IO is one of those performers. She has a great backup band and as a front person, you can’t take your eyes off of her. She was climbing the lighting grids, exploiting the electric fans to launch her parachute blouse, jumping around and collapsing on the stage and interacting a lot with the audience. They also had plenty of fog and great lights which made for a really cool visual experience.

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When Tim “Terrorbird” said there’d be new Rainbow Arabia songs and new Hecuba haircuts at this show, I blushed, “Hecuba Haircuts?!!” —Wow, a lot of them hairs was snipped. No bodysuit (Jerry) or wife beater (Tom) on these bods tonight. Instead, closed collar black long-sleeve shirts and matching sweatshop slippers, a lack of facial hair not framing some wide-open blue orbs—the prison camp high fashion twins thing going on can only be a metaphor for the great suffering of love for art. Or art for love. Or sacrifice inverting beauty and dang. No-eyebrow minimalism, I must agree.

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Download: Rainbow Arabia “Haunted Hall” [Audio clip: view full post to listen] (from Kabukimono out now on Manimal) Download: Hecuba “Miles Away” [Audio clip: view full post to listen] (from Paradise out now on Manimal Vinyl and available from L.A RECORD) Thanks to good ol’ Lazy Brow, L.A. RECORD has ONE PAIR of tickets to [...]

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When Mwamwaya took the stage, it was almost as if the universe itself showed up simply to sing to us and smile back. Mwamwaya was accompanied by two female counterparts, one dancer and a back up singer supplying the show with enough vivaciousness to keep that shit popin’. The whole thing felt like an old school block party, just in time for summer—with dancing in the streets.

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On the follow-up release to last year’s The Basta EP, Rainbow Arabia goes way beyond—themselves, their influences, the music they’ve put to record so far. The band obviously respects the experimental, but their balance of post-punk with world music styles sets them apart from the rest of the Manimal roster and at its best elevates the duo above other L.A. bands doing something self-consciously “different.” Here it’s an exercise in escapism—a band seeking adventure in exotic landscapes. Danny and Tiffany Preston blend club beats and dance rhythms gleaned from America to Africa, sliding continents under each other like a gambler shuffling cards.

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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 together in three minutes. They speak here when issues of toxic mold were much more on their minds. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

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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.

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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.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIYHILNRoLo]

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