The Monkees - Daily Nightly

After making most of the album Headquarters on their own, the Monkees broadened their outlook for their fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., bringing in select session players to assist them in recording. This album marked several changes for the group, the most immediately noticeable being Mike Nesmith's increased vocal contributions. He sings lead on five of the album's tracks, while Mickey Dolenz, the band's previously dominant lead vocalist, sang only three. But what a trio of tunes! Mickey memorably voiced 'Pleasant Valley Sunday,' another hit from the pens of Goffin & King and one with surprisingly sharp social commentary. Climbing to #3 on the pop charts, it featured a blazing, 'Paperback Writer'-style guitar riff that fit seamlessly alongside the other rock hits of the day. The single's B-side, 'Words,' also with a Dolenz lead vocal, became a hit as well.
Beyond his voice, Dolenz significantly contributed to the sessions by bringing a Moog synthesizer into the studio, one of the first twenty ever produced. This made Pisces one of the first, perhaps THE first, rock album to include the Moog. It was featured to great effect on Mickey's third lead vocal track, 'Daily Nightly.' This adventurous spirit proved contagious, making Pisces one of the most fully-realized albums in the group's career. In addition to recording songs written by their usual songwriters, songs from up and coming pop composers like Harry Nilsson, Michael Martin Murphy and Jeff Barry were also included.
As previously mentioned, Nesmith stepped to the vocal fore on this release, notably on the soaring Mann/Weill composition 'Love is Only Sleeping.' A hypnotic song in trippy 7/4 time, it is one of the Monkees' finest recorded moments. Originally intended to be a single, it remains one of their most admired album cuts and was featured in three separate episodes of the television show. Another Nesmith-led track, the country rock showcase 'What Am I Doing Hangin' Round',' delightfully foreshadowed the direction he would later take on his solo recordings with the First (and Second) National Band. The album's closer, 'Star Collector,' is a decidedly adult take on the subject of groupies and an indication that the band had grown weary of squeaky clean, bubblegummed themes.
The album's title refers to the astrological signs of the four members. Since both Nesmith and Davy Jones were Capricorns (and both share a December 30th birthdate), the '& Jones Ltd.' tag was added to avoid confusion. The album's front cover artwork, an illustration by Bernard Yezsin, features four blank-faced band figures staring out over a sea of colored flowers, with the Monkees' logo half-hidden among the flora. An apparent homage to the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band released earlier that year, it was another deliberate signal that the Monkees were a real band, ready to be judged amongst their peers.  From: https://www.bear-family.com/monkees-the-pisces-aquarius-capricorn-jones-ltd.-180g.html?srsltid=AfmBOopsN8K54mZZZ_U2mM3H_xIPoXem28SwMb4aHTvVe6p2kedmzm0z

Two Minutes to Late Night - Foreplay/Long Time (Boston cover)

The ball has dropped on 2020, but as we forge ahead with renewed vigor and a steely resolve, it can be difficult to appreciate the full extent of how this ongoing pandemic upended every aspect of our culture. The music world saw big names succumb to COVID, from the recent passing of country singer Charlie Pride, to Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, to the legendary singer-songwriter John Prine. But for every big name that passed, for every megastar that had to cancel globe-spanning tours, there are countless others who grind out a living as touring musicians that were crippled by the closures of smaller clubs, not to mention the millions employed at those venues.
Musicians had to find new ways to stay connected to their audiences. Many livestreamed solo performances from inside their closets over social media, or on Zoom shows organized by promoters of shuttered clubs and even local libraries.  While these shows were far more intimate than watching a full band at a crowded bar, there is only so much one performer can do in front of a webcam. I’m no computer expert (all I know is that the World Wide Web is a series of tubes), but it is mystifying to me that technology can instantly apply a camera filter to your face to make you look like a chicken nugget, but is unable to adequately account for audio lag to allow people to remotely play music together, in real-time, over the interwebs. And some genres of music do not lend themselves to quiet acoustic renditions of songs performed by a single person surrounded by their sweaters.
I listened to a lot of heavy metal in 2020, as Unwinnable’s honcho Stu Horvath and I embarked on an Iron Maiden podcast. It’s the best Iron Maiden podcast (hosted by two longtime friends from Kearny, New Jersey) out there, in my humble opinion, but listening to all that metal made me appreciate that it is a genre that cannot easily thrive in the brave new world of coronavirus living. Thanks to being a long-time fan and social media follower of Brooklyn metal club St. Vitus, though, I discovered, early on in the shutdown, the greatest thing going in heavy metal in the year of our (demon)Lord 2020 – Two Minutes to Late Night’s Bedroom Cover series.
Two Minutes to Late Night (“2M2LN”) is an exuberant heavy metal themed spoof of a late-night talk show that is as DIY and devoted to the artists it showcases as the club where it started, St. Vitus. Hosted by Gwarsenio Hall and featuring Kevin the Sound Guy, a.k.a. comedians and co-creators Jordan Olds and Drew Kaufman, 2M2LN manages to thread the very narrow needle of being fun and silly and metal as fuck all at once. One kickass Bedroom Cover of “Rocket Queen” by Guns N’ Roses finds Gwarsenio being handed a cup of tea mid-song. As he sips from the mug, his pained shrieks at the too hot liquid stand in for Axl’s signature ooohs and yeows. Funny isn’t a word often associated with metal. It’s a genre known as much for being self-serious and dark as it is for the utterly illegible fonts used in the logos of its bands. Yet, 2M2LN reveals that heavy metal has plenty of funny and engaging performers who are eager to laugh at themselves and the over-the-top nature of metal’s image.
When the pandemic hit, both St. Vitus and 2M2LN wasted no time in addressing the challenge head-on. St. Vitus launched a hugely successful Kickstarter to support the bar and its employees, and on March 18th, 2M2LN posted its first Bedroom Cover of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Devo-inspired masterpiece, “Dare to Be Stupid.” It features 2M2LN co-star Stephen Brodsky of the show’s “house band” Mutoid Man, Nadia Kontogiannis of Dead Temple as a mustachioed Elvira character, Weird Al Vira, and members of Khemmis and Thou playing along with the ludicrously talented Olds. The video displays the strange mix of joyful energy and rippin’ rock that makes the talk show so engaging. Whatever metal mystique is lost by seeing a guitarist shred your face off from a corner of their cramped NYC apartment is more than made up for by the “Metal Stars – They’re Just Like Us” quality of glimpsing into the performers’ very normal looking homes. This allows the well-produced videos to achieve a certain level of intimacy, similar to the solo shows many other, far quieter, musicians have been doing.
Since that first effort, 2M2LN has released a new cover video weekly, totaling 36 installments to date. The song choices cover a broad range of music, from Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” to The Misfits’ “Earth A.D.” (with a particularly surprising guest performer). The latest video is a parody of Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas” featuring Gwar entitled “Stab Into Christmas.” It’s as magical as you’d expect. As a bonus, the show has good politics. They released a cover of Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” played by all non-white performers in support of defunding the police, and the aforementioned holiday cover features the excellent lyrics, “Stab into Christmas / Let’s kill a landlord / We’ll make him sit on a machine gun bidet!” God bless us everyone, indeed.  From: https://unwinnable.com/2021/01/03/two-minutes-to-late-night-bedroom-covers/

Sarabeth Linden

Primus - Mr. Krinkle

"Mr. Krinkle" is Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin, who used that name as an alias when he checked into hotels. Primus frontman Les Claypool, who wrote the lyric, told Greg Prato: "The thing about Mike, he is one of these guys like Mike Watt - he has a very interesting perspective on things, and he's really good at tossing out these colorful little quips on how he perceives things. So we would have these great conversations on the phone. That's what 'Mr. Krinkle' is all about." The line, "Seems the rumors are about your team might move away" refers to the San Francisco Giants, who were considering a move to Tampa. Mike Bordin ("Mr. Krinkle"), a huge Giants fan, was not happy about it. Primus was at the peak of their popularity when they released this song on their third album, Pork Soda. "Alternative" music was big, but even in that genre, Primus was on the fringe and rarely got airplay on commercial radio. But there was a big market for these strange sounds and a festival to showcase it: Lollapalooza. Primus headlined in 1993 and included "Mr. Krinkle" in their sets. This is a rare rock song with a double bass as lead instrument, played by Les Claypool. To avoid bringing the unwieldy instrument on the road, he would perform the song by using a bow on his electric bass. Mark Kohr, who did most of the Primus videos in the '90s, directed this one, which is quite a feat of film-making. Done in a San Francisco warehouse, it's a one-shot video with acrobats, contortionists, dancers and other oddities that come in and out of the frame as the band plays in the corner. Les Claypool wears a pig-head mask the whole time to jibe with the "pork" theme of the album. Many of the performers were friends of the bands, and others came from the Circus Center school nearby. In a Songfacts interview with Mark Kohr, he said: "It was a lot of fun. And I'll tell you, from a one-shot standpoint, it was a lot of work. I had to do the timing of all of those events - meaning all of those people coming out - and have all that happen at the right time. It was a real challenge. It was a little terrifying. I had all these people and we had a rehearsal the day before. I was like, don't freak out, just keep moving, because it's going to turn out the same in the end whether you worry and crumble or not. But it was one of those times when I felt like my skin was on fire because there was so much riding on the whole situation. But that was a really fun piece to do with a lot of great people."  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/primus/mr-krinkle
 

Buke & Gase - Pink Boots

[I have two windows open: in one, my questions for Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez of Buke & Gase. In the other window, I have the Creation Kit, and I’m building a castle for Skyrim. I’m determined not to use fan-made resources, crafting purely from what shipped with the game. I tell myself it looks more authentic that way, but that’s untrue. It’s because by setting myself limits, blocked creatively into a corner, I have to think my way out. I have to snap those little lego-blocks together in ever more inventive ways, which pushes and stretches me. I can’t rely on things built by other people to let me coast along: either I imagine it, or it doesn’t exist.]

There’s no such thing as a buke. Arone Dyer invented it out of an old baritone ukelele and bits of whatever else they had lying around – I think it had bits of old car in it at some point – because they imagined it and wanted it to exist. Arone needed something lighter than a guitar, but I’m baffled by the ukelele: it’s just not something I associate with indie rock.

Aron: Actually there are a lot more ukeleles in indie rock than Gase’s. We don’t necessarily like ukeleles at all – we wanted to make a small experimental electric guitar and made one from parts of a ukelele. It is now a Buke.

The gass is a guitar-bass hybrid, similarly concocted by Aron Sanchez because he just didn’t want to be just another bass player. Hence, Buke and Gass – or Buke & Gase, as they call themselves for obvious reasons. Just the two of them, with just the two instruments plus their voices and whatever percussion they can strap to their feet. They make a hell of a racket for such a tiny band, but it’s a glorious noise. It’s indie rock, stretched and pushed until it makes something new. Descriptions are amusingly inept – they’re not “folk metal” or “chamber punk”, but I’ll give them “asymmetric congruencies of melodic discordance”. They pretty much sound like this.

Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez were introduced by a mutual friend.

Aron: Arone was on a swing, I was carrying sheet rock. 
Arone: We were inside, it was bright, like the sun was hanging out with us.

They’d met after Dyer moved to New York City from Minneapolis in 2000, where she joined the noise rock crew Hominid. Sanchez played with another act called Proton Proton before joining Hominid, and he and Dyer became more than bandmates. Then they split up.

I married my former bandmate, but I quit the band as soon as we got together: I couldn’t imagine the fallout from a break-up – the awkwardness, the arguments – it just all seemed too claustrophobic to me. Curious, I ask how their ex-lover status affected their working relationship.

Aron: Not a topic.

Does he mean that it didn’t cause problems, or that it’s none of my damn business? Probably both.

Arone: Non-issue-inducing.

What, aside from each other, have you taken from your old bands Hominid and Proton Proton to put in Buke & Gase?

Aron: The Gase began development in Proton Proton. In Hominid we learned how and how not to work together.

Arone took three years out from her music to race and fix bikes. She still works as a mechanic, which strikes me as an unusual occupation for someone in a busy band. I picture physical exhaustion and long hours, and ask how that fits in with being in Buke & Gase.

Arone: I don’t want to kill anyone, so I have to pay attention to the brakes.

Another answer that could be taken either way. All I know of Aron’s dayjob is that he worked with the Blue Man Group. What was it like being blue?

Aron: I have never been blue, actually: I used to be in the production side of the company. I still build instruments for them when requested.

I’ve never been too kind to Buke & Gase in the past. It didn’t help that my first exposure was the spit-take-inducing Revel In Contempt, which made me think they were the greatest new band on the planet … and then heard an album that to me sounded like half a dozen more versions of Revel In Contempt. That’s not because Riposte was a boring or samey album – most bands don’t even have one song that good in them, let alone an album-full – but it was the same sensation I got the fourth time I saw Cirque du Soleil: once you’ve ooohed-and-ahhed after the most astonishing aerial stuntwork in the world, they have to try so much harder to impress that it’s almost impossible for them to do so. You become immune to the spectacle with frightening speed. That first impression is so breathtaking that you want that feeling again – that sense that you didn’t even know it was achievable – and simply doing it again or even doing it better is just not going to get that reaction. Because you expect it.

General Dome is less like being ambushed in broad daylight and more like being glomped. You know exactly what it is and where it’s going, but that doesn’t stop it surprising you because it is pushing further in all directions. Arone’s voice darts around the scale like a butterfly and the abrupt changes in time signature are as dizzying as its flight, but it’s poppy, too. The choruses are infectious. If it was hard to describe Riposte, then General Dome is even more genre-defying, landing on all points on the noise-rock-indie-rock-math-rock spectrum. I wonder how much they planned that out before they started to write it.

Aron: The only plan was to create more music using the limitations and challenges of our instruments. Most of the compositional elements come from improvisation, we mostly follow where the song tells us to go, and hopefully we are getting better at it.

Is that Autotune I hear?

Aron: We are using a vocal processor to add melodies and harmonies. We use it in a creative way rather than a corrective one. We use the same technology to add harmonic layers to the Gase and Buke as well.

[Still with my level-editor window open, I’m surveying my fairytale castle. It looks beautiful, I admit that much, but it doesn’t quite look right. Why, really, have I imposed those limits on myself? I think I’ve done as much as I can, and it does look good, but if I unshackled myself, I could do better. Because I could take all that I’ve learnt through imposing those constraints and apply it to the new resources and make something better still. Better, perhaps, than anyone has seen before. Instead of just plopping them down in the usual places, I can bend them in new directions and make something that will stop you in your tracks and mutter “wow”.]

Buke & Gase are going to take their self-imposed shackles off, too.

What would you like to achieve with the next recording?

Aron: Perhaps getting more help with production, exploring new sounds. 
Arone: Maybe change the name and the instruments, and therefore change the set of self-induced limitations to continue to be creatively inspired by all things fun.

Who’s on your MP3 player?

Aron: Extra Life, The Knife, Arvo Part and 437 other artists.
Arone: Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Shellac, De La Soul, and most of what Aron’s got.

From: https://reinspired.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/interview-buke-and-gase/

Ostrich Von Nipple - Lick a Toad

Ostrich von Nipple – ‘Quantifies Absurdity’ is a journey that is a journey of infectious mentalism. The album starts with the intimate, loud and almost rock opera-ish ‘Shhhh (I’m Naked). On a guitar bed of epic bizarreness an atmosphere of sewer systems is announcing the word for the world police and oversized food chains; America. The music goes into a funky drunkaholic groove underlining that ‘America is the land for the strange’ as if it’s a poster attracting weirdoes from abroad to get their asses over to the land of the free. It sounds not the slightest dangerous, but truly inviting to undress yourself and join this club of weirdoes and happy freaks.
The album doesn’t settle down when ‘The Angry Arm’ reaches out to pull your ears right back in. A rhythmic yet shimmery odd substance of music secretly brings something that with drastic re-listen sessions would be possible to sing along as if it’s your own life-song. Don’t think the muppets, but think a tripped out bunch of fabulously alternative sounding Feebles. There is a tremendous amount of musicology hidden behind the oddness; impressing just as much as it inspires to let your inner natter run out and play air guitar in the moon light.
‘To Stalling For Time’ kicks in the energy button for some insane, (really insane? How surprising!) Episode of chicken-ska! Think a lot of pocking, excessive polka dancing, intimate middle parts for a shared kiss among one of the cocks; and groundbreaking electric guitar solos over rolling wobble baselines. It’s here that the dance-ability of the listener and Ostrich von Nipple gets ultimately tested; and successfully succeeds to win the main price! The end is like a marathon of polonaise chickens holding each tails, lifting each leg up as if they are wearing flippers & having an excellent time!
The album goes so quick, not because the tunes are short; but because they are heavily entertaining. Before you’ll know it you are listening to a pirate-clown-fart-folk-song named ‘Clowns Run Away’. It has the impression on me that it is song by someone dressed in a furry monster costume with a single eye; it’s all tongue in the cheek material, seriously gets listeners grabbing for some liquid named whiskey. Oh the good oll’ whiskey and this tune go so well together; almost like yin and yang! ‘Wandering in Shadows’ takes the surprised listeners on a journey of all kinds of shadows and their inhabitants, some are funny, some are having a bad breath, some are playful and others just wander around like the listener does. It’s like wandering in your own mirror and finally seeing yourself. (or in this case; hearing yourself ‘seeing’)
A serious beginning begins at the track named ‘Killing the Koala’ (a subject that is of course a tremendously serious subject) After the buildup of intentional atmospheric tensions, the ‘kill the koala’ session actually lightens up with a flexible rhythm for the koala to attempt its slow escape on. Or perhaps the killers will get distracted by a silly ‘kill the koala dance’ and forget all about the koala? A strange song of togetherness is the one named ‘Precious Things’, here the freaks come out and play their favorite instruments, they sing and dance together,  go acid-jazzy like a Bella Lugosi on speed! It’s the tune to bite your teeth in, rip it out of your speakers and play it over and over again. This is the invitation for math-rock, the invitation to the asylum, and the invitation to cabaret from the bottom of a hellishly fun sounding pit! Take what you can and make the most out of it..
The absolutely out of real life Jehovah witness inspired tune ‘Door to Door’ takes us all the way inside the head while they go from door to door. You can hear what they hear while they walk, and hear what they hear when they try to put their shoes between half opened doors. It’s deliriously delicious; and strangely will probably turn non Jehovah witnesses into Jehovah witness wannabes! ‘So Do We’ goes on a spiritual journey, full of hare Krishna-ish feelings; warm, happy, together and a redefined insane vibe of brilliant weirdo love. It’s the ‘Halleluiah’ moment on the album; making you want to praise the weirdest almighty and sticking your paws into the great big sky of nothingness. It’s absolutely an enlightening moment on this wonderful album, a moment in which all music comes and falls in place. The stuff to feel deeply enhanced with!
A great party starts when the mad martians have arrived at the beach, and Ostrich von Nipple is there to complement it with the perfect party anthem music. The sounds gets funky, all over the place, baselines, epic hand drums, hanging chords on a keyboard, cartoon vibes, organic organ epic-ness; it’s an energetic waltz of a potpourri of whatever-is-available; and it’s a lot of fun! ‘Left him on the ground’ gives a spin to the socially awkwardness of the weirdoes that have been roaming around on this record. This might be their more creepy side that steps into the spotlight, showing off all their colorful greyish colors like a flamingo on Prozac. Precious listening material!
Upright Jerker is the last tune on this album full of imaginary friends, freaks and exhibits. It’s here that I feel like it’s time to say goodbye to the one eye-monster, the garden gnome,  the jazzy things that have come out of the closet to deliver this intensive album of fun, adventure and general oddness. Don’t think that this is just a circus side-show, Ostrich von Nipple is clearly an act highly (extremely high!) armed with quality music skills. Madonna, Katy Perry and Cher fans might not exactly team up to hear it, but in another perfect dimension; they really should! I couldn’t find a place for preview / streaming this magnificent Residential album, but you might google it yourself and come across links like this one to the official label who just (very freshly) released it; and get one of those limited precious copies!  From: https://yeahiknowitsucks.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/ostrich-von-nipple-qualifies-absurdity/

Bab L' Bluz - AmmA

Bab L’Bluz (literally “The gate to the Blues”) is a Franco-Moroccan band created in 2018 in Marrakech. It is a Moroccan Psychedelic Rock band inspired by Gnawa and Hassani traditions, combining Rock, current music & Moroccan popular music. Bab L’Bluz was born following the meeting of the Moroccan singer-guitarist Yousra Mansour and the French guitarist/producer Brice Bottin in Marrakech in early 2017. Both passionate about Gnawa music, they decide to learn together the guembri. Mid 2017, they compose a new repertoire of 10 tracks of powerful and current music, while respecting the analog universe of the 60’s & 70’s. They want to mix their influences tastefully, and want to be labeled as a Moroccan Psychedelic rock band. Mid 2018, they are joined by friends and musicians from Lyon Jérôme Bartholomé and Hafid Zouaoui. They will do their first live concert on Radio Nova. The group performs in international festivals such as: Arabesque, L’Boulevard, Rock Am Bach, Le Péristyle, the Opera Underground of Lyon, ARTE concerts, and released their first album Nayda! in June 2020 on Real World Records.  From: https://fliartists.com/artists/bab-lbluz/

Levitation Room - Crystal Ball

 

There’s nothing like the weight of Los Angeles pressures that range from societal standards to its fast-paced culture. The hazy smog sets over the City of Angels and the summer heat makes the sidewalks sizzle. Palm trees loom over the sunsets, making you feel like you’re in a dream. It’s the home of the psychedelic quartet Levitation Room. The band is composed of singer Julian Porte, guitarist Gabriel Fernandez, drummer Jonathan Martin, and bassist Kevin Perez. The four musicians break the bonds of gravity with their cosmic wall of sound and thought-provoking lyrics.
Levitation Room was formed around the band members’ mutual love of ’60s garage rock played with a psychedelic twist. Initially, they sought to re-create the sounds they love. Their own sound is described to be a perfect mix of lo-fi and fuzzy pedals. The wavy and atmospheric songs echo their influences: summers of love, sunny days at the park, life, society, and self-awareness. Today, Levitation Room is broadening their soundscape and dipping into the world of genres through intoxicating guitar tones while maintaining their dreamy melodies. Luna had the chance to talk to lead singer Porte about their latest single, “Scene for an Exit,” and the band’s upcoming record.

LUNA: Before we get into the meat of the questions, did you happen to participate in Barbenheimer? It’s when you watch Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.

PORTE: No, but I did see Barbie. My girlfriend dragged me to see it. Well, actually, I was persuaded to see it. A friend of ours was in town from up north, and my girlfriend and I were both kind of detesting it a little bit. We ended up trying it, and it’s really good. It's really funny — really hilarious. Once I put my guard down, I realized the movie was pretty good. I was trying to get everyone to go see Oppenheimer, but they were like, “We'll walk out of the theater sad.” I still have yet to see Oppenheimer.

LUNA: If a big movie studio decided to make a biopic on your life, who would you want to be cast as yourself?

PORTE: I think it’s gotta be someone who has my complexion, so that kind of narrows it down. I watch a lot of films, but trying to recollect actors' names is always tricky. Who's young enough to play me but also has my vibe? Who’s the guy who played Freddie Mercury… Oh! Rami Malek! Yeah, I would go with Rami Malek. I liked what he did with Mr. Robot.

LUNA: Rami Malik. Solid choice. He's phenomenal. To set the scene, how would you describe the beginning moments in forming Levitation Room?

PORTE: Well, it goes back to me and Gabriel, the lead guitar player. We were friends a long time ago and we were in a band called The Hits. At that time, I was just a singer. I wasn't a guitar player. We were starting with this band, but my involvement was short-lived because I ended up leaving due to conflicting musical interests with other band members. I went off to start learning how to play guitar and I was becoming, like, a folk musician, and I was a street busker — that's how I kind of built my chops. At some point, I was doing open mics and trying to get gigs as a folk musician, but no one ever seemed to pay attention to it. I thought, “I think I need a bigger platform; I think I need to expand my sound here.” I'm a big fan of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll. I like all kinds of music, but that was my favorite. That's what I really honed in on.
One day I made a Facebook post asking if anyone wanted to start a band, and Gabriel responded and was like, “Yo, I'm thinking about leaving The Hits,” because at that time they were gigging. They’d found another singer, and he was down to jam and meet up with me. So we started hanging out in his garage and going over covers of songs that we liked. We were dreaming up this idea of starting a band together. I think it really all came together when I met John at a party — our drummer, Jonathan Martin — and we started jamming together at our friend Isaac's studio. We realized that we needed our own studio, and I found this ad on Craigslist for a big warehouse space that was being rented out. John and I ended up moving in and living there.

LUNA: That’s really cool.

PORTE: In front of the warehouse was a music retailer space, and the owners had told us they were shutting the retail space down because they couldn’t afford it anymore. Eventually, the owners hit us up and offered to take it over and have some kind of business endeavor installed in there. And so a bunch of our friends helped and we all came together to start a music collective. That’s when things started to take off.

LUNA: Wow, I didn't know anything about the warehouse. I think that's really cool, that a lot of the things that propelled you guys forward were community, having those shows and other people coming together.

PORTE: It was in east LA. In the front, we sold guitars, music equipment, vintage clothes, records, and antiques. Our friend was a tattoo artist, so he was doing tattoos. We had another friend who was a video editor, so we built an office space for him. Then in the back, we had our studios, which we rented out to bands to rehearse. The thing that made the bulk of our income was throwing a big blowout party once a month. A lot of bands like Cherry Glazerr and the Mild High Club played and were doing some of their first shows there.

LUNA: That’s sick. It’s been about three years since you guys last released music — how do you think you’ve changed as a person over that period of time?

PORTE: The pandemic changed me quite a bit, I guess you could say. I feel like I'm socially inept now. I don't really go out as much. I get nervous in big crowds when I never really used to, and my interest in a lot of things has changed. I've gotten interested in history, and I've been trying to educate myself on how the financial system works and stupid things like that. Everyone else on this planet is constantly evolving, right? We're always changing. It's forever changing. That's one consistent thing that we're always doing. I used to be so attached to my ideals, and what I've come to learn is that I shouldn't do that because I'm always going to change my mind about certain things, interests, convictions, everything.
I remember when I was younger, in high school — and even after high school — I thought I was going to be a punk rocker forever, but I changed. As far as the music, we're trying to expand our sound because between the four of us, there's a culmination of interest, and we all like different things and we all like a lot of the same things. We're trying to bring every element of what we like into our music. There’s jazz, folk, and world music — and also trying not to pigeonhole ourselves into being just a psych-rock band because we want to make good pop music. We want to make music that we want to listen to and that spans all genres of music.

LUNA: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of which, how do you think the writing process for “Scene for an Exit” has differed from the rest of your discography or past songs you guys have written?

PORTE: I think, at least for us, there are two types of ways to approach writing songs. One comes very naturally, where we're just kind of jamming in the studio. Someone's like, “Oh, that sounds really cool. Let's keep doing that,” and then it just evolves into a song, or sometimes it goes nowhere. Other times, it's a thing where someone has been really working on a song. Perhaps it came quickly, or perhaps it developed over a period of time. I'm thinking back to our song “Warmth of the Sun,” which is one of our top five listened-to songs — and that took me two, almost three years, to write. It just started with a little riff. “Scene for an Exit” was a particular song that came about in the studio from comfortably jamming with each other and thinking, “That sounds cool.” The song came very naturally, very organic. We didn't really sit and throw our heads at the wall or scratch our heads. It was a cool song that came quickly.

LUNA: Being held as staples to festivals such as Levitation Fest and Desert Daze is a testimony to how your recorded music translates exceptionally well into live music. What’s your favorite part about performing live?

PORTE: It’s an exhilarating experience. I think, especially the moments before you hit the stage, your nerves are just cross-wired. As soon as you get on stage and feel the reception of the crowd — especially if it's a warm reception — then it's on. You're floating in this space. It's almost like a dream, because it happens really fast. Then when you reflect back on it, it’s like, “Whoa, what just happened?” Sometimes when you're having a bad show it can feel excruciatingly long. You're just like, “Oh my god, I can't wait for this to be done.” A majority of our experiences have been very positive. It's almost like a religious experience. You're up there in the act of receiving God or something. I think we have to, a lot of times, realize that the music is bigger than us and kind of remove our egos from that experience. People are there for the music, and it's a total exchange between the band and the crowd. There's a conduit, almost — what the crowd gives us, we give back.

LUNA: Absolutely, yeah. To close everything off, the last question I have is: What aspect of your upcoming music are you most excited for your audience to experience?

PORTE: The way that the fidelity of how the songs sound on this record is much different than the lo-fi sound that we usually do, so I'm excited to present that to them. I'm also just excited to show people how much we've evolved in our sound and in our songwriting. I'm not trying to be too boastful, but I'm very proud of this body of work. For one, it took a long time to do because we kept re-recording it and trying to find the right home for it. This time we made an album that I would want to listen to, whereas before, I think a lot of the music that we've made… I don't think I would bump it in my car. I hope that people like it.

From: https://www.thelunacollective.co/journal/qa-levitation-room