(from Mary’s Big Feet EP out now on NocturnalSol)

Migrating from the populated and frenetic, sweaty plains of her recent live performances, Ms. Jo Williams has descended into dank, wooded forests; the sun is fading. Here, there’s a walloping loneliness in her voice, as if there may not be anyone out there anymore, and even the crickets have gone quiet. This is rough; like haunted field recordings from a quiet apocalypse, her tiny guitar and warbling singing often the only instruments, save for reverb-soaked, ambient sounds. Despite the howls in the distance, she remains a mystic, skirting some line between aged contemplation and the weird, awesome rambling of young children when left to their own devices. And from that mixture comes something difficult and joyful. There is an expansive, a hopefulness, that constantly overwhelms whatever encroaching darkness is suggested. Near the end of ‘Homeheart,’ her nonsense chorus is suddenly visited by a quick shock of percussion. On “Blue Toy Airplane,” she’s joined by her young son who duets on lyrics about Trader Joe’s balloons, and it’s just too fucking cute, really. In other contexts, it could seem like a throwaway song, but coming late in the album as it does, it repurposes everything as a type of ghost-filled lullaby. If the woods go quiet, fill them with noise.

—Gerard Olson

Tommy Santee Klaws “In Formation”
(From Rakes out now on Imaginary Music)

This record is ruthless and filled with weather. Sometimes it’s rain-addled, green and gasping; sometimes there’s barren, scorpion-infested desert fire; sometimes you see constellations. The band (really, more a militia) seamlessly oscillates between each microclimate, never at risk for jetlag. The man himself, Tommy Santee Klaws, has a brutal, quavering wail. At one moment he’s threatening, a well-reasoned exponent of dread. The next, he’s the spokesperson for failed animals (an elk who did not win a mate, or a caterpillar with parasitic wasp larvae eating its guts). The rest of the band provides reinforcement, a lawful commotion of agreement, punctuating the peaks and valleys like patches of forest. The upright bass makes doom-laden growls. Beneath everything, recordings of crickets, frogs, chirping birds, rain, environmental noises that act as framing devices, overtly relocating your brain. There are moments that bloom and flourish—suddenly—and your fingers mash at the increase volume button to make it even bigger, to somehow get it loud enough that it becomes tangible: vines growing up your chair, coyotes howling, flies struggling inside pitcher plants, a campfire. This cannot just be sound. Despite its seriousness, there is something very devious here, something a little romantic too. Occasionally the music has a smirk; the awesomeness of feeling wretched. “Late Bloomer” has a mischievous nautical jauntiness. The drums in “Ooh Ooh Ooh” cascade like rocks thrown off a cliff. Like some of the other L.A. new-folky type acts, they understand the trick of making nostalgia work both ways: into some bright future as well as into virtuous, murky past. They’re skinning the old to dress the new.

—Gerard Olson

They are enveloping. Potentially they are in an echo chamber, or they are reenacting the scene in Ghostbusters where the EPA shuts off the containment grid and there are ghosts everywhere.  Tommy, with family, vacillates between delicate tenor pleas and a stabbing coyote yelp.  I have seen them perform five times in the last two months and, beyond all hyperbole, dammit they are good.  As fuck.  No joke.  And they are ripe for sea chanties, with their industrious, pained stomp.  Not to mislead: they are not about gnashing teeth and fretful weeping (though, it is not prohibited), but they are stronger and more playful.  Tommy’s wife, Donna, constantly plunking on miniature pianos or shouting into knock-off Fischer Price bullhorns (awesome, cheap robot voices), makes it all so fun, making Tommy occasionally smirk.  If you fret, here, it will be joyful.

There’s an analog here with what is happening in terms of the Los Angeles folk scene that’s got all the people interested.  We get gut-dripping sincerity with extraterrestrial weirdness.  The whole Lynchian unreality and amorphous real/not real stupid meta-whatever bullshit that is now beyond standard in L.A. commentary, is more than plentiful, but it doesn’t feel tired. The large fictional cavities that pock the city (the showmanship of fakeness: in Hollywood, it’s the last scene of The Hills, or Joaquin Phoenix, but in Echo Park, it’s Machine Project’s fabricated shipwreck or Beck’s claim that a submarine was found in the lake) are dispensaries, rather than the absence, of a churning mess of emotion.

—Gerard Olson

At 5 Star Bar, as part of Spirit Vine’s month long residency, Heisenflei and M were drenched in sweat and nightmare psychedelia video projection, sequestered beneath a balcony, primitive warriors emerging from a cave, in the midst of hallucinatory, plant-fueled cosmic understandings.  M hunched over his guitar as suburban housewives giving birth were projected over his shoulder into the darkness behind.  Heisenflei’s singing, when it becomes frenzied, seems increasingly atonal and chant-like.  When it all ends and they regain composure, the scariness dissipated, they somehow become adorable, like Gremlins if you watch it in reverse.

They were soon followed by the residents of the month, Spirit Vine, who were there to remind everyone that Jefferson Airplane is also a thing.  Somehow, suddenly, San Francisco ’68 (right before the hard drugs really fucked everyone’s shit up and before Altamont was all, like, bloody, man) was dripping from the ceiling.  Jacqueline Cingolani, all with acid-wracked moaning and uncontrollable stomping foot, converged on the surrounding crowd, pulling them towards her, perhaps in hopes that the epically tall and mulleted bassist would turn into some hallucinatory lizard grandfather monster and feed, while the guitars fuzzed flowers into the cosmic universe brain.

—Gerard Olson

Progressing from manic laughter to viscous black drool to glowing fabric monsters, the video for the Random Patterns hallucinatory calypso epic “Psychic Luau” is a nightmare adventure covered in rainbow puke.  Favorite part: the expression on the one dude’s face when he realizes that he now has the arms of an inflatable dancing balloon man.  Pure joy.  Everything oozes neon everywhere.  Director The Great Nordic Sword Fights have taken what is really a perfect summer song and given it the pointless amazing escapade that it deserves.

—Gerard Olson

Being Two Places At Once from Halloween Swim Team on Vimeo.

As a primer for their upcoming EP series, ANTENNAAA, keyboard gurus Halloween Swim Team play with old televisions and toy robots over a spaced-out drone.  Also, there seems to be some sort of wormhole?  And one of the robots dies at the end, which is very sad. “Being Two Places At Once” is soaked in doomy synth, brain melting buzzes and android whistles.  If Sergio Leone was always on peyote and had hired conscious supercomputers or cyborgs to score his movies, this would have been the resulting soundtrack.

—Gerard Olson

Roky looks slightly feral: dark, heavy eyes, mossy hair.  In a raspy yelp, he howls, “Stand…for the demon of FIRE!” his palm held out over the crowd, as if clutching a skull.  He has a minor skittish nature, often turning to Will Sheff from Okkervil River to get his bearings or communicate telepathic messages.

He’s credited for singing horror movie songs.  (In the bathroom, someone is trying to explain to the attendant who Roky Erickson is: “Camine con un zombi,” he says, the attendant laughing, repeating the word, “zombi.”)  The trick, though, is that he can imbue lyrics about vampires with a pentacostal, gospel-like passion, in the same way that Blind Willie Johnson growls about Jesus, or Merle Haggard sings about prison; because it’s a part of their internal landscape.  There are no parodic intentions.  “Two Headed Dog,” sounds just as genuine as “Goodbye Sweet Dreams,” a dusty plea for psychic calm.

His voice is now more of a werewolf bark, rough edged and cursed, but also rampant and excited.  He adopts a pseudo-caribbean accent when he says, “I walk wit de zombi,” as Okkervil River chugs along behind him, seeming to constantly wrangle him back into the song, pushing each song a little heavier, a little faster, more jangly, more unkempt, bending notes out into some swamp-ridden realm.  Despite the presence of the monstrous and somber lamentations for a lost past, Roky sounds and looks faintly triumphant, his weighted, beaten figure growing increasingly buoyant, floating.  Quieter moments of doubt and defeat would descend—a slow trumpet, meditations on failure—and would be dispelled soon after by crunching exuberance.

—Gerard Olson

Outside the Hyperion Tavern, we start talking about history, and whether the awareness of it influences the sort-of weird, bubbling joyfulness that comes from watching pre-war murder ballads being plucked on a banjo.  Does it feel good because there’s something inherently authentic in the music, or does it only seem authentic because it points us to a dust-filled, unrefined past?

There was plenty time to investigate over the weekend, as the 5th Los Angeles Old Time Social unfurled across the city, in strange little pockets of wild yelping and lonesome fiddle.  Started originally as a series of private parties over the weekends leading up to the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest, the Social soon morphed into a three day festival of traditional Americana, home-made beer and clogging.

This year, Olentangy John started things off, balancing on the Hyperion Tavern’s narrow ledge of a stage, a toothy grin frequently punctuating his unruly, but well-proportioned beard.  He played galloping traditionals, rocking and tapping his foot like a hobo.  The tavern’s shack-like construction and tight, flannel-to-flannel confines accented the haunted, backwoods vibe of Olentangy’s drifter’s twang.
Olentangy John by Daiana Feuer

Continuing the descent into Appalachia, Cat Tracks scaled the rickety stairs to the stage.  They were all rugged mountain features and far-off, knowing glances at one another—jaunting fiddle over simple, steady guitar, mandolins and banjo ukes thrown in at random, people hopping on stage and others leaving in a grinning little dance.
Cat Tracks by Daiana Feuer

As Mosby’s Raiders pulled out their strings and tore through a tumbledown, whiskey-driven version of “Gospel Plow,” someone behind me whispered that they were the fratboys of the night with their trucker hats and straw baseball caps, somehow.  They exhibited bright miniature smirks as they piled into Stanley Brothers standards, making sad songs weirdly buoyant.

The next day, the Social migrated to the Velaslavasy Panorama theater, with its womb-like arctic diorama hidden up a spiral staircase and a lush back garden populated with stone arches and round hobbit doors.  The supernatural weight was not lifted by Frank Fairfield—who seemed to always be sepia-toned, visiting from an ancient photograph.  Fiddling and yelping, his eyes appeared to sink back into his head.  He jumped between instruments, growing more and more trancelike as his leg beat along with the music.  During each instrument change, he seemed to age, his voice growing more  eerie, his body collapsing into itself, as if taking on the historical burden of the music, sneering and gritting his teeth in a pentecostal fury.

In between the next two sets, more home-made beer was consumed and jostling dancing began to occur on the sidelines.  Joe Wack and Friends, Old Time Social mainstays, specialized in obscure West Virginia fiddle numbers, interspersed with complex winding anecdotes about the songs’ origins.  Triple Chicken Foot pleaded with the audience to feed their sheep in a craggy howl, a damning, quirky gospel admonition.

Triple Chicken Foot by Daiana Feuer

This is part of the awesome diversity of Los Angeles experience. In the midst of all the civilization, you can find music that was created in its absence.  Songs written by men who lived seventeen years before coming across another soul, but kept alive by dedicated folk who are surrounded by other bodies at all times.  Because, despite the disconnect, it’s still prescient in a scary and freeing respect.  Because once all the plastic stuff is taken away, we’re back down at that base level, where you need to stomp your feet to get through the song.

—Gerard Olson

Stalking through the tundra, musk-ox battling around them, the White Stripes in Under Great White Northern Lights are sweaty, tearful, smiling specters.  They appear randomly on buses or bowling alleys or pool halls or boats, cloaked in the grain of 16mm film stock.  Flux’s Cinema Tuesdays gave our city a sneak peek at the film, a deep and curious document of the band’s snaking tour of Canada, alternating between on-stage guitar assassinations, sly conversations in cabins and cars, and offbeat explorations of the bleak landscape and its congenial citizens.  The recipe works, giving you many different threads to cling to, and implicitly contextualizing everything that happens in Jack and Meg’s ramshackle tumbling through the wilderness.

Small moments.  During one performance, Jack culls loud growling noises from his keyboard and shouts at Meg to play faster, as if he’s captaining a ship.  Later, in an interview, he insists that he never talks over Meg, talking over her in the process.  Back stage, he teases her for the quietness of her voice, reappropriating Randy Newman, “Quiet people got no reason to live.”  Another performance, an understanding of their mostly telepathic, onstage communication begins to arise, as Jack gives the knife-across-the-throat/kill-it gesture and she complies before he gets his hand back to his guitar.  Their relationship is cute and strange and antagonistic and gives the film a solid emotional ground that most concert documentaries don’t even attempt to achieve.  There are no big revelations here, but there are moments that help to illuminate the central drama of the White Stripes and feeds the massive, cephalapod narrative that encircles them.

Live entertainment

Writing about Jack and Meg is potentially dangerous.  It’s too easy to start throwing around joyless theories and obligatory catch-phrases.  The minute anyone starts questioning the brother/sister thing or attempts to ponder what level of contrivance is behind the whole persona, they lose the game: exposed as the ideological enemy, a blind fool who has failed to comprehend the deep wondrous complexity in truth and, ultimately, the universe.  This is all unspoken, of course.  And Jack and Meg seem to (or don’t, at all, maybe) encourage all the conjecture and analysis.  There seems to be delight in revealing the joylessness in modern conversation about celebrity.

Emmett Malloy

The film plays with all the tropes.  Emmett Malloy, the director, seems to have a supernatural understanding about what makes the band so intriguing and why they were the sole survivors of the bloody neo-garage wars of the early ’00s.  He films most performances in the obligatory red, white and black to complement all the sloppiness and frantic barbarism, of course.  But at the same time, the stage violence is interspersed with Jack softly waxing about the freedom that emerges from difficult and sweat-filled work.  Malloy understands that the White Stripes’ dirtiness and cacophony often obscures their unexpected politeness and tenderness, and the most intriguing moments arise when they are placed outside the bubble of stardom.  When they visit a community center of ancient Inuit elders to talk about ravens and sing Blind Willie McTell, Jack seems absolutely delighted when they teach him how to write his name in their language.  The elders then pull out a squeaky accordion and commence square-dancing, slightly confused about who these people are, but playing along nonetheless.

Live entertained

As the film and tour draws to a close, Jack is sitting at a piano and playing a mournful song.  Meg sits by his side, slowly drawing nearer until she’s almost touching his face, and tears begin to fall.  Her ache and sadness are enigmatic, but still painful.  What are the underlying emotions here?  And, are they real?  Does it matter?  It seems to feel too perfect to not be staged.  But, then, there’s that trap again.

—Gerard Olson

Random Patterns hit the same part of my brain as half-forgotten, possibly made-up songs from the musical interludes on Sesame Street.  They’re psychedelic, but in the friendliest, most helpful possible way.  I want them to be teaching me how to count to six, in Spanish, with a crazy pinball machine flashing rainbows all over the place, and a guest appearance by Little Richard.  And at Synchronicity Space, with its slightly shrunken stage and the gaggle of mustaches surrounding it, the band’s spastic dancing and smily glow takes on a felt-covered, googly-eyed bent.  Dan Melancon’s madly flailing arms and Michael Ilves jumpy spasms of fancy footwork look sped-up; remember how amazing/hilarious fast-motion footage is when you’re a kid?  It feels like that.  Even when the music gets slow, they seem to be running at sixteen frames a second.

I know alot of people have been tossing around the word “psychedelic” in descriptions of these dudes—I mean, I just did—but they don’t have any of the cloying spaciness.  They’re of a more dusty and adventurous stance.  At the end, Chris Frias’ guitar strap comes undone and he’s left smiling, singing and holding his guitar like a rubber chicken.  If this was an acid trip, it’d be one with convulsing laughter, climbing trees and rolling on blankets, thinking you’re a dog.

Dressed in a fruit patterned shirt and pulling people in close, Speculator opened the show, fooling with knobs and buttons and electronic stuff, and making messy, excited topographies and shouting echoes into the microphone.  Alpine Decline followed, turning off the lights and guiding everyone with a blue strand or beacon, snaking around the drums, as hands make shadows around it, jumping from snare drum to synth to high hat.  They punched out miniature, epic anthems.  The single thread of blue in the dark – it was like the dark part of the ocean, with flashing hungry things everywhere and constant pressure being applied to everything.  Submarines are cool.

—Gerard Olson