. We were there just the other day to see Gaslamp Killer. He’s amazing. Crystal Antlers played a couple weeks ago. It’s really exciting when these communities come together. There shouldn’t be a separation between those scenes, and there’s not.
What is an information bomb and how do we live in it?
M: We decided before not to burden you with this kind of an interview.
Really?
M: ‘What if we just took it really conceptually and answered by putting every interview question into Google searches?’ Why even answer an interview about ourselves when you can type in a question and get so many voices and experiences? That’s more interesting than anything we could say.
What is interesting then?
M: What’s interesting is what would survive. Lyle comes from a hip-hop background—so it’s which samples survive—which ones are interesting and relevant. What’s interesting about an information bomb in general is the back catalog of information. A catchy little phrase or word combination in the future might be really interesting to people in a way it isn’t now. We played at Little Radio and the sound guy was talking about John Titor. It’s just kind of silly but an interesting idea. That a blog from the past could foretell the future. That’s kind of why I’m into all the reissues coming out now. I’ve really been digging on like Brazilian recordings that made it out when all the psych recordings had been destroyed by the government for being subversive. That Marconi Notaro record.
L: To me what’s interesting is what part is preserved and what ends up in a basement somewhere. From a sampling and beatmaking background—it’s the more obscure things that you as a producer can blow off and bring into the light.
Like the Skull Snaps.
L: Just bringing it back into circulation. Like in psych and folk with all the reissues coming out. It’s so confusing to me that appropriation is looked down upon in some circles. It’s so important to culture to bring things back out.
M: The act of appropriating in general is a political act because of all the things it brings up. Every phrase is like trademarked now—the Situationists had that line ‘revolutionize your everyday life’ and now that’s how products are being sold.
L: You just made me think of the book I’m reading now—by an author Matt’s been corresponding with. Sebastien Doubinsky. For his first draft of his new book Potemkin, he took the titles for his chapters from the songs on our record.
M: It’s interesting how the internet creates all these new worlds. When I was creating the album, I was just throwing new ideas on Rupert Murdoch Myspace and you’d get people writing me like ‘Check my work! Check my blog!’ He was like, ‘Read my writing!’ And it ended up his writing was really interesting. As I was recording, he was taking the song titles and writing along with it. But that’s my idea lyrically—by writing with disjunction or different voices, hopefully the person who is listening has more room for interpretation. ‘Commonplace Feathers’ has a line about ‘these matters shook up the community.’ The line is taken from a farming book. People are like, ‘Oh, September 11?’ It’s those things that the culture is putting in and interpreting. A lot of words and images from outside. But we’re creating them as much as any other author who is like, ‘I am the author! I’m speaking from the energy flowing through me!’ If you approach it more conceptually, you can kind of make a statement about the fact that most stuff is regurgitation. A catchy sample or a catchy meme—information that’s surviving and moving into the future.
L: In the book Sebastien wrote—the writing is very much sci-fi. The dystopia he creates in his book—the way people escape it is through this internet world that’s very commercial, where you create your character and go in their shops and buy their things, but this group of hackers has created another world in that world. I don’t wanna give it away but in the world within that world is the black market for culture. It’s where you go to buy all the records the government burned, all the books—to have a meaningful exchange with people.
M: We’ve been reading Virilio and he’s talking about scientific advancements—kind of how science is more destructive because we’ve created a way to completely destroy each other, and the advancements don’t outweigh the negatives. I was reading how in the ‘60s and ‘70s performance artists—a woman could take her top off and walk down the street and get arrested, and they’d say, ‘You’re a woman—you’re not allowed to walk around topless.’ And the woman would say, ‘Oh, I’m a man.’ That was really interesting politically and culturally then. Now with technology you can just get your ID scanned—‘No, you’re a woman!’—and get arrested. Today we have to find new forms. As a performative act, a hacker could hack in and change their gender from female to male, and then they’d walk free!
L: Just to be clear—I don’t endorse anyone hacking anything!
How does someone make music under the domination of the info bomb?
M: Making art that makes people think is really important.
Who has done that for you?
L: I was really into the first Eno and David Byrne record My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Just the idea to me with all the sampling—you put that record on and it brings up all kinds of things—what you think about, what you haven’t—but it doesn’t preach. And they’re often using samples for simply the way they sound. So anything that encourages anything but passivity.
M: When Lyle and I take samples, that’s kind of the first concern—how it’s working sonically. For our cover of ‘Fire In Cairo’ on the Cure tribute Manimal Vinyl is putting out, we had that sample from the Egyptian workers’ strikes. We were listening to the different commentators—it was less about the language and more about the tonality of the voices, and how it affects the listening experience.
L: I’m listening to Rainbow Arabia and the fact that they take from so many sources is interesting—Middle Eastern sounds, Asian, African—that’s synthesis!
M: Danny from Rainbow Arabia imports all his keyboards from Afghanistan and Iran. We were talking about covering the names on our gear because it’s like branding, and he was like, ‘I have to leave this one—it’s Casio in Arabic.’ There’s something in that—how many people are creating your sound? People are so anti-sample or appropriation, but every synth sound—every plug-in in Logic or whatever interface—how many artists and designers went into making those sounds that we’re using? So many other people were involved in creating our sound. It seems it could go even further. Sampling text—emotive bloggers to corporate propaganda—because there’s already so many creative people giving input into the sound.
L: It’s great that in underground music circles that the obscure is always prized. Instead of rehashing old shit, you’re bringing something new into the cycle.
M: You can’t get away from appropriating. Just from being in a certain environment—all you are is a rehash. You can’t create outside what you know.
Public Enemy sampled Wattstax for sort of the same reasons.
L: The Bomb Squad is a huge thing for me. That brings to mind something Matt said. It’s impossible to not be political—the way the Bomb Squad sampled, it was so claustrophobic—and if you’re not taking anything from that, it’s your fault. There’s so much there.
You have that United States of America sample on the album—what else is in there?
M: ‘Ground’ sampled the EPA and the New York Times. Brooklyn was a really loud place. I recorded in my apartment and there was so much noise. I recorded sirens on my street, ambulances going by, chattering on street corners—and the EPA talking at you.
L: At our live show, we look for all kinds of stuff that catches our attention in the sampler, and because we’re looping through the mic, it’ll pick up some of samples I hit. We have a sample of Hugo Chavez in front of the U.N. yelling that Bush is el diablo, and that will get caught and create some new word.
The Chavez Diablo Vortex?
M: We’ve also been sampling news about the Large Hadron Collider.
L: This amazing propaganda film. ‘CERN in three minutes! CERN is good! The Large Hadron Collider will probably not destroy the universe!’
M: There’s a rap video my friend Kari turned me on to—people rapping inside of CERN.
How’s the production?
L: Godawful.
What would be an appropriate way for someone to build on something you’ve made?
M: However they want.
L: That’s part of the fun. Do whatever they wanna do with it. In a really cool alternate reality world, I imagine in fifty or a hundred years when it’s all dusty in someone’s basement—some kid will find it and sample from it and bring it back to life somehow. There’s a scene in Scratch where DJ Shadow is down in the basement he’s been digging in for years, and he’s basically like, ‘When you’re down here, show respect.’

GANGI WITH WARPAINT, LOCAL NATIVES AND ALEXANDRA HOPE ON MON., MAY 25, AT SPACELAND, 1717 SILVERLAKE BLVD., SILVERLAKE. 8:30 PM / FREE / 21+. CLUBSPACELAND.COM. GANGI’S A RELEASES ON VINYL THIS MONTH ON WHITE NOISE. VISIT GANGI AT MYSPACE.COM/GANGIMUSIC.

Download: The Polyamorous Affair “Eastern”

(from Bolshevik Disco out this summer on Manimal Vinyl)

The Polyamorous Affair make bolshevik disco-pop in a mossy compound in Los Feliz and emerge only to teach kindergarten, play shows or get snowed on. They have an album due on Manimal and co-founder Eddie Chacon used to be in a band with Cliff Burton. This interview by Dan Collins.

It’s nice to interview people at 8:30 PM and not AM! Are you guys night owls? You’re probably jetlagged from your tour of England.
Eddie Chacon (production/vocals): We’re definitely jetlagged, man!
Sissy Sainte-Marie (vocals): And I think I caught swine flu today, too.
Did you eat some infected swine? Or get it from the air blowing around airports?
Sissy: I think I just got it from the 24-hour news.
There’s a rumor going round that you are married.
Eddie: It’s actually amazing being in a band with your wife because we just work on it 24/7. We don’t really have to go to a rehearsal space. Even though we try to take a break from it, it’s almost impossible. We always somehow wind up coming back to what we’re trying to achieve with the band.
Sissy: And we can always work in the studio. It’s right here at our fingertips, at any moment when we get inspired. We don’t have to wait for other band members show up or not show up.
When you guys play live, though, do you have people backing you?
Sissy: We have a DJ and a live visualist.
Eddie: De Ja Francois is the DJ and Mr. Cocoon is the visual artist.
You guys are very visual! I love the video for ‘Babayaga.’ It’s really witchy and disturbing. Sissy was doing such a creepy dance! Do you have a background in dance?
Sissy: No, not at all. This really great choreographer named Dola Baroni—she choreographed that for me. She was very patient. She was a very good teacher, because I have no rhythm—no coordination. And I had to do that dance in 33 degree weather, and I was wearing close to nothing in the middle of the night, and I had to replicate the dance three times perfectly to get the triplicate shot. And I think I had to do it about a hundred times.
Eddie: And then it started snowing! It was in the Angeles Crest Forest, and then it turned out to be the coldest day of winter. We totally got rained out, and it was a low-budget video, and that was like a really big deal.
Sissy: We had to schedule a second night, but it turned out great! All’s well that ends well.
Who wrote that song?
Eddie: Everything we do is 50/50. We work around the house and toss ideas around. Often things come together by osmosis. I’ll be in the studio, and Sissy will be in another room, and she’ll come in and throw something down. We’ll just get inspired by each other.
Sissy: I was inspired by the Grimm fairytale ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ In Russian, ‘babayaga’ means ‘witch.’ I liked the way that word sounded in that song. Lovers go on vacation, and they were living a life of decadence, and I think they both died. And the ghost of the little girl doesn’t know that she’s dead, and she thinks that she’s still alive and he’s dead.
The same thing happened to me! How did you guys decide to make this kind of music?
Eddie: The initial brainstorming happened when we were staying in Denmark a couple years ago with some friends of mine. At the time, we were really getting into John Lennon and Yoko Ono and reading about David and Angie Bowie, and we were getting into the mixed media idea—of how Yoko Ono brought this whole different artistic direction to John Lennon when they got together because she was already sort of a famous underground artist.
Sissy: We were inspired by this book called Still Lovers about people and their Real Dolls. We originally wanted to make a doll the artist. But they’re really expensive! When we first started performing live, and I was so nervous and stiff, so many people would tell me, ‘Aw, you’re just like a little doll on stage!’ I can be this icy robot puppet vampire love doll. Like a replicant from Blade Runner.
What was your career before you guys met?
Sissy: I was a school teacher, and I still am. I was teaching third grade, and now I just substitute—so it’s a different grade every day. Today I taught kinder.
There was a band in L.A. called Third Grade Teacher, where the singer really was a third grade teacher. So you’re not the only one.
Sissy: No, no! We all have our double lives, I guess.
I feel like in 1975 or something, or even ten years ago, somebody could have a career and be sort of a middle-class musician. Not everybody was rich, but some people could do okay. Now either you’re totally rich or you have a day job. Is this something new?
Eddie: I absolutely think this is something new, but there’s also something great that comes from it—that you don’t really need a big fat record company anymore to reach the public. You can put out your own material and distribute yourself.
Are you saying that Manimal Records isn’t a big fat record company?
Sissy: Ha ha—they’re well on their way!
Eddie, your career has been wildly eclectic. You started off in a metal band with Mike Borden from Faith No More and Cliff Burton, then you worked with 2 Live Crew, then had sort of a soul band in the early nineties with Charles & Eddie, then worked behind the scenes with acts like the Neville Brothers. And now you’re doing this. It kind of boggles the mind!
Sissy: His talents know no end.
Eddie: I just do music. It sounds kind of trivial, but I just have a passion for music and just continue doing it no matter what. I just kind of follow whatever I’m obsessed and into at the time.
What do you think Cliff Burton would say if he could see the Polyamorous Affair?
Eddie: We’re doing a sort of electronic disco thing, so he probably would want to beat me up.
Have you ever considered going back and sampling your own back catalogue since you have the rights to it?
Eddie: You know, I haven’t! Paul, the owner of Manimal, was asking me if I’d be interested in doing a version of ‘Would I Lie to You’ with Alexandra Hope. That was the first that I’d really thought of that. A few years ago, a friend of mine was making an indie film, and he wanted to use seven of my songs, but at that time I was a Universal Music Publishing songwriter. And I couldn’t even let my best friend use seven of my songs for his movie, and I thought that was very frustrating! In the olden days you were kind of a corporate entity, and you didn’t even really own yourself—and now you might be like more of a mom-and-pop business where you’re kind of a smaller entity, but at least you own the rights to yourself and everything you’re doing—which gives you a lot more freedom in the long run.
You have a song called ‘Whoever Controls the Groove Controls the World.’ Is the inverse true? Does the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale have a lot of groove?
Eddie: Ha ha—no, it’s about Clear Channel!
They have the groove when it comes to billboards.
Eddie: My God—we were just in England, and we were meeting with a PR company, and she was talking about Clear Channel owning everything over there, and I was like ‘My God, I had no idea it was a worldwide thing.’
Speaking of which, Eddie, I wanted to ask you about Scientology! You dabbled in it eight or nine years ago—do you have any deep dark secrets that could get L.A. RECORD in trouble?
Eddie: I didn’t get to the point where I found out about the space ship! I was actually studying with a legendary acting coach—Milton Katselas—who has since passed on. He taught a lot of really big movie stars, and there were a lot of Scientologists in that class—like Giovanni Ribisi and Jenna Elfman—and I just got to be friends with them. And I was like, ‘What the hell, I’ll take a couple of introductory courses and see what it’s about.’ But like with all religion, what you get for free is the essence of what it’s really all about.
Was there a part of you that was like ‘Isaac Hayes is in this religion!’?
Eddie: That was probably the coolest thing about taking my two little introductory courses! I was just coming down from the fourth floor of the little celebrity tower and the elevator door opened, and he was in the elevator, and I walked in and I got to have a little chat with him! He’s been my hero ever since I was a little boy. I went to see him at the Circle Star Theater as a child when he was Black Moses, wearing the full-on gold chain vest!
Don’t you guys have a song that’s all heroic quotes about stars and circles and space time?
Eddie: ‘Like Animal.’ The wormhole video.
Sissy: That’s just a dialogue for the video—that’s not in the song.
Eddie: We always make fun of each other that we’re a bit like Grey Gardens, because we live in a compound in Los Feliz hills, and we really just work in a bubble. We were kind of making fun of that when we made the ‘Like Animal’ video.
Sissy: Crazy hermits living in a state of decay!

L.A. RECORD AND MANIMAL VINYL PRESENT THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR WITH BLUE JUNGLE, ALL LEATHER, HALLOWEEN SWIM TEAM AND MAGICK DAGGERS ON THU., MAY 14, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $10 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR’S BOLSHEVIK DISCO RELEASES THIS SUMMER ON MANIMAL. VISIT THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR AT THEPOLYAMOROUSAFFAIR.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THEPOLYAMOROUSAFFAIR.

Download: Alexandra Hope “Invisible Sunday”

After plenty of airplay on French radio and recording with members of the Fiery Furnaces, Alexandra Hope will release her new album Invisible Sunday on Manimal early next month. This is the title track.