Clavius Productions presents:
Sunday, April 18
Velvet Lounge
915 U St NW WDC
http://www.velvetloungedc.com202-462-3213
$10, doors at 9pm, 18+
The Styrenes (35th anniversary tour! featuring members of the Electric Eels and Mirrors)
Kohoutek (Prophase/Music Fellowship, improv psych)
The Styreneshttp://www.thestyrenes.comFew bands in the history of rock and roll have been so consistently mischronicled, misquoted and misunderstood as Cleveland?s Styrenes, Mirrors and Electric Eels. All Music Guide, Wikipedia, even a book on the history of punk music: They all got it wrong on these three groups.
Rolling Stone came a little closer, calling them ?post-punk before punk ever happened.? But of all the critics who have tried to describe the Eels-Mirrors-Styrenes aesthetic, James Mann may have captured it best. In his
Ink review of the Styrenes collection
It?s Still Artastic (ROIR), Mann wrote ?there is a current of unflinching integrity and valor not often found in music. This is the sound of men who truly don?t give a damn. Freed from chasing the bright lights of fame and fortune, they (not so quietly) developed a unique and uncompromising vision.?
And they?ve never stopped. Thirty-five years after the Styrenes? first gig, bandleader Paul Marotta?a member of all three groups?continues to record and perform, including a two-week anniversary tour in April, 2010 with Mirrors mastermind Jamie Klimek and Electric Eels founder John Morton. In a recent interview, Marotta recalled what led him to form the Styrenes in 1975.
?I was playing guitar in the Electric Eels and keyboards in Mirrors in 1974,? he told Athens, Ga. rock writer Gordon Lamb. ?It was challenging and fun and frustrating and all the things bands are. But neither band was exactly what I had in mind, and both bands were led by strong personalities?Jamie in Mirrors and John in the Eels. I wanted to call the shots, so I needed to have my own band.?
Klimek and Marotta formed the nucleus of the new ensemble, releasing their first single?Marotta?s cheerfully fiendish hate song ?Drano in Your Veins,? originally written for the Electric Eels in 1973?under the name Poli Styrene Jass Band. They also performed and recorded as the Styrene Band and the Styrene-Money Band, with sidemen including Jim Jones, Anton Fier and Michael Antle, before settling on the Styrenes name. The band is often lumped in with other Cleveland-area groups, but existed there for only about five years before Marotta and Klimek decamped for New York in search of greater musical opportunities. And although their original recordings, like those of Mirrors and the Electric Eels, have been saddled with the ?proto-punk? moniker, the Styrenes? music?from their earliest singles to the recent CD
City Of Women (Rent a Dog, 2007) ?has stoutly defied easy labels.
?A big, full sound created from a mixture of acoustic, amplified and electronic instruments has been an almost unbroken thread tying together our recordings over the years,? says Marotta, who, at various times, has incorporated tape loops and gadgetry, violin, cello, alto sax, trombone, clarinet, French horn and harmonica into the band he leads primarily from the piano. While the Styrenes? move to New York came a year or two too late to benefit from the rock-club scene that had begun to die out by 1980, both Klimek and Marotta continued to write, perform and record in a variety of settings. In 1987, Marotta began collaborating with Cleveland writer and vocalist Mike Hudson, formerly of the Pagans, on a series of stories with music. The two recorded the LP
A Monster and the Devil (Tinnitus, 1989), and performed as the Styrenes with Klimek and a shifting array of other musicians and actors.
Klimek and Marotta also revived Mirrors as a three-piece with Klimek on guitar, Marotta on bass and Paul Laurence on drums, playing regularly around New York and touring both coasts and the Midwest. Laurence also played drums for the Styrenes, which now included both Hudson and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. With all three members of Mirrors also playing in the Styrenes, the two bands toured as a package and began recording new material until, in 1994, Klimek left New York.
Marotta then recruited guitarist U.K. Rattay and bassist Al Margolis to record
We Care So You Don?t Have To (Scat Records, 1998), which proved to be Hudson?s last album with the Styrenes. While rehearsing, recording and touring in support of the CD, Marotta also worked regularly as bassist for New York?s swinging-bachelor-pad sensation Voodoo Martini, played guitar in John Morton?s band, Amoeba(raftboy) and started Jilmar Music, a music publishing company. For the first time since 1975, when Mirrors, the Electric Eels and Styrenes all released their first singles, Marotta was again in three bands with new recordings?the Styrenes? three-song
Christmas CD and the debut discs from both Voodoo Martini and Amoeba(raftboy). Also in 1998, the Styrenes accepted an invitation to perform on BBC radio and TV, which led to a club tour of the U.K. with Marotta taking over as lead vocalist.
By 2000, Marotta was ready for a more ambitious project: the Styrenes? recording of Terry Riley?s landmark work
In C (Enja, 2002) with an expanded group of seven players, including Morton on guitar and the guitarist and vibraphonist from Voodoo Martini. ?We rehearsed for almost a year,? Marotta says, to create a taut and compelling rock version of the 1964 composition, which the touring Styrenes occasionally perform with local musicians taking part.
The typical Styrenes show is a fast-paced hour of what Marotta calls ?serious and intense rock music?loud or soft, fast or slow, sincere or snotty?that avoids mid-tempo rock conventions.? Audiences can also count on hearing some of the band?s narrative pieces, in which spoken word and instrumental music are layered into hypnotic, virtually cinematic experiences?among them: ?Westies,? a violently lyrical story of Irish-American gang life and death in Hell?s Kitchen, and the trippy dream-tale ?One Fanzine Reader Writes,? in which strange events transpire on the Lake Erie shore.
?We won?t be overly loud,? promises Marotta. ?Still, everyone should get a big, dark, intense, funny, scary, and with luck, pleasantly overwhelming blast of rock and roll.?
Kohoutekhttp://claviusproductions.alkem.org/kohoutekFormed in Washington DC in 2003, Philly-based experimental collective
Kohoutek plays improvised psychedelia, ranging from unsettling,
discordant noise to delicate melodies, inspired by the likes of Can/
Amon Duul 2/Agitation Free/Ash Ra Tempel/Krautrock, Trad Gras Och
Stenar/Parson Sound, Dead C, Skullflower, Sun City Girls, Hawkwind,
Gong, Sonic Youth, Bardo Pond, Ghost/White Heaven/Japanese psych, Sun
Ra/Art Ensemble of Chicago/free jazz, early Pink Floyd, MBV/Spacemen
3/shoegaze, King Crimson, Soft Machine, Heldon, Van Der Graaf
Generator, drone, musique concrete, noise, cosmic folk, and doom/
sludge metal. All Kohoutek performances are rituals channeling
untapped energy transmogrified through pure expression and response
to the immediate environment.
Lossless Loss, the second studio album recently released on Prophase,
covers most of the dynamic stylistic range Kohoutek is known for:
abstract and textural sound, atmospheric rock, harsh noise freakouts,
clattering percussion, guitar heroics, and alien electronics
congealing to form a multihued psychedelic extravaganza. Recorded
deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in September 2007, the
five members embarked on a psilocybic twilight journey, and this 44-
minute aural excursion is the result. No overdubs and minimal editing
create an experience as close as possible to a Kohoutek performance.
With longtime core members Scott Verrastro (percussion, flute), Craig
Garrett (bass) and Scott Allison (electronics) augmented by Vic
Salazar (electric guitar) and Damian Languell (vocals, harmonica,
clarinet, didgeridoo, Space Echo), Kohoutek forge their own path in
the improv universe, and
Lossless Loss is another burning fragment of
this fleeting sonic comet.
"People interested in music that defies the pop song convention,
music that challenges that part of your brain that lies dormant
during most aural experiences, need a band like Kohoutek. This
quintet began their wildly meandering journey across the more
peripheral realms of free-form psych rock a few years back and from
the very beginning they seemed determined to try to cross swathes of
interstellar drone, guitar squall and loose, slowly evolving
improvisations of drum and bass grooves and squelchy electronics with
tapestries of gravitationally flowing darkness. What we get is a
sonic bag that is raw, gorgeous, loud, dreamy, dissonant and mystical
at the same time, somehow managing to transcend all sorts of
seemingly limited genre barriers. Dedicated followers of bands such
as the Spacious Mind, SubArachnoid Space and Ash Ra Tempel will for
sure want to check these cats out, with a musical style that at its
best rarely goes wrong in the live setting." (Mats Gustafsson)
