To Live and Shave in L.A. (aka TLASILA) rip through sonic boundaries and demolish cultural mythologies with a kinetic mélange of violent, constantly shifting musique concrète structures, splintered electronics, and operatic, glam-infused vocals. Their powerfully evocative compositions can take the form of forty-minute Kuiper Belt freak-outs or dense, demonic, two-minute pipe bomb pop. Their avowed enemy is genre itself, their ultimate goal, unknowing. Hyper-literate texts, ungovernable performances, and a ruthlessly meticulous production ethic yield recordings without referent, sounds that garrote taxonomy. TLASILA was formed in Miami Beach, Florida in 1991 by Tom Smith, an alumnus of late 1970s-early 1980s dada-improv outsider cabals Boat Of and Peach of Immortality, and the earliest (1985) incarnation of Jon Spencer’s legendary Pussy Galore. Smith was soon joined in TL&S by Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, a veteran of many aesthetically disruptive (and equally ignored) South Florida projects (most infamously, Scraping Teeth), and Ben Wolcott, a filmmaker and lifelong circuit bender whose mammoth, screeching oscillators sent early Shave audiences running for cover. Now a full-fledged collective with nearly 20 members, To Live and Shave in L.A. have released dozens of albums on a variety of international labels and have toured the world with jagged frequency for more than seventeen years. Between them, Bastard and Smith have produced upwards of 150 albums for a dizzying array of artists and puzzled record companies. Smith is also a member of neo-Aktionist quartet OHNE.
---
TLASILA 666 / Sudden Infant: European Tour 2008!
---
Ben Wolcott, backstage at the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC and loitering on Baltimore’s mean streets of self-portraiture.(Pix taken by Graham Moore during TLASILA’s April-May 2007 tour of the States.)
---
Thanks for avant-canoodling with us on the recent tour... We enjoyed every other second of your deranged, derailed, wholly debased company... Merci, et bravo!
---
Released earlier in 2007:
Les Tricoteuses
Riven from the claustrophobic todesbericht of TLASILA’s An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers, Les Tricoteuses is both textual corollary and rigorous meta-narrative. In shifting M. Bros.’s focus from 1970s San Francisco to the gates of the Bastille in 1790s France, TLASILA also tilted the genders of its voyeuristic antagonists. Les Tric’s expansive reassessment of Interview is posited within an obsessively redacted dialogue about that year-long re-enactment. Its titular conceits thus suggest layers of narrative foreboding bound in meters of yarn, texts ensnared and strangled by millions of feet of sixteen-millimeter film, all yellowed and scarred by the ravages of time...
(Les Tricoteuses, a reverse composition in ten dismembered movements... Available through Savage Land . Sleeve design by Gregory Jacobsen .)
---
Bio:
To Live and Shave in L.A. was founded by Tom Smith in Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Smith had previously been a member of Boat Of (Athens, GA, 1979-1983), Peach of Immortality (Washington, DC, 1984-1990), and Pussy Galore (Washington, DC, 1985-6); the first TLASILA demos were recorded in July 1990.
A Short History: Smith met Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra in 1991 at South Beach’s Sync Studios. A co-owner of the dank, rambling facility, Bastard quickly joined Smith in the nascent collective. Two years of continuous recording and local performances (under the Peach of Immortality moniker) followed. By the autumn of 1993, Smith and Bastard had amassed a larder of eighty songs...
During a Miami Beach rooftop party in the summer of 1993, Smith met electronics whiz, undisputed global oscillator overlord, and soirée host Ben Wolcott. As Miles Davis’ Dark Magus album was the only music allowed on the stereo throughout the event, an invitation for Wolcott to join TLASILA was reflexively extended. Ben was convinced to join the burgeoning collective soon after. History shall not forgive them...
Meanwhile... Following a lengthy post-production regimen, To Live and Shave in L.A.’s debut album, 30-minuten männercreme, was released on the Love Is Sharing Pharmaceuticals label.
(30-mm.)
After the release of 30-mm, the Bastard/Wolcott/Smith engine went into overdrive. Between 1994 and 1996, they recorded the primary elements of the following releases:
Prostitution Heute! (1994, 2x7" EP); "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell (1994, released 1996, CD); Vedder Vedder Bedwetter (1995, CD); An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers (1995, CD); Commmiinnggg! and Practis’d the Black Art (1996, CD); Tonal Harmony (1997, CD EP); Les Tricoteuses (1997, CD); Peter Criss vs. Peter Christopherson (1998, released 2000, a collaboration with crazed UK noise aparatchiks KF36, CD); Where a Horse Has Been Standing and Where You Belong (1998, CD); Amour Fou on the Edge of Misogyny (1998; fractured breakbeat remix of Wigmaker dub vesions, created by Billy Taylor [Melted Men, TLASILA 1997-8] in 1998 and released 2001);The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (2xCD, 2002; the album that broke TLASILA internationally, inasmuch as they could be broken, etc.); and God and Country Rally! (2004, CD).
(The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, begun in 1995, completed in 2000, released through Menlo Park Recordings in 2002. Cover design by Syd Garon.)
---
Their philosophy? PRE. (But they’re open-minded about their essential close-mindedness.)
In late 1996, Ben Wolcott spun off from TLASILA to join the remarkable mega-freak ensemble Frosty. A revolving cast of avant-malcontents soon entered the Shavian fray... European tours in 1997 and 1998 featured Nandor Nevai, Billy Taylor, Greg Chapman, Julien Becourt, and for one exceptionally bizarre gig in Paris, Bill Orcutt...
The 1999-2000 edition of To Live and Shave in L.A. comprised Bastard, Smith, Nevai, Weasel Walter (of the Flying Luttenbachers and myriad aggregations), and Misty Martinez. By the summer of 2000, To Live and Shave in L.A. 2 had arrived, and soon after, a full-fledged clone explosion. Smith decamped for Europe to begin OHNE with Dave Phillips... By December 2003, Bastard and Smith decided to haul the Lamborghini out of deep salt storage and get back on the demolition derby circuit. Ben quickly re-upped, and Mark, Don, Andrew, Chris, and Graham soon followed.
Personnel:
Rat Bastard - small electronics, radio receivers, bass, etc.; Don Fleming - guitar, synth, treatments, backing vox, etc.; Chris Grier - guitar and electronics (and TLASILA majordomo); Mark Morgan (also in NYC’s superlative Sightings) - guitar, backing vox, and four-track; Graham Moore - laptop and treatments; Thurston Moore (the Shave’s honorary chaplain) - guitar and treatments; Tom Smith - voice, small electronics, laptop, album production, etc.; Andrew W.K. - keyboards, backing vox, etc.; Ben Wolcott - oscillators and related devices. Membership is fluid; the collective entertain the occasional audition request.
Detailed histories of each of the TLASILA members, as well as additional information on the recordings referenced above, may be found within the pages of the official To Live and Shave in L.A. web.
Other recordings of note:
Spatters of a Royal Sperm (1991; the late, lamented Doris Wishman, a friend of the South Florida TLASILA extended family, directed the video for this unreleased - but widely bootlegged - four-track EP; a legit release looms); My "Limp" Went Husserl on Me (1991-2, pre-mannercreme Miami recordings, planned for a 1992 release but jettisoned in favor of the material that would later form 30-mm... eight songs from the Husserl sessions made the jump to minuten); Tony Conrad, Fat-Ass (created 1998-2000, currently in hyperstasis).
As alluded above, the majority of their recordings have emerged only after protracted grand mal post-production seizures. The Wigmaker was assembled over a five-year period; Horoscopo required four. Conversely, An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers, the product of a dare, was written, recorded, mixed, and mastered in a day. Each has their detractors...
Recently issued:
Noon and Eternity: released October 31, 2006 on Menlo Park Recordings .
Horóscopo: Sanatorio de Molière slithered through the gate August 25, 2006, via Blossoming Noise .
---
Many others are in queue, including a double studio album for Blossoming Noise, two additional releases for the French Savage Land label (the long-delayed Commmiinnggg! and Practis’d the Black Art album and the TLASILA/Kevin Drumm collaboration), On a personal note: Mil gracias to all friends of TLASILA - as ever, your support is sincerely appreciated. Treacle, pink ocelots, sunflowers, lottery jackpots, etc.
---
Regarding "thanks for the add" comments: we appreciate your feedback, but we often delete the more rote iterations, primarily to reduce page-loading time. Deformations of the script are, of course, preferred, and tend to remain tethered to the archive.
---
One last thing... OHNE.
Essential to an understanding of TLASILA’s sonic and textual realignment is the work of OHNE, the group founded by Tom Smith and supra-human Fear of God/Schimpfluch-Gruppe mainstay Dave Philips in 2000. Its ranks sealed by the fortuitous addition of Swiss laptop jihadist Reto Mäder and Molotov-lobbing Tochnit Aleph label supremo Daniel Löwenbrück, OHNE fused neo-actionist performance rituals with discrete, microtonal splinterings, full-on hardcore turntable splatter, endless alkaline plains of prepared pianos, and Smith’s inimitable vocal slur to create, sui generis, a hitherto unknown quantity. (Anyone who witnessed one of OHNE’s performances between 2002 and 2004 knows that these words reflect, absorb, and repel certain truths. They aren’t mere gush.) There is a direct, immediate component of the contemporary TLASILA that can be traced, without doubt, to OHNE .
OHNE’s albums:
OHNE 1, Mego CD, 2002; OHNE 020510 Live at Yaroslavl Museum of Modern Arts, Russia, SOI Tapes CD/DVD, 2003; OHNE 020503 Live at Buddha Bar, Minsk, Belarus, The Egg and We CD, 2003; and OHNE 020504 Club Nemo, Gomel, Belarus, Tochnit Aleph CD/DVD, 2004.
OHNE’s compilation appearances (to date): Veli, sisko, kuulet kumman soiton: Avanto Compilation 2004, Avanto CD, 2004; and Cultural Mimicry Volume 1: A Spirals of Involution International Compilation, Spirals of Involution CD, 2004.
Shock Stop Press! OHNE will (possibly!) release a new studio album in 2008 (or ’19), and tour Mexico and Canada (but probably not the USA) as well!
---
(Above, a quartet of Horoscopo tour images from Graham Moore’s Bolex; below, Tom and Rat, taking a blissed-out fifth at the Underground, Hamilton, Ontario, September 3, 2006. Photo by Ben Wolcott.)
---
(Above, Graham and Rat at Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, May 1, 2007. Photo by Ben.)
---
---
(A poster commemorating TLASILA’s mad 2006 dash through Montréal. If memory serves, Rat hurled his own pancreas, and those of perhaps six other (un)lucky, and doubtless quite tasty, Québécois passersby...)