L.A.Drones!
Introducing L.A.Drones!; photographed by Leva Ann.
Currently making some big buzz about the greater Los Angeles area, our friend Rachel Mason introduced us to L.A.Drones!, a duo of disguised identities that operate under the the handles Kontrol Remoto and Darlingtonia Brackets. Performing with bandanas and masks that prominently feature Xs on them, the L.A.Drones! alludes to drones that have become a part of our everyday existence coupled with the Spanish wordplay where ladrones in English translates to thieves. With their debut album The Name Of This Band Is L.A.Drones! available now from the Oakland imprint This Starcraft—L.A.Drones! present the world premiere of their nu-techno, post-industrial invitational video that begs the questions, “Don’t Want You Dance?”. Invited by Michael Stock to host their tape release party May 22 at Part Time Punks at The Echo, Kontrol Remoto and Darlingtonia Brackets will play 80s French synth legends KaS Product (playing their first stateside shows), with a later unveiling of the album on red vinyl in late August at HM157.
Featuring combined concert footage & film the group’s travels, the Calvin Goode and Ernesto Reynoso video for L.A.Drones!’ “Don’t Want You Dance?” captures a wild Tuesday performance held at LA’s Los Globos where the duo performed alongside Cellars, Terminal A, & Obo Des. Featuring the slick moves and pretty faces from fans & festive friends-L.A.Drones! roll with a posse of dancers that includes (but not limited to, mind you) Tristene Roman, Allen Norton, Cameron Tyme Edison, Matt Sherin, Adam Brooks, Lee Busch, Cooper T. Moll, Heather Galipo, Cleo Hoover, Maren McConnell, Fenex, Jean-Paul Miller, Chris Nowak, Xe Davis, Peter Kalisch, Joe Gamache, Daniel L Munoz and Max. As Darlingtonia begs for the listener/viewer/ear & eye of the beholder’s soul, the visuals take you on a psychedelic trip into fantastic locales of lesser known splendors. Prepare yourself to go on a hyper-drive trip through Chiapas, the Sonora Desert in Mexico, the breathaking vistas of Huasteca Potosina-San Luis Potosi, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Tonina & Palenque Pyramids & riding along the Mexican roads of Chiapas / Huasteca, Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, Sinaloa ants at work, Sir James Surrealist Garden Xilitla in Huasteca Potosina-San Luis Potosi, Tijuana, Nevada roads, Venice Beach LA, La Mision Beach & Rosarito Noria in Baja California, Mazatlán Beach in Sinaloa, and more in just over six minutes. L.A.Drones! took the time to chat with us in the following interview feature.
Take us to the very dawning of L.A.Drones and what sorts of events brought about this masked endeavor?
Back in the summer of 2013, a little before returning to Mexico City—where we had our hideout at the time—we were on tour in Los Angeles with our previous band Lineas Albies: We used the initials of Lineas Albies for L.A.DRONES! in order to continue with our hidden identities. Lineas Albies is a bizarre electronic post punk band with guitars, sequences, synths, and with the fierceness of a punk rock band live; however, and like many other post punk bands, we understood our last album more electronically (The Pink Album[2010]). I guess we were evolving or changing our skin. In fact our shows had like two parts, some songs were electronics with synths and others with guitar. I remember doing “1969”—a Stooges cover. Really powerful blend of guitar noise industrial electronics super destroy to finish the shows, that was a mix of everything.
We had to return to Mexico City, when we were invited to play in a party, so we delay our trip to give our last concert. The night was amazing! Especially with the electronics, and as many times it happened to us, we ended up spinning at the after party. We throw some electroclash, EBM with Gigolo Record and more European stuff—for some reason people just wanted that night electronic dance music, which we thought was weird ’cause we did not see that too often in L.A., at least not at that time. It was fun, people danced wildly throughout the session! That night we decided that we would start the side project, that we were thinking of doing before. And that night we saw it very clear; we want to do electronic music for the dance floor and we wanted to do it so bad. We were so inspired by the idea of mixing our classical rock souls with electronic music. Our idea was always work with the same bpm (127, we like prime numbers) so that the tracks were interchangeable, creating the feeling of a dance live session with our own sequences, samplers, synths and other devices. The concept was drone per se, with the drone references to inspiring bands like Suicide or Spacemen 3, E.A.R., Can, Crash Course in Science, Silver Apples, Coil, the concrete music of Terry Riley, the first Cabaret Voltaire or the dub music with the acid house and early Detroit techno, and the whole disco and funk music of James Brown, that is basically repetitive and drone. After all, drone music comes from Africa—to go into a trance and get in contact with the Gods with a single note or a simple drone sequence and the repetition as a concept. This was what worked well on Don´t Want You Dance? or Horrible Dreams. The idea was to mix tracks, and each concert was different.
And so L.A.Drones! play their first concert. It took place in VOLTA on December 2013, in a very cool festival of alternative music in Mexico City that still today dedicates its line up to experimental music, noise and sound art. Our second show was on February 2014 at HM157, our favorite venue in Los Angeles. By then Give Up was born—although, less dronic [sic], the concept still remained—open electronic music played live. The songs were born out of a live improvisational process. Although we began to have more defined songs, everything was changing and live improvisation made each concert different. All sounds were separated. They were their own entities, we went with the controller, and mute and throwing tracks, mixing them together. In the beginning four songs were created that took 40 minutes to play live. As new songs emerged through this live experimental mixture we decided to reduce them to half and simplify the concept to go faster in live shows.
This was how L.A.Drones! songs were born: playing live in the studio and on the stage. It is our mobile studio that travels everywhere, and of course to stage. By May 2015 we thought that we had enough music to make an LP so in the summer we locked ourselves three months to record everything and our first record was born, The Name of This Band Is L.A.Drones! with 7 songs, which is what we do now live, and what we call our first capsule. Second capsule will be created by the same way like we did the first one. That’s our plan, the methodology will not change. First goes the live show and after the record, and that will be our second capsule…
Artists of elusive mystery—L.A.Drones!—photographed by Amy Darling.
Describe for us the wordplay of your moniker, and the Spanish word for thieves; what sorts of connections do the two of you make between things like thieves, your home in LA, and the concept of drones?
With the initials of our previous band Lineas Albies and the concept of drone easily came the name, L.A.Drones! with such a magic that ladrones in the Spanish language means thieves, and really quickly, we came masked as ladrones—badasses like Diabolic, Phantomas, El Zorro, The Shadow, or similar characters from the comic books—and hidden identities like our favorites The Residents or like We Are The Walrous—that would really work also—especially to differentiate L.A. Drones! from our old Project—also we find the concept of uniformity attractive, like Devo, Kraftwerk, etc.
Yes, somehow we relate electronic music with the uniform, synthesizers, the revolutionary army, the Sci Fi, robots, future, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Logan’s Run—all examples of how sci-fi brings to everyone the future-fabric that they will uniform themselves in. And also traveling through space and time. That’s all there. There is also a lot of Sex Fetish concept introduced throughout Synth Pop through Crash—the book by JG Ballard, which had also so much influence on Cabaret Voltaire, the first Human League, Soft Cell and as The Normal with “Warm Leatherette”, Chris & Cosey—well, the fetishist concept is basic in synth music. And of course black music, the Black Panthers and uniformity as Public Enemy (Terminator X, Malcolm X), we can’t forget that in the end we are all some whities using the 4X4 beat invented by the blacks, with the blues, funk, disco, and rock. We had our suits, so we just needed masks—we wanted something simple, easy to make, something a little scary and at the same time create mystery—that was easy!! And the X, ancestral symbol, the unknown in algebra, the forbidden, the number six in numerology, multiplication, an amulet against poison—of contemporary music [laughs]—X means the search for the new, the lover of the the unknown…the X-Men of Chris Claremont, and the most important, On Earth “We Belong To The X Generation” (very few left). In Spain and other parts of the world such as China, an X scratched into the stone or written in chalk outside of a house signifies a message to a thief that the residence is a good place to rob. And tacháaaan! L.A. The City of Los Angeles, the city where the whole idea was conceived, and the city where we will be back soon, and where we live now. Everything was very magical from the beginning.
And what do we like to steal as ladrones—thieves? We had this hobby a long time ago. In the first LP of our previous band, the songs were constructed with samples, as a collage, it was crazy ’cause you might find the piano of Lennon, Michael Rother Guitar, the Warren Ellis violin, the moans of Lux Interior, all in one song—what a band, a total treat! Then adding our own vocal melodies, synths, whatever—it was like making the [Great Wall of China] or something. It all makes sense that being the music lovers and collectors that we are, the concept of sampling would be very attractive for us to work with. So the name L.A.Drones! again came to adjust well to the concept. Stealing samples was part of the plan, as the primary basis of the creation of our songs, besides programmations [sic], drum machines, etc. So we went to our old files, “la samplería” with lots of gigabytes of samples recorded from our records in the past. Cabaret Voltaire, they seem to be our favorite, most inspiring resource for L.A.Drones! To this date, I guess Richard H. Kirk is an idol for us, ha! And all this work, to say that using samples is very tricky stuff, you have to pay royalties for it or it must be covered to avoid detection. Sometimes the sample is merely the spark that starts the process of creating a song—like an engine you have built a whole song around it, in the end sometimes you decide that the sample no longer works good for the song and you get rid of it. But still the sample was so important to make the song come to life. It is always fascinating. X marks the spot where not only the sample is stolen, but also where the treasure is found—the pirate’s booty—from which the center of the song flowers or perhaps explodes. The samples we steal is actually homage paid to who we steal it from. The engine of our next new track, it is the bass from a song of The Saints.
What should we be expecting May 22 with your big tape release at Part Time Punks, playing with 80s KAS PRODUCT?
Obviously we will play The Name Of This Band Is L.A.Drones! tape/LP which our beloved label from Oakland/San Francisco, This Starcraft, will release to the world on May 22! You should expect an awesome L.A.Drones! show and we really expect to sell the 100 cassettes, limited copies [laughs]! If we have time we will play one of the two covers we have like “Cosmic Car” by Cybotron, or “Fashion” by Bowie, or maybe that one that we are programming now—a cover by the fucking king of the 80s, which is Prince, super important for the synthesized music.
Interested in hearing some favorite anecdotes from two of you about the live performances that comprised the video for “Don’t Want You Dance?”
It was a very exciting day. We had just returned from Europe and we had a show with friends’ bands that Cellars had organized and many of the friends who were there we haven’t seen for 4 months, so it was very thrilling. Suddenly we found out that our sound card and the laptop did not work, the jet lag, maybe? (seriously, machines also suffer this kind of “shock to the system”) so we had to run back to the house to fix the problem. We were the third ones at the stage, so we had time also to drink maybe a little more than usual, with all that excitement, to limit the situation and stress. This takes you always to get more crazy, and the fact that we had so many issues with the machines and were able to fix it and do the show finally—it was an explosion, we really had so much fun at the stage! Problems take you always to be in more crazy state, with all the adrenaline totally up, ha! Many wires and many machines can give you some problems, ha! But magic happens again cause Calvin Goode and his marvelous camera, captured everything, the whole live performance. Thank you Calvin, and Ernesto Reynoso who also capture real dancers in the L.A.Drones! shows, [the] venues, Los Globos in Sunset and Honey Trap and The Redwood in DTLA. The rest of the travel shoots and the art is by L.A.Drones!.
As a group that knows who to sample, who to alter, what to emulate (and when); I would really be interested in hearing about synthesizing modern models with the new approaches that you two employee through your dark dancing/laser scanning styles.
This is all about a sonic experiment that, without abandoning strong electronic rhythm, joins styles such as electro, kraut rock, dub, acid, space, synth, noise, disco, funk, never forgetting melody, through the interaction of loops and drones, with the manipulation of these sounds playing live, with effects being squeezed to the extreme. Voices, two synthesizers, effects modules, plus pedals, and a mixer combine in order to generate a unique experience. So, we already had several machines that we bought years ago, we put all of them together, a synth, mixer, modules effect, many pedals octaving, flanging, distorting—we’ve got a new more gorgeous synth and many many wire. As we said before, we go like nomads with our mobile studio through the world creating our sonorous capsules in different houses, couches, places, stages and so on…
L.A.Drones! get dramatic; photographed by Christopher Samuel Ashworth.
What else is happening in LA and elsewhere right now that you both have to tell the whole world about?
What happens in the rest of the world nowadays we don´t know too much about, because when you live in a city like L.A. it happens the same thing like to the Angelenos, that you get to the core, and stocking up (hanging out?) with the bands around, listening to music from your friends, go to the concerts of your friends, you listen in the car to the cassettes that your friends barter with you. The music and the scene itself absorbs you and at the end you don´t know about the rest of the galaxy. It happens very often that when we hear something that a trendy magazine says is good, it is actually bullshit, so we don´t trust too much the topicality—we actually hate the current pop music. We nurture with people around us. It is a reality that we live. We have friends that are doing amazing music. Today we have received by post the last Greg Gomberg [from The Centimeters] solo record, a good friend of ours, and it sounds so cool, we love it. The local scene right now is so good. It is much more exciting than years ago when we came in 2010-12, then it was more hardcore and rocker. Lately there is more post punk, more electronics, more synths, more avant-garde, and L.A.Drones!. We feel so proud to be a part of this as an electronic duo of the city with our dronic, sonic, melodic, and at the same time, influenced by the synth of the end of the 70s and early 80s, electro, techno Detroit like Cybotron, with the concept of the motorik of the kraut rock, predominant in Neu and Can and people like Laika made sooo good in the 90, in the so-called post-rock, the whole concept, led to a contemporary music (we are a cocktail for sure, no doubt). We believe in the cocktail and we hate the cliché. The cliché is a shit bitch, total bullshit. Viva la cocktelera! People like B´52s, mixing disco music, with surf, no wave, but trying to create their own sound. We know that to do something totally new is a really difficult matter, but at least we should try. For us the worst is to do the fucking cliché and be the new Sonic Youth for example. They however were inspired by Velvet Underground, Crime, Stooges, Swell Maps, they are the shakers of many things from the no wave era, but they would not imitate Velvets, and that is the cool thing about them, cause at the end they have found their own sound. So when music is a fucking cliché it is so boring. The last years we’ve found in California many interesting projects, but in general the music world sucks. It is very sweetened and very awful, no substance at all, we don´t like it, when we listen to the latest popular songs we actually think that we have not missed anything at all.
Spring/summer itinerary for L.A. Drones?
Since our return from Europe in mid September we were almost eight months non-stop playing almost every weekend, some times two or three times solely in L.A. and surroundings. We can almost say that we were on tour for seven months locally here in L.A. As we will not have the vinyl until late August—which is coming out on the label This Starcraft—we want to continue working on the new songs we already have for the second LP. Surely we will continue playing some concerts during the spring/summer, but only a few until the VINYL RELEASE PARTY at the end of August in HM157—a big party, that you should not miss. The idea is to expand our repertoire of songs. Right now we have seven plus three versions, and another seven in the pipeline for our second LP. From September we would like to tour Northern California and the Bay, and maybe more, lets see what happens…
L.A.Drones! album debut The Name Of This Band Is L.A.Drones! is available now via the Oakland label This Starcraft.
