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Luis Vasquez, aka The Soft Moon

​Luis Vasquez sounds like a calm, well-adjusted person over the phone -- and this is something of a surprise, because the music of Vasquez's debut album as The Soft Moon winds its way through panoramas of fear, paranoia, apprehension, and darkness. It's not as overtly gloomy as, say, much of Joy Division's catalog, but the buzzing synths, whispered vocals, linear compositions, and hissy noise littered throughout easily supply the impression that they were made by some black-fingernailed recluse.

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Exray's reppin' SFO.

​Jon Bernson puts it pretty plainly (and enthusiastically) when discussing the emerging lo-fi scene in the Mission: "There's a real collaborative spirit!"

In case you haven't heard, a new crop of bands in the neighborhood is getting weird. One of them is Bernson's Exray's, a collaboration with Michael Falsetto-Mapp that blends harmonious elements from Continental synth-punk, decades-old musique concrete, and L.A.'s instrumental hip-hop, and mashes it all together using the glue of lo-fi pop melodicism. You can't help but link Exray's -- which celebrates its debut album release party this Friday at Cafe Du Nord -- to the same pie-in-the-sky garage-pop fronted by the Fresh & Onlys, Sonny & the Sunsets, Ty Segall, and others. But there's an inorganic quality to Exray's that sets the project apart from its peers.

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Thanks to both the national media and the local one, most of us know about the more-than-worthy garage-rock, shoegaze, indie-pop, and electronic sounds emanating from the S.F. scene. But far less appreciated are the aquifers of creativity stirring beneath us in the Bay Area's experimental underground -- and the guitar-driven drone duo Barn Owl is at the top of all that.

"Compared to bands like Weekend, Thee Oh Sees, these more garage-pop-oriented bands, I don't see us having much in common with them," says Barn Owl's John Porras, sipping tea with his bandmate, Evan Caminiti, while they consider their place in the local scene. "At the same time, something is happening here in the experimental world that I'm happy to be a part of."More >>

Multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Scott Von Ryper and Aimee Nash, who make up the Black Ryder, could easily fit on a concert bill with My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, and Mazzy Star. Their debut record, Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride -- a bewitching and quixotic soundscape filled with swirling, fuzzed-out guitars and guest appearances by members of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Brian Jonestown Massacre -- was voted one of 2009's best albums by Rolling Stone Australia. It gained further attention from the award-winning video for the dark country track "Sweet Come Down," directed by Michael Spiccia.

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Introducing San Francisco's The Soft Moon, the haunted house of a solo project from Mojave desert native Luis Vasquez, which released its self-titled debut last week on Brooklyn spook-factory Captured Tracks. Like that label's flagship act, Blank Dogs (although check out this link too), The Soft Moon capitalizes on the steely persistence of outmoded electronics and the occasional disembodied yowl to create elegantly moody hypnoses, love anthems for robots who once caught a glimpse of the October sky.
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Chadwick Donald Bidwell, Dee Kessler, and small infant human

​In addition to their titles as frontmen of two of the Bay Area's best underhyped bands, Dee Kessler (Thee More Shallows) and Chadwick Donald Bidwell (Ral Partha Vogelbacher) -- known together as Fops -- can both claim the decidedly un-rock-and-roll mantles of Lamaze partner, diaper changer, spelling bee coach, scout leader, that kind of thing. Fatherhood hasn't made them give up the music scene, though, nor has it turned them into Wilco-caliber dad-rockers: it's made their sounds a little more focused and their weirds a little weirder, and we should all be thankful. They've already sired two albums' worth of material, one of which came out in October on London's Monotreme Records. The second is slated for release early next year.

The first, Yeth Yeth Yeth, has the vaguely hallucinatory qualities of Thee More Shallows and the mischievous churn of Ral Partha: it's missing the dimension of a live band, but the songs are still diabolically inviting, rickety castles piled high with troubling details and insidiously catchy melodies. As Bidwell (with a little help from Kessler) explains below, it also sounds like the work of two dangerously creative minds confined to a basement recording studio while the confusing California seasons transmogrify. Monotreme's press release sums it up pretty well: "Prepare to dance whilst scratching your head."

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Now seems like a good time to make sure we're all up to speed on the work of the soon-to-be-buzzing Glasser, the one-woman tribal-chamber-stomp project of Los Feliz resident Cameron Mesirow. Ring, her first full-length album, comes out next week on True Panther, but you can stream it below.

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If you're like everyone in the world, you've been into Cee-Lo's irrepressibly catchy reprisal anthem, "Fuck You." Maybe you've even checked it out in Spanish!

Well. Think that's subversive? Try "Fuck Me."


Meet Camu Tao: Ohio player, Def Jux staple, and member of some of underground rap's most venerable crews, including The Weathermen (along with Aesop Rock) and MHz (along with Rjd2). Camu died in 2008, at 30, of lung cancer, before his solo debut saw the light of day. That album, King of Hearts, was finally released on Def Jux a few weeks ago; you can nab it here. As an appetite-whetter, though, the label is giving you the first hit free. Head here to download Forever Frozen in Television Time, an EP recorded in 2004-5 by Central Services, a.k.a. Camu and El-P, "under the influence of several illicit substances between the hours of 3am and 8am." (Fittingly, the only non-original cut is a "cover" of Huey Lewis's "I Want A New Drug," with "want" changed to "need.")
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Reporter performs tonight at Milk

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