Zombies are the new vampires. AMC has scored record ratings for "The Walking Dead" and the ghost of Richard Nixon is being summoned to fight zombies.  Zombies are on the march.

But Nocando and Nobody aren't followers. The genesis of their Bomb Zombies collaboration stems from an auspiciously fated trip to Japan, where Nobody warded off insomnia by downloading hours and hours' worth of rap radio hits. After presumably synthesizing everything from "You're a Jerk" to "Lollipop," he proposed that he and Nocando do an entire EP riffing on the sound of modern-day mainstream hip-hop.

The result is "Sincerely Yours," a funhouse with a stripper pole installed, pregnant with minimal Roland 808 handclaps, Auto-Tune and enough bass to melt ice. This is no big surprise -- the DJ born Elvin Estela spent much of the spring making beat kids touch their toes by playing Ludacris' "How Low" on the Low End Theory's marrow-splintering sound system. But he's best known for making glitchy psychedelic headnods for the likes of Busdriver, Freestyle Fellowship and Nocando -- the latest stand-out alumni of the Project Blowed club.

Spinning freaky tales of groupies and random debauchery, Bomb Zombies is the beat scene's version of a 2 Live Crew record. Stripping the intelligent out of the so-called Intelligent Dance Music subgenre of the late '90s, the pair bridge the gap between the contemporary L.A. underground and classic Miami bass -- two scenes mutually bonded by their love of heavy low end.

One of the highlights is "Over the Edge," with its beat that sounds like "Boyz n the Hood," had it been constructed in the era of surplus swag, and with a hook pilfered from Grandmaster Flash's "The Message." An unusually versatile MC, Nocando steers from the more heady abstractions offered on this year's stellar "Jimmy the Lock" mixtape to spin a tale of strippers and getting sauced. Thankfully, his intricate wordplay and charisma stays intact.

Released this week on Nocando's own Hellyfyre Club Records -- an imprint of Alpha Pup -- Pop and Hiss is premiering the track in question.

Download: (Pop & Hiss Premiere)
MP3: Bomb Zombies (Nobody and Nocando) -- "Over the Edge"

-- Jeff Weiss

Photo: Nobody and Nocando. Credit: Bnut

Raised in Rome and relocated to Barcelona, the 27-year old born Giovanni Civitenga was tabbed by local luminary Daedelus to be the second artist to record for the producer's incipient Magical Properties imprint. But even if the imprimatur of the erstwhile Alfred Darlington wasn't enough to convince skeptics, Citivenga's musical lineage is as strong as anyone this side of Flying Lotus (the nephew of Alice Coltrane).

The beatmaker who casts spells under the name My Dry Wet Mess is the progeny of the bass player in the orchestra of famed Italian composer Ennio Morricone, the man who wrote the canonized scores for the Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood collaborations in the 1960s. But rather than create orchestral spaghetti Western beats, Civitenga acquired an Atari and an MPC and started sampling -- his ear more attuned to hip-hop and bass music.

After changing his name from the ungainly "Bluermutt" and moving to Catalonia, he eschewed his earlier embrace of pop-techno to make the sort of harder sci-fi beats that have been emanating from London's post-dubstep world and L.A.'s Low End Theory.

Commencing studies in interactive design, Civitenga began to construct sound-reactive video performance programs, which led to an audiovisual collaboration with Daedelus last year. Consider him a Barcelona version of Dr. Strangeloop, able to seamlessly blend the worlds of art and sound. In honor of a performance at tonight's Low End Theory, Civi's project My Dry Wet Mess offers this premiere: His remix of "PieFace" from Flying Lotus' "Pattern + Grid World" EP.

On the original version, Lotus ostensibly channeled the tension preceding a banana cream pie smacking a clown's face (at a circus selling cannabis instead of cotton candy). On this version, My Dry Wet Mess does what every good remix should: select a different flavor altogether. So, consider this an empanada de manzana, light, airy and easily consumed.

Download: (Pop & Hiss Premiere)

MP3: Flying Lotus -- "PieFace (My Dry Wet Mess Remix)"

-- Jeff Weiss

Photo: My Dry Wet Mess. Credit: Friends of Friends

 

Icaros are medicine music. The songs and incantations taught by elderly shamans and utulized to aid ayahuasca visions and heal the sick. Power disguised as hymn. The wails of the possessed. An attempt to drill toward the supernatural, via means accessible to anyone with a willing larynx and proper proximity to the proper psychedelic panaceas.

Mexicans With Guns hail from neither Mexico nor the Peruvian Amazon, where ayahuasca grows on unruly vines. Ernest Gonzales, who is Mexicans With Guns, calls San Antonio home and does graphic design while running the stellar Antipop imprint. But Los Angeles might as well be his second home, considering his most recent releases have been with the local Stones Throw-affiliated Innovative Leisure and Friends of Friends.

I once described Mexicans With Guns as Gonzales' "a luchador-mask-sporting alter ego who makes adamantine beats that sound like dubstep remixes of Baltimore club tracks made by a man who may or may not have assassinated Herb Alpert in a fit of rage." The Free the Robots remix of "Icaros" supports that assertion. Gonzales' Latin influence is muted in favor of FTR's punushing quicksilver attack, a monocrome medley of sky-is-falling snares and synths that wobble like Bay Area bridges.

It's an icaro, all right, a heavy, disorienting potion that speaks well to the skills of both artists. Mexicans With Guns play the Low End Theory on Wednesday for the release of the latest FoF Gem, FoF Presents Volume 3. 

It's a good idea to bring your chakapas and your most powerful Andean potions.

Download: (Pop & Hiss Premiere)

MP3: Mexicans With Guns -- "Icaros" (Free the Robots Remix)

-- Jeff Weiss

Photo: Mexicans With Guns logo; Credit: Antipop

There’s a pixie-shaped specter hovering over the music of Ana Caravelle -- one that looks an awful lot like Joanna Newsom.  Such will be the lot of any young woman who roots an experimental, ambitious album around the harp and an idiosyncratic voice. But “Basic Climb,” the debut album from the 22-year-old Angeleno (née Anahita Navab) is about as far from Newsom’s cracked madrigals as you can get.

Carvelle’s music isn’t idyllic or sylvan -– it’s spooky and percussive;  it's a little deadpan; and it only occasionally lets the clouds part for a rich flurry of harmony. That she’s based her career in the simmering Low End Theory beat-music scene  (she recorded “Climb” at Alpha Pup head Kevin Moo’s  in-house studio) is unlikely but no accident. She writes songs with an intuition toward the feel of cut-and-paste sampling, and the sense that arrangements don’t have to neatly stack up to be entrancing.

Lead single “Where Have You Been?” makes room for a boozy clarinet, junked-up percussion and effect-less vocals that feel intimate in a kind of spooky way -– as if a stranger on a bus suddenly told you they loved you. She covers Arthur Russell’s “Lucky Cloud,” and it’s an apt choice -– they both wring a lot of feeling and atmosphere from charismatic but not traditionally "emotive" voices.

Her debut comes out Sept. 28 on the label of the local collective Non Projects, and we have an exclusive remix of her track “Shapeshifting” from her label head Anenon to pass along in advance of that. Caravelle and her boyfriend, the local producer Asura, are playing a number of collaborative shows this fall, including great bills at the Downtown Independent on Sept. 26 (with Shlohmo, and -– full disclosure -- co-presented by Pop & Hiss contributor Jeff Weiss); a truly killer edition of Low End Theory with the New York electronic composer Oneohtrix Point Never and L.A.’s  ambient-music samurai matthewdavid; and the Eagle Rock Music Festival’s experimental stage with Sun Araw and L.A. Vampires. Any of them will be a fine occasion to hear what happens when one of the oldest instruments in music gets torn up and re-built anew.

-- August Brown

Photo: Ana Caravelle. Credit: Spencer Lowell

Download: "Shapeshifting (Anenon Just One Shape Remix)" MP3

 

Flying Lotus has described Teebs' music as sounding "the way 'Avatar' looks." And those familiar with the 23-year-old visual artist and musician's canvasses would be prone to concur.

Like the Teebs-painted album cover at right, his music is a yarn ball of intense colors and peculiar crevices. His last EP was titled "Tropics," and it boasted the spectral beauty of his artwork, with beats that bloomed with pastel color. His sound is a Gordian knot, impossible to unravel but bright as agate.

It's a balance of the baroque with the abstract, a collision between tangled futuristic projections and everyday objects. One of his best mixes was called "2 a.m. Wine," and it captured Teebs' ability to project an Ambien-addled aesthetic -- a gauzy,  gorgeous haze ideal for the witching hours.

His first single for his Brainfeeder debut LP, "Ardour," expands on these ideas, and illustrates why it's one of the most anticipated records within the Los Angeles beat community. Since moving from New York several years ago, the producer-artist born Mtendere Mandowa has been one of the city's brightest prospects, a member of the My Hollow Drum collective, a frequent Dublab guest and a Low End Theory staple. Additionally, BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs included one of his tracks on her "Wild Angels" compilation. 

"Ardour" is slated to be released Oct. 19th. It figures to be worth marking your calendar in advance.

Download:

MP3: Teebs -- "Arthur's Birds"

-- Jeff Weiss

Little is known about yuk. He's one of the linchpins of the Dublab- and Low End Theory-affiliated My Hollow Drum collective. His Myspace page is private and biographical information is scarce. All that is commonly known is that he is 24 years old and his display name reads "Finger Painting Maestro." 

It's an accurate phrase to describe the wild and discrete splashes of color that define "a d w a," his full-length debut that dropped Tuesday on matthewdavid's Leaving Records imprint.

The album proves to be as inscrutable as its name, a gauzy drift through weird spaces cackling with found sounds and beautiful rain-washes of synths, and gentle drums. It's the funkier Beat Scene equivalent of a forest sleep soundtrack that you'd buy at the Sharper Image (R.I.P.).

His partial anonymity manifests itself in his understated and undulating music. The artist's Leaving Records press kit claims that he  "explores the misty juncture of beat and melody like a heart-of-darkness jungle cruise." (It's an understandable analogy considering his Costa Mesa base is so close to Disneyland.)

The mixture of ambient and beat music places his sound close to label founder David, PPM sound-collagists Infinite Body and the experimental ambient beat-slap of Flying Lotus' "L.A. EP 3 X."

Celebrating his album release Wednesday night with a performance at the Low End Theory (along with Tokimonsta), yuk is premiering "emilia reflection" at Pop & Hiss -- a serene and sylvan track fit for forest dwellers and those that wish they were.

Download:
MP3: yuk.-"emilia reflection"

-- Jeff Weiss

The news of a BBC Radio1 DJ leaving her post would ostensibly have little impact on the Los Angeles music scene, but Mary Anne Hobbs is the exception. Over the last three years, the host of an experimental program has consistently broken many of the artists associated with the Low End Theory scene, oftentimes months or even years before local journalists.

This Q&A that Hobbs did with Pop & Hiss last year has a more thorough examination of her role in championing Los Angeles bass music and dubstep as a whole. But in brief, her 2006 "Dubstep Warz" program was credited as being one of the seminal moments for the then-incipient genre. Subsequent compilations "Warrior Dubz" and last year's "Wild Angels" are also essential anthologies of the heavy bass and blunted beats that have been emanating out of England and Los Angeles over the last half-decade.

While Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing and Gaslamp Killer absorb most of the international attention lavished on the Low End Theory, less discussed is the interplay between the Lincoln Heights Weekly and the Project Blowed scene. Granted, Nocando, the spot's lone rapping resident is an alumni of the legendary South L.A. rap graduate school, but Lincoln Heights club the Airliner has regularly hosted the likes of both new Blowedians (Dumbfoundead, Open Mike Eagle, Intuition) and veterans like Busdriver, Aceyalone, and Abstract Rude.

Tonight marks the debut of E. Super, a quartet of producers compromised of Maestroe, Kuest1, Alwayz Prolific, and Alpha MC, whose stellar "Side A" was released Tuesday on Nocando's Hellfyre Club imprint, a subsidiary of Alpha Pup. Unlike many of the younger laptop fiends emanating from the Low End, E. Super have steadily building a rep over the last decade, collaborating with everyone from their fellow Blowedians to Stones Throw-signed Oh No, to underground heavyweights Casual and Prince Po.

"I initially only planned to release  rap records but I'm putting this record out because these are the beatmakers who have stuck behind the young L.A. rappers and help create the sound of Open Mike Eagle, Dumbfoundead, Verbs, Intuition, Satyre, and myself," Nocando said. "They've been winning beat battles and beat showcases for years in this city. As soon as Maestroe told me that he had an instrumental project with Prolific, Kwest and Alpha MC, I told them that I'd release it on my imprint."

"Side A" finds them incorporating everything from 80s funk to Giorgio Moroder, 8-Bit nostalgia, hard-core hip-hop and the occasional Radiohead sample. For an all-instrumental album, it's surprisingly song-driven and deceptively melodic. Though it feels slight at just 21 minutes and 14 tracks, E Super make the best kind of impression, one that leaves you waiting to hear Side B.

Download: (Pop & Hiss Exclusive)

MP3: E. Super-"We Super"

MP3: E. Super-"Embedded In Me"

E. Super, Tonight at Low End Theory at the Airliner, 2419 N. Broadway, 9 p.m. $10, $5 for members.

-- Jeff Weiss

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L.A. Record is the city's liveliest bastion of grass-roots, punk rock, seat-of-your-pants music writing. It's the kind of magazine where the writer can ask an audacious question of a musician and instead of that ending the interview with an unceremonious click of the recorder, the musician just goes with it and amps the level of freaky a few notches higher.

After five years and 100 issues, the magazine published by Charlie Rose and founded by rockers-about-town Chris Ziegler, Rose, Dan Monick and Sean Carlson, has interviewed scads of performers from all ends of the musical spectrum, including Flying Lotus, No Age, Billy Joe Shaver, HEALTH, Genesis P-Orridge, Fever Ray, Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola, Stephin Merritt, Terry Riley and Yoko Ono. The one uniting factor here might be that all of these musicians traffic in a certain iconoclast spirit, rebels and sass-talkers operating just a little or a lot off-center from the norm.

The next issue is L.A. Record's centennial rag -- and its first as a quarterly, instead of monthly, incarnation -- and in honor of such an auspicious accomplishment in today's withering environment for the printed word, the magazine will be kicking off a month-long citywide slew of events. Buy an L.A. Record 100 card for $24.99, and you'll get free or discounted admission to 120 events, including shows with Nite Jewel, Nora Keyes, We Are the World, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, the Growlers, Dum Dum Girls and Blitzen Trapper, plus some multimedia events, gallery shows and screenings. This weekend the party kicks off with the Dublab System DJs, Abe Vigoda, projections by Videothing and a special guest at Nomad Gallery. All proceeds go toward CalArts Community Arts Partnership, which provides free, after-school programs for youth.

We talked with Editor in Chief Ziegler about the history of L.A. Record. His story of talking to GZA after an earthquake memorably illustrates the kind of singular encounters that can happen only to a music writer living in California.

On the anniversary of your 100th issue, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about putting out a paper?

That it can be done! Which is sometimes a hard lesson to learn!

You’ve been making a print product and a Web product for some time now. What are the strengths and weaknesses of those different forms? Do you believe “print is dead,” especially for music criticism/writing?

I don’t think print is necessarily dead, but I think the old model of printing a newspaper is probably about to go under. But then I also don’t think it necessarily has to — or "had to" if it’s time to use the past tense? Print will probably have to be free and have to work as an artifact and not just an information delivery system, but there’s still value in hard copy. The Web is great because it’s fast and far-reaching and can deliver any kind of content — if you can hear about a band, you can actually hear them. But print works better for things like huge artwork and long articles. And the information lasts longer. I worked at three different newspapers in the last three years, and two of those went out of business, and the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote for them exist now only in whatever isolated back issues are still out there. So — lesson learned? I don’t think work should be that easy to erase.

For a feature in Tuesday's Calendar, I spent an afternoon with the L.A. electro-jazz musician Flying Lotus to talk about his strange and wonderful new album "Cosmogramma," touring with Thom Yorke and how his peers in the Low End Theory scene are destroying genres with their avant-garde music, while simultaneously rising to international prominence.

If you want to hear the record in its natural setting, Lotus is commandeering the Echoplex on May 14 and May 15 for two very different performances. On the 14th, he’ll play a solo set with full visual accompaniment and excellent openers including fellow travelers Ras G and Samiyam. On the 15th, however, it gets even more intriguing, as Lotus debuts his new live band (or, as he’s dubbing it, an "infinity" sign), with his virtuoso saxophonist kin Ravi Coltrane, Gonjasufi, the Gaslamp Killer and matthewdavid warming up.

If you have a job interview or drug test anytime in the days following, tread lightly, but this is an absolute must-see. From what I’ve heard, Lotus’ band is going to obliterate the confines of electronica for something absolutely new and necessary.  

-- August Brown

Photo: Flying Lotus in his element. Credit: Anna Webber / Getty Images

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For much of their young career, the default setting of the L.A. electro trio the Glitch Mob could be summed up in the title of their popular mixtape: "Crush Mode." Built off skittish, compressed-to-death drum loops and Dre-inspired synthesizers that could saw through metal, the Glitch Mob redlined practically every mixing board they played through for years.

But of their Low End Theory cohorts, the Glitch Mob is the last to release a debut album. For those who've wondered whether they've been dawdling, they haven't -- they've been wholesale re-inventing their sound. "Drive It Like You Stole It," the first single off the forthcoming full-length "Drink the Sea," imagines the synthetic strut of "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" as a bleary Ibiza comedown.

No epileptic edits, no throat-punch distortion, just a shimmering, spacey and unexpectedly sad track that Michael Mann needs to get on lock-down for a future "Collateral" sequel. The sound might not make for  brash mixtape titles, but it's an enticing turn for the band, which just made my Coachella must-see short list off of this.

-- August Brown

Photo courtesy Magnum PR

It’s difficult to argue against the merits of extended vacation. Especially if you’re Shlohmo, aka Henry Laufer, the 20-year-old beat wunderkind who created “Shlomoshun Deluxe” last summer on a four-month break from San Francisco’s California College of the Arts.

Armed with a laptop, an iPod microphone and a copy of Ableton software, Laufer distilled dank dubstep, the hulking bass and mutant groove of L.A. beat music, glitchy Warp Records IDM and an array of found samples into a precocious debut that earned effusive raves from XLR8R magazine, taste-making British BBC-1Xtra DJ Mary Anne Hobbs and Low End Theory co-founder Daddy Kev -- the latter of whom recently tabbed him with the unenviable task of following turntablist titan D-Styles on the club’s monthly podcast (where Shlohmo acquitted himself nicely).

Oddly enough, this was never the plan. Always inclined toward a career in painting, Laufer started taking beat-making seriously only last summer, when two semesters of dealing with excessive art school pedagogy left him alienated. The offspring of a musician father and a visual artist mother, the Crossroads graduate had loved hip-hop and electronic music since discovering them via the skateboarding video soundtracks of his youth, an obsession further inculcated by the discovery of Low End Theory at age 17. But the idea of joining his heroes onstage seemed remote until Leeor Brown, the impresario behind nascent local powerhouse Friends of Friends, discovered Shlohmo’s MySpace page.