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MUSIC THE THRILL KILL KULT : Bizarre Band : They say they’re into drug use, sexual perversion, Satanism and mass murder, and they’ll play Tuesday in Isla Vista.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Mass murderers in hell may be playing My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult on their Walkmans while they’re dreaming of ice cream and a cool breeze. If it sounds far-fetched, it isn’t a whole lot stranger than the stuff in the band’s bio package.

The photo should make it abundantly clear that this is another very strange band with a funny name. Based in Chicago, they have absolutely nothing in common with some of their more famous Windy City musical contemporaries. They don’t cover any Cheap Trick, Shoes, Styx or Material Issue songs, and they leave all of those old blues guys alone too.

Even their bio sheet, which weighs more than a ton of good excuses, is sort of misleading. For example, it states, in part, that the band openly supports drug use, sexual perversion, Satanism and mass murder and other stuff that wouldn’t look too good on a resume. And they can’t even spell “cult.”

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“Yeah, everything’s true,” said Groovie Mann, the bandleader, in a recent phone interview. “We’re in Pensacola, Fla., right now, but it’s too hot for me to wear my leather pants.”

Now if Mann had a comma in his name, one might think this is hippie, trippy Deadhead music. But Thrill Kill Kult music is as much like the Grateful Dead as the Dead are like Barry Manilow.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult will be stopping over at the Anaconda Theatre in Isla Vista next Tuesday. And because the venue is perhaps just the right size for a cult meeting, but too small for an asylum, it’ll probably go on as scheduled.

“There’s nine of us, or 12 total with our crew. We have some dancing girls called the Bomb Gang Girls,” said Mann. “And it’ll be safe--little Buffy Coed has nothing to worry about if she comes to the show.”

While not exactly a Cecil B. DeMille production, nine or 12 seems a lot for a band. But then this is one band that sometimes calls itself a project. For the Thrill Kill Kult, there are but three main maniacs: Mann, Buck Ryder and Buzz McCoy.

“Buzz and I were neighbors.” said Mann. “We’d known each other for years before that. Anyway, we made a tape and took it to Wax Trax Records in Chicago, who have allowed us total freedom. And here we are. We played our first gig in October, 1989.

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“Originally, we were more of a film-type thing. But for now, we’re a band, but we don’t draw a line between project and band. Actually, we’re more of a happening, or maybe, we’re the cabaret show from hell. We play tabloid disco dance music. That’s where we got our name--from a tabloid headline.”

Thrill Kill Kult music is pretty industrial, which is a polite way of saying it’s dissonant and loud--this could be the soundtrack for the Inquisition.

“I guess industrial music is what Throbbing Gristle used to be,” said Mann. “I guess we’re industrial-inspired, but we’re never totally industrial. We’re more of a dance band in a weird salad.”

There are also plenty of religious references. Tunes on the new one (“Confessions of a Knife”) include “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan.” The chorus of “The Days of Swine and Roses” includes references to “Christian zombie vampires.”

Christian zombie vampires are those people who try to pin flowers on you at airports and generally bother you, or else ring your doorbell at the wrong time, Mann said.

As strange as this gig is going to be, it could’ve been a lot stranger.

How strange?

“We tried really hard to get the Village People to open this tour for us,” said Mann. “I called their booking agent and everything. Really. But they were too expensive for us. I was hoping for at least a couple of gigs. It would’ve been perfect. Or maybe Eartha Kitt.

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“Actually, anything is OK, except when he have an opening rock band. Immediately, the lights get all screwed up, things get unplugged. Our show is very complicated--all our lights our sequenced--and those people tend to be really simple.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Tuesday, 8 p.m. at the Anaconda Theatre, 935 Embarcadero del Norte, Isla Vista, 685-3112. $17.

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