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DOWNLOADS
TLASILA's first album, 1994's 30-minuten männercreme, is now officially, completely, irrevocably sold-out. For those of you who've yet to hear it, however, there is a remedy...
To Live and Shave in L.A. - 30-minuten männercreme
Part One / Part Two
For more information on 30-mm, go here.
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To Live and Shave in L.A.'s second album was 1994's "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell. (Due to the cruel vicissitudes of fate, however, it was released in 1996 as the fourth in imperial succession.)
Below you'll find it ripped from the original master at the highest mp3 bitrate. Needless to mumble, we're offering it for free. Pull up Old Sparky and find a vein for your next lethal injection...
To Live and Shave in L.A. - "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell
Part One / Part Two
For more info on "Helen Butte" vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell, go here.
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We envisioned our third album, 1995's Vedder Vedder Bedwetter, as a pitiless, contiguous bombardment. Fifth Column refused to release it without concessions to bourgeois norms (i.e., providing their audience of portly Fetish Night devotees a quasi-comprehensible, oft-demarcated bodybag o' tunes), and thus the conceit was dashed on the shoals of hubris...
To Live and Shave in L.A. - Vedder Vedder Bedwetter (original contiguous mix)
Here.
For more info on Vedder Vedder Bedwetter, go here.
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To Live and Shave in L.A. - An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers
As some of you may be aware, we dashed out Mitchell Brothers on a dare from Ned Hayden, the erstwhile Action Swinger and COO of Audible Hiss (the short-lived, Caroline-distributed imprint). Mr. Hayden thought our recordings a trifle mediated, so he threw down an ill-fitting, resin-encrusted gauntlet:
"Write, record, mix, and master an album in an afternoon, and I'll release it."
Of course we took the bait! (Our 2007 Savage Land release, Les Tricoteuses, presented a more rarified perspective on the material, repositing the conceit in the process.)
Get it here.
For more info on the album, go here.
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Basic Info
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 tumultuous, evocative compositions can take the form of forty-minute Kuiper Belt freak-outs or dense, demonic, two-minute pipebomb 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 by Tom Smith in tiny Adel, Georgia in 1990, but was nurtured in Miami Beach, Florida following his move to that soporific, semi-bucolic cultural wasteland in early 1991. Smith, an alumnus of late 1970s/early 1980s dada-improv outsider cabals Boat Of and Peach of Immortality, also sulked and snarled in the earliest (1985) incarnation of Jon Spencer's legendary Pussy Galore, and enjoyed a brief tenure as a member of high school friend Don Fleming's heavy psych outfit Velvet Monkeys. TLASILA originally comprised only Smith, but by October 1992 he was joined by Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, a veteran of many aesthetically disruptive (and equally ignored) South Florida projects (most infamously, Scraping Teeth), and in late 1993 by Ben Wolcott, a filmmaker and lifelong circuit bender whose mammoth, screeching oscillators sent early Shave audiences running for cover. At its 2007 apex, the TLASILA collective numbered nearly twenty very seriously ill patients. Smith and his cohorts have released dozens of albums on a variety of international labels and have toured the world with jagged frequency for nearly two decades. Smith and Falestra have produced upwards of 150 albums for a dizzying array of artists and puzzled record companies, the former's tending toward those which either refute or disrupt categorization, and the latter's toward pharma-pop whimsy or gutter-fed din. Since the mid-1990s, Bastard has toured relentlessly with comedic noise troupe Laundry Room Squelchers, and hosts the annual International Noise Conference in Miami and various global locales. Wolcott now performs solo or in duo/trio configurations as Oscillator. Smith continues to rend membranes as a member of the neo-Aktionist quartet OHNE, transatlantic quintet Rope Cosmetology, and Hannover-based tape and voice duo Three Resurrected Drunkards. With the late Gerard Klauder, Smith was a co-director of now legendary Smack Shire label. He currently runs Karl Schmidt Verlag from Hannover, Germany.
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Bio:
To Live and Shave in L.A. was founded by Tom Smith in Adel, Georgia, USA. Smith had previously been a member of Boat Of (Athens, GA, 1979-1983), Peach of Immortality (Washington, DC, 1984-1990), Velvet Monkeys (Washington, DC, 1984), and Pussy Galore (Washington, DC, 1985-6); the first TLASILA demos were recorded in May 1990 and sent to Don Fleming for appraisal. Mr. Fleming gave Tom his imprimatur, and the juggernaut lurched into gear.
In January 1991, Smith moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where he often crossed paths with Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra. Rat was a baggage handler for Delta Airlines who owned a quizzical music boutique and was co-proprietor of Sync, a recording studio located on Lincoln Road Mall (then a desolate, and infinitely romantic, strip of despair). Tom booked himself into the facility to cut the Spatters of a Royal Sperm EP, a quartet of songs that laid the aesthetic and narrative foundation for TLASILA. After abortive sessions with other engineers, TS turned to the more simpatico Falestra - a fellow freak and veteran of various dead-end proto-noise outfits - for assistance. In short order, the recording was completed, and a 500-year friendship began. The initial lineup of TLASILA (still "officially" known as Peach of Immortality while the Spatters EP release - which ultimately failed to materialize - was being sorted) was Smith, performing solo with tape and radio backing. In early 1992, filmmaker Oscar Perez and former L'Trimm vocalist Rachel "The Lady Tigra" Derougemont joined Smith for a sporadic fourteen-month juncture. Harry Pussy's Bill Orcutt also joined Tom on stage throughout this early period, and each iteration of the ensemble landed songs on TLASILA's debut album. Rat Bastard joined the live unit in October 1992, memorably playing a block of amplified concrete during his first Churchill's performance with Perez and Smith... After two years of continuous recording, Tom had amassed a larder of eighty songs. Following a lengthy post-production regimen, To Live and Shave in L.A.'s debut album, 30-minuten männercreme, was released on Smith's Love Is Sharing Pharmaceuticals label.
(30-mm.)
During a Miami Beach rooftop party in the summer of 1993, Tom met electronics whiz, undisputed global oscillator overlord, and cocktail party host supreme Ben Wolcott. As Miles Davis' Dark Magus album was the only music Mr. Wolcott allowed on his stereo during the evening, an invitation to join TLASILA was reflexively extended....
After the release of 30-mm, the Smith/Bastard/Wolcott 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); 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.)
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Smith's overriding philosophy? PRE. His dictum? Genre is obsolete. (It is.)
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, who was spotted quite by accident on a side street near the venue and was deputized for an evening...
The 1999-2000 edition of To Live and Shave in L.A. comprised Smith, Bastard, 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, Graham, Gaybomb, Sickboy, and Balazs soon followed...
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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.
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