California Sounds: Sex Stains thrill, Tom Brosseau reminisces and Suzanne Ciani & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith honor Don Buchla
As many music communities exist in the city as there are stages and platforms. Whether physical clubs or digital hubs, cosmopolitan California occupies a lot of aural real estate, with neighborhoods both physical and virtual bumping on dozens of frequencies.
Below, a few newly posted highlights, all of which are available at the major streaming sites (and as Bandcamp downloads).
Sex Stains, “Period. Period.” (Don Giovanni). Starting with the seminal punk band Bratmobile in the ’90s and leading up to today, musician and writer Allison Wolfe has already dented culture a few times. Nearly a decade and a half after Bratmobile stopped making music, Wolfe is still causing ripples wherever she decides to explore.
She relocated to Los Angeles from the Northwest a few years ago, and in recent months, her new band Sex Stains has been sending notice to the city. Given the oversize personalities at play, it’s hardly Wolfe’s band, though, which is apparent throughout the group’s self-titled first album.
Its lead vocalist, Mecca Vazie Andrews, is best known for her work as a dancer and choreographer. Other members have gigged with bands including L.A. post-punk group Warpaint, Atlanta experimental soul artist Cody Chesnutt and East L.A. punk rocker Alice Bag.
For their first video, Sex Stains opted against cleverness, ignored narrative and skipped green-screen tricks in favor of exuberance. Shot in the endangered downtown punk club the Smell, it features the quintet bouncing, flopping, vogueing, puking and playing to the camera as the remarkable new song “Period. Period.” moves in unison.
At under two minutes, the song’s a burst of guitar-based joy that jerks like a jalopy but manages to shift gears and rhythms with the smoothness of a high-end sedan. Sex Stains is playing a few times in coming weeks. On Tuesday, they’ll open for British band the Mekons at the American Legion Post 206 in Highland Park, and on Oct. 23, they have a gig at the Echo in Echo Park.
Tom Brosseau, “North Dakota Impressions” (Crossbill). The Los Angeles-based North Dakotan makes a timeless, honest brand of folk music that he regularly performs at the West Hollywood theater and club Largo.
Both alone and as part of a casual trio with actor-musician John C. Reilly and singer-songwriter Becky Stark, he plays songs that are smart and a touch curious.
His new album is the most recent in a series recorded with Nickel Creek member (and fellow Largo community member) Sean Watkins. Like the others, “North Dakota Impressions” focuses on Brosseau’s storytelling, which is fearlessly earnest, and does so with delicate, inventive instrumentation and arranging.
Blessed with a distinctive, high-lonesome voice and a fluid, oft-dramatic way of phrasing his lines, Brosseau at his best, as on “You Can’t Stop,” resides in a beatific, folk-inspired terrain that’s immediately identifiable. “The Horses Will Not Ride, the Gospel Will Not Be Spoken” recollects a church fire and its remains. “A graveyard lies along the side/ Where we lay our loved ones/ They had no choice and sadly watched/ And rolled around in their coffins.”
Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, “FRKWYS Vol. 13: Sunergy” (RVNG International). The death earlier this month of influential synthesizer innovator and all-around brilliant guy Don Buchla shed a spotlight, if only briefly, on the deep, rich tones of his greatest invention, the Buchla synthesizer.
The tones generated by Buchla’s instruments played a part in drawing together two generations of experimental electronic composers, Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, both of whom are experts at building impressive works using the tool he created.
Ciani is a Grammy-nominated Northern California musician best known for her influential work starting in the 1980s, most of which could be found in the New Age section of your local record store. Ciani and Buchla were simultaneously based in the San Francisco area. When he was building his instruments, she was forging unbeaten compositional paths, and she often worked as his sounding board. Smith is a rising L.A. based electronic artist whose drifting, oft-breathtaking Buchla-based tracks reveal untold circuitous secrets, the evidence being Smith’s recent solo album “Ears.”
Their new two-track collaboration, part of an impressive series of abstract recordings issued by New York label RVNG, pulses with electric energy and is a fitting, if unplanned, tribute to Buchla’s work.
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