Santa Fe's music scene is getting bigger-and weirder. Sounds good.
It was an otherwise quiet February night. But inside The Paramount Nightclub, hundreds of adolescents-and a handful of errant adults-packed the front room waiting for the Japanese electro-pop-punk band The Polysics to take the stage. But first they screamed their applause to local wonderboys The Big Boo-whose alt.pop sound was homegrown under the tents of the Warehouse 21 music scene.
A few weeks later, similar enthusiasm brimmed over in a warehouse down off Rufina Street, where the description-defying sound of BING made for an alt.alt St. Patrick's Day musical feast.
These are just a few examples of the alt.music scene that has been brewing in Santa Fe for the last few years and now come to fruition. It's the alt.country scene shepherded by bands like Hundred Year Flood and Goshen, the alt.alt High Mayhem attitude filtering out into other venues, the Warehouse 21 scene alt.pop/alt.punk explosion infiltrating the way-over-21 crowd.
In this issue, we offer a snapshot of a few of the bands who have pioneered the alt.sound of Santa Fe's growing music scene, as well as a roundup of other innovative musicians whose iconoclastic ways make them worth hearing every time you get the chance.
Alt. Country
Say you want a revolution? Santa Fe's Alt. Country scene just might provide it.
By
Bill Palmer, guitarist and vocalist for Santa Fe's Hundred Year Flood, says the years 1967 to 1972 are a source of continual inspiration for him, an era that produced classic albums like
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and
Are You Experienced
and one that has yet to be topped. "We're still living in that post-'72 era," he says, "and it's a clean slate. We're
due
for a musical revolution."
Though perhaps not a full-fledged revolution, there has been an insurgency in recent years among musicians raised on rock 'n' roll but inspired by the twang of country. Building upon the country rock sound pioneered by bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers, the genre has come to be known by different names-insurgent country, twang core and cowpunk among them-but is most often referred to as alt.country. Though there's no
definitive
starting point for alt.country, hipsters and historians generally point to Uncle Tupelo's 1990 album
No Depression
(named after the Carter Family song "No Depression in Heaven") as the genre's big bang.
Hundred Year Flood's own big bang came when Palmer and his band mates-wife Felecia Ford (vocals, keyboards), brother Jim (drums) and sister-in-law Kendra Lauman (bass)-moved from Austin, Texas, the self-proclaimed live music capital of the world to Santa Fe after getting hooked, Palmer says, by the "fresh" sound of the first Goshen album, a band he would later work with both as musician and producer.
The move invigorated the band. "The Santa Fe audience is open to you being what you are," Palmer says. "[That] solidified our ties as a band, our roles and our goals." The move also turned out to be the beginning of a new direction for Santa Fe music.
Goshen's Grant Hayunga says Santa Fe's alt.country scene, which also includes Joe West and Hundred Year Flood, among others, is a recent development. "You couldn't see three bands from Santa Fe doing [alt.country] five years ago," he says. Folk, Hayunga says, was the sound of the day. "And coming from Kentucky, that meant something to me."
With the addition of Hundred Year Flood, Santa Fe's alt.country scene was born and exploded with like-minded artists, local hipsters and celebrities flocking to the VFW for weekly shows that not only gave Santa Feans something to look forward to but also created camaraderie between bands. Though the VFW scene soon fizzled, that camaraderie exists to this day in the form of Frogville Records, a label started in 2002 by artist John Treadwell and singer-songwriter Nathan Moore. "We were all friends and fans of each other's music before Frogville," Palmer says. As a result, musicians from one band often perform with another. "I think my brother plays [drums] on every record made in Santa Fe," Palmer says. This musical inbreeding is common to music scenes everywhere, he says, not just in the Frogville family. Hayunga sees the cross-pollination as "artistic necessity," a way of helping out not just fellow musicians, but friends. "Frogville consolidated [the scene]," Hayunga says. "All these people from Kentucky and Virginia and Texas all came together under the Frogville umbrella."
Untainted by the politics of cool that bigger scenes are saddled with, Santa Fe music continues to grow due to the dedication of its musicians and the support of its fans. There's a sense of sophistication here, Palmer says, that doesn't require a band to fit into a specific genre. Here, unlike other scenes, there's room for everyone. "In Austin there's a distinct sound-blues/folk/country-and most bands are compelled by that legacy." There is no "Santa Fe sound," he says, leaving musicians freer to experiment and change their act, a luxury the band has taken advantage of.
Growing up in east Texas, listening to country radio and the state's greatest export, Willie Nelson, Palmer says, gave the budding musician in him a solid grounding in country, but more and more his songwriting has started to reflect other influences. "I'm turned on to psychedelic sounds," he says, citing influences like Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and Gram Parsons. British New Wave bands like The Cure and The Smiths also played a pivotal role in his musical education resulting in the band's constantly evolving sound. In fact, HYF covered The Smiths' "Reel Around the Fountain" on their last album,
Cavalier
. Though the band has moved more in a rock direction of late, adding additional crunch to their country roots, Palmer says the band is always open to explore their many influences. "I'm not afraid to be the hick from east Texas onstage who sings roots music with a fake British accent," he laughs.
Such an ability-or desire-to cross genres is an earmark of the current state of alt.country. The band Wilco (who will perform at Albuquerque's Kiva Auditorium on April 26) an offshoot of Uncle Tupelo, recently found itself lauded by critics for its forays into experimental pop on the albums
A Ghost Is Born
and
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
. The Santa Fe alt.country scene has seen a similar evolution, as folks like Joe West expands his rootsy repertoire with electronic experiments, and ubiquitous guitarist Ben Wright makes a second name for himself, playing in post-modern dance/rock outfits like D Numbers and BING.
Hundred Year Flood has just finished a trip back to Austin, performing during the South By Southwest Festival, and are planning on "putting out the feelers" for shows when they return to home. Because the scene is so small, he says, it's easy for a band to wear out its audience playing the same set over and over, but HYF are always writing new songs, tweaking their old ones and looking to give something back to the scene that's supported them. "The fans in Santa Fe continue to inspire us," Palmer says, "and we want to continue to inspire them."
Alt. Pop
BOO! There it is. Hip–hop+New Order+skinny boys=da bomb.
By
It is a tradition that goes back a long way: A bratty, white-boy co-option of genres (especially hip-hop), confounding in its cleverness, appealing in its self-deprecating way and (perhaps most important), backed by silly but imminently danceable beats.
The early day Beastie Boys are perhaps the best example.
Granted, there are problems with co-option, racial, political, social. And snotty, self-referential rap and semi-rap can be tedious. But not if it's done right. Not if it's done with humor and brains. Not if, instead of co-option, the borrowing of different styles gets twisted inside a certain warped brain, swilled around like Listerine, 'til the molecules of each song and lyric take on a life of their own and become something else, something new and different. And especially not if you can dance to it. Not, in other words, if it comes from The Big Boo.
The Big Boo: Santa Fe's teenage synth-pop-rap-drumbeat wunderkinds, born of the kind of open scene only Warehouse 21 could muster in this dusty town. Specifically, The Big Boo are lead duo Noah DeVore and Michael Rae (both 18 years old) and electronic beatmiesters Zac Sheinbaum (17-year-old son of Santa Fe photographer David Sheinbaum) and Adam Koroghlian (also 17). The four got together as an evolution of the W21 melody-punksters Rok on Robot. "We had real instruments when we did that," says Rae, "except we didn't know how to play 'em at all." So he and DeVore ditched the guitars, teamed up with Sheinbaum and "made up the band" as Rae puts it, expressly to open for the bizarro Japanese electro-punk group The Polysics at W21 about a year and a half ago. The rest is a goofy history that's taken on a life of its own. As they've grown, the foursome has produced what may be the most original, infectious take on synth-pop that the Southwest has ever produced, a sound their manager, Javi Aguilar, calls "outsider electronica."
Aguilar, no stranger to the music biz (he's been a high-level DJ for 25 years, and his recent gigs include DJing at Marianne Faithful's birthday party) sees something special in these kids. "Tim Jag invited me to come DJ at a place called Twister's and when I walked in, I saw them and I thought 'Am I in the East Village?'" Aguilar says. "They were
so
overstyled. And then when I heard them, my jaw just dropped. Everybody was just watching how clever they were, and how ambiguous they were."
And it is a certain aesthetic sophistication that gives the Boo their edge, one that belies (or perhaps epitomizes) their age: They seem comfortable, for instance, playing around with ambiguous sexuality, flirting from the stage with the boys and the girls. Even more ambiguous, their sound culls from a variety of influences you wouldn't expect from anyone their age-ELO (seriously), industrial heavy metal and, believe it or not, folksters like Harry Nilsson. Despite their reliance on electronica, the Boo clearly care about melody; their work is as infectious and melody-driven as any Cat Stevens song. In that, maybe Nilsson is the most important influence of all.
The Big Boo belie their age in a second way: They have, at such a tender age, already perfected the stupid/smart, simple/complicated musical and lyrical aesthetic that many bands strive for years to achieve. And it comes to them naturally. Their songs are catchy, sexy, loving homages to high school parties, to the lives of the well-off kids who spend their days hunched over computers blogging on
and writing goofy drum beats and then sneaking out the window at night to go kiss girls. These are all subjects which could be sophomoric and smarmy and boring-who cares what the rich kids do?-but the Boo have a certain sweetness and intelligence that translates into a cohesive artistic whole. It's the same appeal of an early John Hughes movie: We shouldn't care about the minor "troubles" of privileged, good-looking Molly Ringwald in
16 Candles
, but we did when the film came out and we still do. Why? Because the dialogue is witty. Because Hughes' portrayal is well-intentioned. And because the soundtrack is great.
Which brings up Big Boo's place as an epitome of the musicians of their generation: They sound like bands they've never even heard of. Nowadays, computer blips and beeps, fat 808 bass bombs and synthesized drumming-all sounds laboriously crafted in the '80s with hours of work and brand new, Atari-like technology-can be created and replicated with relative ease, using fairly cheap technology and software. The result: a whole new generation of bands realizing it's fun to whip up some cheesy synth riffs and rock us, Amedeus. The Big Boo is no exception; without even knowing it, they've stitched together a snarky pastiche of The Judys, a smidge of Book of Love, even a bit of Kraftwerk, and
License to Ill
-era Beastie Boys.
No wonder, then, the boys have grown more popular among their elders (like Aguilar and Jag) than among their peer group. "There are definitely a lot of kids out there who say 'oh they don't have drums and guitar, I can't really dig that,'" DeVore says. Rae agrees that their generational appeal might be skewed: "For some reason older audiences respond a lot better than young audiences. I think it's because young audiences just haven't been exposed to that much music and don't really have a context in which to view it." In the end, then, The Big Boo might find themselves more popular outside of Santa Fe. In the past year, they've traveled to LA twice, first playing with hey willpower (an underground electronica/rap offshoot of fabled indie band Imperial Teen) and at the bar mitzvah for the son of Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz (where DeVore particularly enjoyed the "giant cake shaped like a 12-sided die"). On their second trip, the foursome rocked out at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, where they were approached by a representative from Capitol Records demanding a demo disc immediately.
The band seems relatively nonplussed about the attention. "We were more impressed that the guy who played Pedro from
Napoleon Dynamite
was in the front row," Rae says. "But it was really hip because around [Santa Fe] a lot of people know us from other places, so a lot of people are like 'well this is nice, but it's just Mike and Noah being strange' whereas out of that context it's weird enough for people to see us do it and think it's really hip."
Ah, yes, the age-old story of punky teen music: It's so hip, hometown folks don't even know what they're missing. So welcome to the new era of punkdom, where blips and beeps and computer programs take the place of distorted guitars, and vague sexual banter takes the place of testosterone.
Alt. Alt
It's a BING thing. There's nothing like a little bit of everything.
By
Entering the door that leads from Santa Fe to the living room of Chris Jonas and Molly Sturges is little bit like falling through the looking glass. The first thing in sight is a bright, oversized, stuffed pony resting on a brick floor. Then there is the giggling, speeding blur which the two musicians implausibly suggest is their daughter Quinn. The creaking of the door hinge blends straight into the wheeze of an accordion surging gently from Sturges' chest and Jonas offers a wide, Cheshire grin encased in rubbery, saxophone player's lips. The air is thick with a kind of maddening sizzle of creative productivity, but hey, that's the world of BING.
BING is a band, an ensemble of musicians first established by Jonas and Sturges in 2002. The BING band members not only represent an impressive sampling of Santa Fe's alt.musical history, coming from projects as diverse as Mary & Mars, Aunt Claire, Brassum, The Gluey Brothers and the African Space Project, but maintain side gigs that keep them in contact with an improvisational scene of other hard-to-pin-down acts, like legendary horn player, electronic percussion composer and quirky instrument builder JA Deane, or High Mayhem and Outpost Performance Space regulars, The Uninvited Guests.
BING's commitment to jazz style improv and progressive composition also puts them in the company of major musical theorists who've made a home in Santa Fe including Barbara Monk Feldman, Morton Subotnik and Joan LaBarbara, as well as local genre-blenders and concept tweakers as disparate as Ether, Ray Charles Ives and Invisible Plane.
But just what kind of a band BING is and what sort of music it plays is difficult for the outsider to judge. No one knows how to label BING.
"We've heard everything," says Jonas, "people always try to understand it by what they're familiar with." Gigging for BING then, can be tough-promoters want to go with known quantities. "It's not jazz enough or rock enough or it's too experimental or not experimental enough," says Jonas, recounting.
The first time I heard BING was at Circus Luminous in 2003 at The Lensic. Wise Fool and Moving People Dance Theater put on a dazzling show of acrobatics, tricks and antics, but what has stayed with me to this day is the haunting, original score performed live alongside the circus. It was something of an orchestrated collision between a Serbian wedding, a French Quarter dirge for the death of pop culture and an all-American torch ballad swollen with loss and possibility.
"Doing scores for the circus (BING did Circus Luminous again in 2004) has greatly guided the direction of BING," says Sturges. But even though some of the sadness-tinged celebration of Eastern European carnie music may have remained with the band into its current incarnation, it doesn't explain the totality of BING, and Sturges claims a profound influence from all sorts of music.
"Do we have to fit them into some category?" asks Max Friedenberg, director of High Mayhem, Santa Fe's locus for independent, experimental and improvisational music. "Let's not do that. I mean, they're Baltic, they're Klezmer-the point is all of the musicians in BING can play whatever they want, and they do, this is just one possible manifestation of that kind of versatile ensemble."
Because Jonas and Sturges both compose, their breadth of inspiration is understandable. They have a pure thirst for the structure (and sometimes unstructure) of sound. BING works in Santa Fe because the city is full of like minds. Currently, the inner world of BING is expansive and accomplished, being comprised of Jonas on saxophone, Sturges on accordion and providing vocals, Nina Hart on bass, Mark Weaver on tuba and trombone, Ben Wright on guitar and Peter Breslin on drums, but the outer world has found an even larger community.
"There is a feeling of generosity in the music community here in Santa Fe, there's a deep love of music-making itself," says Sturges. "It's an environment where people are sitting in on each other's shows." Friedenberg credits BING with perpetuating that environment.
"They've helped form the current landscape, which is one that has evolved rapidly and I'm not talking about erosion-it's more like plate tectonics, elements crashing together and forming something entirely new," he says.
BING's willingness to experiment has landed it a variety of off-beat gigs. Last week at the Taos Picture Show BING performed a live, original score to Buster Keaton's silent classic
Steamboat Bill, Jr
., as it has done before. The band also performed a similar trick to accompany
The Man Who Laughs
during the 2004 SITE Santa Fe biennial art exhibition. One of the reasons BING members find performing such long pieces rewarding is a compositional doctrine of leaving space for spontaneity in every piece.
"We never play exactly the same thing twice, even in our regular sets, there's room to improvise so we're making choices that come right out of the music," Jonas says. Witnessing such a continuous level of collaboration within the band is one way to understand what's unique about Santa Fe's music scene right now.
"People coming through from New York and Chicago and San Francisco are amazed at the level of collaboration between musicians in this town," says Friedenberg.
Such back and forth keeps BING an exciting project for its band members. At the same time, says Sturges, listeners aren't left out in the cold; fans are able to follow the music and lyrics. "There's a lot in our music that people can count on."
So far, audiences are enthusiastic, but there are still challenges. During a recent show at the underground venue Open Source, Jonas says the band was so into their set that they personally were dancing like crazy. "But the crowd didn't get into it with their bodies. Later, people said they were just so involved in listening to the music." Jonas finds such a thing flattering but maintains, especially in our label-centric society, sometimes we listen too much. "We want to describe things by reference, to say 'oh, it's like Elvis crossed with Devo'-but sometimes it's important to let go of that and be." Or let go and BING.
Try Something Different
A selection of alt.music for every taste.
By
THE GROUP: DJ Nature Boy
THE SOUND:
The man has a garage-sized record collection and a house-sized aptitude for picking just the right obscure dance-punk song from 1979 to play right after the strangely danceable Liza Minelli cover of the Sex-o-lettes (it exists, trust us). And not an ounce of techno.
THE SPOTS:
Sadly, Nature Boy, jet-setter that he is, doesn't play around town much, but he is planning a once a month party at the Southside Cantina. Details aren't pinned down yet, so keep an eye on SFR's Culture section for future info.
THE GROUP: Duality
THE SOUND:
Spewing conscious hip-hop that's actually good, this local duo (Paul "Dan-T" Majkia and Josef "J.D." Branch) belies not only the Santa Fe dearth of live hip-hop in and of itself, they confound the universal problem that hip-hop with brains can't make your booty shake. And "spewing" may not be the right word: The flow is smooth but not boring, the lyrics razor-sharp. And the sweetest moments of Duality's weekly Saturday shows at Backroad Pizza-what makes them truly alternative-are when you realize they are playing to a room mixed with locals, women and queer folk. Now that's mind-expanding. In fact, since the beats are so good, it's downright sublime.
THE SPOTS:
Backroad Pizza (every Saturday)
THE GROUP: Goshen
THE SOUND:
Goshen, comprised of one man (local artist Grant Hayunga) and a rotating cast of band members, makes high octane chunk-a-chunk top-tappin' country that owes as much to Bo Diddley as it does Hank Williams, Sr., all held together by Hayunga's slightly twisted, alter-ego, circus barker vocals.
THE SPOTS:
The Mine Shaft Tavern, semi-private parties at the VFW hall
Downloads available at
www.frogvilleplanet.com/goshen.html
.
THE GROUP: Ray Charles Ives
THE SOUND:
The Brothers Ives (Paul Groetzinger and Brian Mayhall) gracefully fold together the sounds of nationally known bands like The Autumn Leaf, Notwist and The Postal Service, albeit eschewing tick-tick drum machines for an actual live drummer, while keeping a quiet Fender Rhodes-driven groove afloat with the help of off-kilter samples,
glistening guitar work and a general shimmer. When they played at SFR's last Valentine's Personal's party, a cranky middle-aged lady complained "You can't dance to this music!" Maybe not, but you can definitely make out to it.
THE SPOTS:
Half-Rack Studios, Bar B, High Mayhem Studios, Southside Cantina
THE GROUP: Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys
THE SOUND:
Rex and his boys (TC Dobbs, JB Morris, Solomon Hofer and Blackjack Snow) sling out the type of achy-breaky, honky tonk heartache ballads that could save country music if the genre would only get its head out of its ass and go back to what made it essential in the first place: poetically simple lyrics, plaintive steel guitars and vocals so sad you want to crawl back in yer mama's womb, all set in a 3/4 time that keeps rhythm like a broom sweeping sawdust across an empty floor.
THE SPOTS:
The Mine Shaft Tavern, The Cowgirl (Tuesday, April 12), and, for the next couple weeks after that, somewhere in the Midwest (the group's on tour)
Downloads available at
and
.
THE GROUP: Bernadette Seacrest
THE SOUND:
Seacrest has a voice like an imported cigarette: smooth, smoky and highly addictive. Her look might be called Betty Grable+Hell's Angels-and what's more alternative than a tattoo-coated jazz chanteuse?
THE SPOTS:
Swig (every Friday in April)
Downloads available at:
and
.
THE GROUP: Joe West
THE SOUND:
The morpher of all morphers, West changes up his sounds more than most folks change their banjo strings. He currently heads up his Honky Tonk Orchestra (Noah Baumeister, Frank Rolla and Ben Wright), a country collective that could easily play a bar mitzvah. West's side project is the Joe West Intergalactic Honky-tonk Machine, which he describes as "a time-traveling music device." But no matter how crazy he gets, West's scuffed boots are still firmly rooted to a foundation of off-kilter psychedelic cowboy pop.
THE SPOTS:
The Cowgirl (every Saturday), The Mine Shaft Tavern, anywhere crazy stuff goes down
Downloads available at:
www.frogvilleplanet.com/jw.html
and
.
