For Sukia, the Sound of Success Is Still an Oddity

In Sukia’s universe, thrift-store synthesizers do the cha-cha with a hypnotism record and a home entertainment organ someone’s grandma might have played. With a crazy-quilt approach to old synthesizers and samples, the Camarillo-based band has concocted a sonic cocktail of a debut album--part lounge and part disco, part hip-hop and part “Lost in Space.”

This unusual yet infectious approach has made the off-the-wall outfit one of Southern California’s most happening underground bands.

Sukia’s album, “Contacto Espacial Con El Tercer Sexo” (Space Contact With the Third Sex) was released in October on NickelBag Records, a label owned by red-hot production duo the Dust Brothers (Beck, Beastie Boys) and nightclub owner Mitchell Frank. The group’s songs have been hailed as “delicious oddities” by the street-music ‘zine Urb, and praised as “time capsules from a culture of kitsch” by the alternative-music magazine Option. Even Rolling Stone has taken notice, featuring Sukia as an “On the Edge” band to watch.

For most bands, that would mean that everything was chugging along according to the big plan, but to Sukia’s founder Ross Harris, the whole thing is a fluke.

In 1994, the photographer and video director discovered a Colombian comic book called “Sukia” at a burrito shack newsstand. He was so smitten by the exploits of the title character, a lesbian vampire, that he tried to create a soundtrack for it on his newly purchased thrift-store organ.

“It’s sinister, but it’s also this carefree adventure that just happens to be really violent and really sexual,” says Harris, 27, who was soon joined in Sukia obsession by his longtime friends Sasha Fuentes and Craig Borrell.

“The instruments we had--Moog synthesizer, home organ and trombone--translated that feeling easily,” Harris says. “We treated the samples like a vocal, like our singer is this bad hypnotist album. I guess there is no limit to how lame something can be to appeal to us. People’s failed but earnest attempt at being cool always sounds great to me.”

The band created basement tapes to entertain friends, including Harris’ old buddy Beck. They ended up with a high-flying electronic landscape of oddball spoken samples, jarring bleeps and buzzes, Space Age moos, jazzy trumpets, classical French horn and disco beats.

Before Sukia, Harris’ taste for the eclectic was satisfied by his thrift store, Folk You, where he hawked found objects and original art. There he met Eddie Lopez-Peralta, a didgeridoo-playing artist from Guatemala who pops up on Beck’s “Where It’s At” video. Along with 23-year-old Grace Marks, Lopez-Peralta, 40, has recently joined the Sukia fold.

NickelBag’s Frank jumped at the chance to have Sukia as his label’s first release. “I thought it was the newest, most unusual and totally absurd thing I’d heard in a long time,” says Frank, whose Spaceland club is the center of the thriving Silver Lake rock scene. “But when we signed them, we didn’t think we would sell a lot of records. We didn’t care, either.”

Frank estimates that “Contacto” has sold 1,500 copies. Currently, the band is at work on a follow-up and plans to play a few local shows in February. And it’s spending a lot of time doing photo shoots and interviews. “The whole press thing has been a shock,” Frank says.

But Harris became used to the limelight long ago when he was a child actor, appearing in such films as “Airplane!” (he’s the boy in the cockpit scene with Peter Graves and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and such ‘70s TV series as “CHiPs” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

“It kind of primed me for Sukia,” Harris says with a smirk. “Hanging out with Michael Landon and running through the back hills of Simi just kind of inspires electronic music.”