We Are The World’s Robbie & Megan breach hyperreal territory with their new project DREAMERS. It’s both menacing and nurturing. For Hecuba’s new album MODERN, Jon and Isabelle went into isolation, shaved their eyebrows, and removed their identities to see what was underneath. Now they’ve joined forces to create a label that goes to infinity and jumps right off the edge.

[Read more →]

The girl in 1980s leotard with sunglasses, on a pedestal, posing under her own handheld fluorescent light, while Anna Oxygen and Oliwa jumped on the couches in post-aerobic electro triumph, was definitely one of the dancers in the musical New. last Spring. All the pieces in one way or another referenced buildings, structures, and being where we were: The Standard Downtown, a place for abstract behavior by the city’s fashionably experimental.

[Read more →]

I caught up with some L.A. RECORD peeps at the Echo’s No Culture show last week, but not before catching up with Lucky Dragons, owners of one of my few whole-souled enthusiasms on the current SoCal scene. The rara avis duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sara Rara don’t so much give performances of their Minkowski Space postrock as collaborate with the audience and they did so tonight, passing out various tone-making apparatus to rapt ones sitting semicircle on the concrete floor. They view the craft of song the same way long-gone late-‘70s postpunk experimentalists the Swell Maps did—as a mere conventional pretext for astonishing ventures into the arrangement of pure skronk.

[Read more →]

Have you heard much post-minimalism by Philip Glass? It’s all separation and dissection, one moment in time isolated and distributed across space. A premise gets broken into its simplest parts. (Check out David Ives’ play, Philip Glass Buys A Loaf Of Bread.) An occurrence becomes a sentence then dissolves into syllables, and inherently breaks further still, until we arrive at the absolute of precision: beats. Glass would love Hecuba’s debut album Paradise. He’d want to slice it into a million pieces and decorate a tree with it.

[Read more →]