Category Archives: Interview

Interview

N8NOFACE and Chico Mann Update a Classic Alternative Sound on As of Right Now

N8NOFACE promo photo by Sela Shiloni
N8NOFACE (photo: Sela Shiloni)

“Waiting to Wait For You” has been running on a loop through my brain. The lead single from As of Right Now, the latest EP from N8NOFACE and his debut with venerable L.A. label Stones Throw, is a sticky mix of indie jangle and new wave bounce with the Long Beach-based singer repeating, “I can’t wait, wait to wait for you” against a riff that sounds as if it could have come from Johnny Marr. 

N8 credits producer Chico Mann, aka Marcos Garcia, the guitarist best known for his work with Antibalas and Here Lies Man, for the EP’s sound. “He was a huge Johnny Marr fan as a kid,” says N8 on a recent video call. The two connected a few years back to collaborate on producing another song. “We would talk about what direction I would want to go in and I always mention to him things that I just can’t do musically and he’s like, well this is a sound I always wanted to produce, let me write some music with your voice in mind,” N8 recalls. Garcia came back with about a dozen instrumentals. N8 tackled the lyrics in about a year and seven of the songs landed on As of Right Now. 

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Interview

Former Members of The Mae Shi Reconvene at HLLLYH For New Album URUBURU

Photo of HLLLYH by Ezra Buchla
HLLLYH (Photo by Ezra Buchla)

Tim Byron wanted to get The Mae Shi back together. It had been about 20 years since the synthpunk band formed in Los Angeles and a decade since the original members reunited for a one-off show at Pehrspace. “It was the cliche of we’re getting the band back together,” he says on a recent video call. And, despite the fact that three of the members— Byron, as well as his brother Jeff Byron and Ezra Buchla— now live in the Bay Area while Brad Breeck and Corey Fogel are in L.A., he was able to do that. They recorded what was intended to be a new album from their old band. “But, at the end of the day,” Byron says, “it was different enough where we decided to give it a different name and have a separate identity from The Mae Shi.” The band morphed into HLLLYH and includes new members Dan Chao, James Baker and Burt Hashiguchi. Debut album  Uruburuis out on June 27. 

HLLLYH played their first show, opening for Brainiac at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, last January. Throughout this past spring, they’ve released three singles, “Dead Clade,” “Uru Buru” and “Flex It, Tagger,” with a cover song B-side included with each release. Byron is right, the music is different enough from what they did in the ‘00s to warrant a different band name. But, the energy of The Mae Shi is still there. 

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Interview

Jesika Von Rabbit Welcomes Listeners Into Bunnywood Babylon

Jesika Von Rabbit and bassist Lee Joseph press photo for Bunnywood Babylon by Aydra Swan
Jessika Von Rabbit and bassist Lee Joseph (Photo: Aydra Swan)

“Go Back to L.A.” started out as a joke. Jesika Von Rabbit and a friend were noodling around in her Joshua Tree home studio when she came up with the tune and the catchy, garage rock song stuck. Now, it’s the latest single from the singer’s recently released album, Bunnywood Babylon. “Hopefully, I don’t get too many people upset with me,” Von Rabbit says on a video call. 

The song’s title stems from bumper stickers that have been popping up in the Joshua Tree area following an influx of new residents and tourists from Los Angeles. “Some of the people who grew up out here maybe don’t want some of the more of the hip, fancy stuff that’s coming to town,” Von Rabbit says. “Sometimes that’s out of fear too. People are afraid of what they don’t understand.”

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Interview

“I’m Still a Punk”: Claus Larsen of Leæther Strip on Horror Novels, Cover Songs and Connecting with Fans

Leæther Strip Claus Larsen promotional photo
Claus Larsen of Leæther Strip

Claus Larsen is a man of many projects. There’s Klutæ, for which he released the new album, Godsent, in early May and appeared at Seattle festival Mechanismus later that month. Am Tierpark,  his Italo disco-influenced synthpop duo with John R. Mirland, released the album Shameless last year and the two musicians also have a punk band, Gusten, with a forthcoming album that’s near completion. Then there’s Larsen’s flagship solo project, Leæther Strip, which has been ongoing since 1989. It’s Leæther Strip that brought a capacity crowd to downtown Los Angeles’s Slipper Clutch on the final Saturday night in May. 

While Larsen released his latest Leæther Strip album, Fucking Perfect, in February, L.A.’s industrial heads are here for the classics. Tonight’s set is centered around Leæther Strip’s 1990s catalog and Larsen is pummeling the crowd harsh, EBM beats, his intense vocal delivery and a barrage of samples. Inside the small, upstairs venue, people squeeze as close to the stage as possible. 

“I love doing these shows because you see the faces. They recognize what they were into in the ‘90s and instantly, smiles,” says Larsen earlier in the evening, when we meet right after soundcheck. “They’re the reason I’m still able to do this, because I built up my audience back in the ‘90s and they’re still hanging on and supporting.”

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Interview

‘Intergalactic Dance’ Diva Ora the Molecule Has a Message for the Dance Floor

Ora the Molecule Nora Schjelderup press photo by Jonathan Kvien
Ora the Molecule Photo: Jonathan Kvien

It’s early, at least by club standards, on a Thursday night in mid-May, but the dance floor at El Cid is poppin’. On stage, Ora the Molecule flits between the synthesizer that sits on a table cloaked in glittery fabric and a theremin off to the side of her. When she looks down at the synthesizer, beams of light shoot from her disco ball helmet towards the crowd. Dressed in a red jumpsuit with matching gloves and boots, Ora the Molecule looks like a space disco diva who has just arrived on Earth. Few, if any, people in the crowd can resist her intergalactic groove. 

When Nora Schjelderup, the singer and producer behind Ora the Molecule, and I connect for a video call a couple weeks later, I tell her that the show reminded me of sci-fi disco performances from 1970s European variety shows that I’ve seen floating around online.

“Yes!” she responds through laughter. “That’s exactly what I’m aiming for.”

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Interview

Swimming Bell Dives Into Oceanic Vibes on Somnia

Swimming Bell promo photo for Somnia by Lisa Bolden
Swimming Bell’s new EP, Somnia, is out now. (Photo: Lisa Bolden)

Swimming Bell squeezes onto a makeshift stage inside Oblivion, a Highland Park shop with a rack of surfboards propped up against a wall painted beach shack white and a cascade of houseplants falling over the front entrance. It’s a tiny space, where the crowd is gathered between racks of clothing and tables of accessories, while the sound board is set up behind a changing room curtain. Still, Katie Schottland has assembled six other musicians to join her for this Friday night gig, where they play shoehorned between drums, congas, keyboard, pedal steel and a bounty of pedals and cables. 

“Of course, after making the EP, I was like, I need someone to play percussion. I need keyboard. I need pedal steel. Harmony. I need it all,” Schottland says on a video call the day before the show. It was a tight fit, but the band played well, reflecting the breezy, oceanic sound of Swimming Bell’s latest EP, Somnia, in songs like “Found at the Bottom of the Ocean” and “I’m Always Down.”

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Interview, New Music

Maria Somerville Brings Luster to Los Angeles on Saturday Night

Maria Somerville press photo 2025 photo credit Cait Fahey
Maria Somerville (Photo: Cait Fahey)

Bird songs open Luster, the sophomore album from Maria Somerville and her debut full-length with venerable indie label 4AD. Their chirps, taken from a field recording at the singer/producer’s home in Connemara, Ireland, slowly give away to a kind of ethereal ambience with Róisín Berkeley on harp and Henry Earnest on guitar. 

Somerville, who also hosts “The Early Bird Show” on NTS, self-released her debut album, All My People. In between the two albums, she moved from Dublin back to her hometown. “It’s grounding and expansive there, and gives me spaciousness, which maybe subconsciously shapes how I make music,” she says of the move in an email interview. 

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Interview, Music

Cyrnai Embraces “Found Experience” and Future Sound on Calamity of Beauty

Cyrnai (Carolyn Fok) press photo 2025
Cyrnai, aka Carolyn Fok

Carolyn Fok was in Los Angeles, cleaning out her late father’s house, when she discovered the statue of a woman, reclining in a seductive pose amidst the odds and ends stored in a dark room. She shined a flashlight through nearby glass and snapped a photo for what would become the cover of Calamity of Beauty, her latest album as Cyrnai. 

Fok, who is also a visual artist and writer, refers to these kind of moments as “found experience.” As a child,  she found a drum machine that her father made and began playing around with it. “He didn’t give it to me, I just found it and I found a lot of things,” Fok says on a recent video call. “He would leave secondhand instruments in the living room and I started putting things together as a teen, so finding this statue was like, oh, did he want me to find this too?”

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Interview

Edward Ka-Spel on How AI Inspired New Legendary Pink Dots Album, So Lonely in Heaven

Illustration of Legendary Pink Dots by Simon Paul
Illustration of Legendary Pink Dots by Simon Paul


On So Lonely in Heaven, the latest album from Legendary Pink Dots, the long-running psychedelic band leads listeners deeper into a tech dystopian landscape that doesn’t quite feel like fiction. A deleted file leads to disaster where all you can do is “pray to the server, pray to the cloud” on “The Sound of the Bell.”  A persona lives on after the body dies and the organs have been donated in “Pass the Accident.” It’s all very much within the universe that singer and lyricist Edward Ka-Spel has been building across the band’s vast catalog for the past 45 years, where scenarios that blur the line between sci-fi, fantasy and reality are told with a good dose of dark humor. 

Where the band’s 2022 album, The Museum of Human Happiness, essentially documented the COVID-19 pandemic, this time around, Ka-Spel drew inspiration from AI. “My experience of artificial intelligence isn’t all that great,” he admits on a recent call from his home outside of London. 

However, Ka-Spel had caught wind of AI-generated lyrics produced in the style of his own. “It was passable in that it was eloquent,” he says. “It was, I guess, coherent.”

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Interview

Anja Huwe on New Xmal Deutschland Box Set and Returning to the Live Stage

German goth band Xmal Deutschland, Hamburg, 1987 (Photo Kevin Cummins)
Xmal Deutschland box set, Gift: The 4AD Years is out on May 9, 2025 (Photo: Kevin Cummins)

Last February, Anja Huwe took to the stage at the Grauzone Festival in The Hague for a set that included songs from Xmal Deutschland, the post-punk outfit she fronted throughout the 1980s. Huwe hadn’t performed these songs live since the band’s demise some 35 years earlier. In fact, after Xmal Deutschland, Huwe stepped away from the stage to focus on her career as a visual artist. Meanwhile, songs like “Mondlicht,”  “Incubus Succubus” and “Qual” have become classics of the era. Out in the crowd were multiple generations of fans. 

“I had to go out there and I saw these people, so many people, so I just tried to concentrate,” Huwe says, adding with a laugh, “I’ve got to get it right.”

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