Charli XCX signs to IAMSOUND Records

Last year saw a wave of young, female dark electropop artists such as Grimes and Austra make a major impact. The local  IAMSOUND Records is the latest to land a big like-minded signing:  The independent label will release the U.S. debut EP from Londoner Charli XCX in May.

Charli XCX singles such as  "Nuclear Seasons" owe debts to Blondie and goth-edged darkwave and should fit nicely alongside IAMSOUND's other adventurous synth acts such as Salem and Little Boots. The label helped launch the careers of international star Florence and the Machine and the globe-skipping rock group Fool's Gold.

An e-mail from the label said a full track list, artwork and samples of new music were coming soon; her two shows at this month's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, are some of the most anticipated.

RELATED:

Chris Brown to release 'Fortune' on May 8

Facebook changing band pages' format to Timeline format

The Eagles' rep responds to Frank Ocean's use of 'Hotel California'

-- August Brown

Photo: Charli XCX. Credit: From her Facebook page.

Little Boots, NewVillager, SBTRKT play Mondrian sessions

 
This post has been updated. See below for details

The local indie label IAMSOUND has had some luck in getting hipsters to go west of La Brea for its Mondrian Sessions, a series of poolside concerts at the West Hollywood hotel featuring rising acts such as Lykke Li, Feist, Cults and others. Now, they've set a fall lineup with a few adventurous electronica acts.

The electropop siren Little Boots, an unexpected smash at Coachella 2010, leads off this weekend acoustically on Friday, followed by the San Francisco-based experimental art-rock ensemble NewVillager on Oct. 20 and the U.K. beat-music producer SBTRKT on Oct. 24. Even though it's not quite pool weather anymore, it's an excellent stand-by-a-pool-and-watch-bands season right now.

RELATED:

NewVillager wraps up its (literal) Chinatown residency

Twelve L.A. indie labels you should know -- a primer

Album Review: Little Boots, 'Hands'

-- August Brown

Update: This post initially listed Little Boots as playing on an incorrect date. She plays Friday, Sept. 23. We have adjusted the date above accordingly.

Photo: British electronic/dance singer Little Boots. Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times. 

 

NewVillager wraps up its (literal) Chinatown residency with an installation blowout

For the last week, the Human Resources gallery in Chinatown has resembled more of a refugee camp for avant-garde space monsters. NewVillager, the high-concept pop-art project of Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini, quite thoroughly took over the space -- they've been living, working and curating music and art there in the leadup to their self-titled debut album (Aug. 16, on the local indie IAMSOUND).

But albums seem almost beside the point for the band -- they allegedly recorded 10 different versions of their debut with different arrangements, lyrics, melodies and production styles (which seems a rather droll take on what a "song" actually is). But their Tuesday night set, which closes out the week-long experiment at Human Resources, seems to be more in line with their vision for giddy, symbology-inclined chamber pop.

They'll perform what they're calling an "integrative concert" set that will expand the whimsically freaky world of their "LightHouse" video into an installation reflecting the album's themes (which will hopefully include real-life cotton-candy monsters and fuzzy beasts made of cassette tape). But even if they're inclined to change them at a moment's notice, the songs are scintillant takes on voice-tweaked electronic pop doused in atypical optimism. Imagine the Knife's demon-stalked synthetics, then imagine their exact opposite.

RELATED:

JD Samson talks bodies, unfunded babies and the perilous pleasures of pop

IAMSOUND's Paul Tao on their 'L.A. Collection' series

Fool's Gold is the real thing in world music

-- August Brown

MEN's JD Samson talks about bodies, unfunded babies and the perilous pleasures of pop

Yesterday, JD Samson released her band MEN’s debut album, "Talk About Body," and it features the sexiest song about getting knocked up in recent memory.  On, “Credit Card Babie$,” a disco track driven by Moog blasts and little bites of punky guitar, Samson promises, “I’m gonna (sleep with) my friends to get a little tiny baby.”

But the unprintable hook is actually a sad reverse-double-entendre. Turns out the simple wish to have a kid is also probably the most destructive thing one can do ecologically, financially and socially to yourself and everyone around you. It’s a tough decision, but the hooks of “Babie$” give it a hot-and-bothered urgency.

“We had this skeleton of a song idea and I assumed it was going to be super-depressing, because it’s so hard to plan for and support a family,” Samson said. “But then we thought it would be cool to juxtapose it with this fun disco track, to make an anthemic space to relate to it."

That dynamic forms the backbone of MEN, which performs at Amoeba Music in Hollywood at 6 tonight. Samson and bandmates Michael O’Neill and Ginger Brooks Takahashi pair viciously catchy disco-punk with  lyrics that function equally well as floor-filler chants and more difficult reflections on how the wants of the body interact with the political sphere.

Salem's "King Night" will premiere at Origami Vinyl

Local indie label IAMSOUND has spent much of 2010 re-asserting its dedication to L.A. bands. But its biggest effort this fall involves the impressively gloomy Michigan electronica trio Salem, the bellwethers of the second-most-unfortunate genre name of the year.

Salem trades in ostentatiously evil synthesizers, the chintzy drum machine patter of rap producers like Shawty Redd and pitch-tweaked vocals from singer and bandleader John Holland that evoke both Fever Ray and Bun B simultaneously. Salem's geniusly titled early EP "Yes, I Smoke Crack" cemented their sinister bedroom electro-doom, and Holland's unnerving presence evokes something of a pansexual, rap-addled William-Blake-as-drug-kingpin antihero. He gave an absolutely astounding interview with the Dutch gay men's magazine Butt that documents the real-life source material for all this; unfortunately, we can't link to it, but it is well worth looking up.

Early bits of "King Night" suggest the band only went bigger on its proper debut full-length, but hear for yourself at its official debutant party at Origami Vinyl at 8 p.m. It's free (as are drinks), and it will haunt your dreams.

-- August Brown

Twelve L.A. indie labels you should know: a primer

  

A consensus seems to be growing that Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance for independent music. In a recent Sunday feature, we set out to discover just how it is that while the major labels continue to suffer layoffs and severe sales losses, this city’s scrappy, savvy, taste-driven indie imprints have, in fact, been thriving. As a corollary to that, we’ve spoken to and profiled 12 of L.A.’s most active young labels, from artist-owned black metal powerhouse Southern Lord to chart-climbing indie rock outlet Danger Bird to progressive hip-hop imprint Anticon. Here’s hoping they’ll all end up in a GZA song some day.

Sargent House (Echo Park)
Longtime talent manager Cathy Pellow started Sargent House in 2006 with one artist: Seal Beach prog-punk band Rx Bandits, who were ready to call it quits after selling around 150,000 records through MCA/Geffen and, according to Pellow, "never seeing a penny." Today, her stable comprises "a middle class of awesome musicians," also proggily inclined, able to live off their earnings. She also manages a sister label co-run by the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez Lopez.

New Kisses single is a peck on the cheek

So Nite Jewel, Baths, and Memoryhouse are playing the Echoplex tonight. You don't need us to tell you that the bill features wonderful electronic projects worth any and every occasion to plan a night out for.

But you really should rouse yourself from your chillwave evening slumber and get there early, because you'll catch a hint (albeit a DJ set) of Kisses, a new project from Jesse Kivel of indie-poppers Princeton and his girlfriend Zinzi Edmundson.   

Kisses is more sample-heavy than Princeton and rooted in the smeared, tape-decayed disco that you kids all love today. But on their new single "People Can Do the Most Amazing Things," there's both a sad-eyed clarity to the melodies that sets up a great pop tune, and guitar frizz and junky drum samples in the margins that knock it into the experimental ether again. Arthur Russell is a primary influence, and they have clearly absorbed his love of snare reverb and train-tunnel tenor.

You can't quite dance to it, but on a drunk bus ride home I bet it sounds immaculate. IAMSOUND Records, which has been knocking it out of the park with this stuff lately, is putting it on a 7-inch Aug. 3. Is it one of those aforementioned amazing things people do? Maybe. A supremely pleasurable one? Absolutely.

-- August Brown

Photo: Kisses. Credit: Jessica Koslow

Scenes from the fringe: IAMSOUND's Paul Tao on their 'L.A. Collection' series [UPDATED]

Last year, we deemed IAMSOUND Records to be the bee’s knees in local independent labels. Yet strangely, they were best known for releases by British sirens like Little Boots and New York electro acts like Telepathe.

This year, with the inauguration of its "L.A. Collection" series, the label is re-upping its commitment to the Los Angeles fringe, with a limited-run, split 7-inch series featuring A-list L.A. bands such as Local Natives, Fool's Gold, Nosaj Thing and Dead Man’s Bones, alongside rising newcomers such as Rainbow Arabia and Pocahaunted. The first edition, featuring sultry disco purveyors We Are the World, came out on Tuesday.

We talked to the label's manager Paul Tao -- seen above with founder Niki Roberton -- to find out what the series says about our sprawling, ever-shifting music scene.

What were you trying to document in this series, and how did you get the idea for it?

We came up with it last year. We’re an L.A. label, but there seemed to be a lot of confusion about where we were from -- we’d been releasing a lot of U.K. and New York stuff lately. When you think of New York, you think of the Strokes and Interpol, and L.A. doesn’t have a really cohesive scene or sound like that. We wanted to do something to bring all sides of L.A. together and show the full diversity of what the city has to offer. It’s not all just bearded guitar bands or electro or Smell scene kids -- there’s a lot more than people think. 

Is there any overarching theme or shared L.A. value in these songs?