To Live and Shave in L.A.

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Founded by avant-garde iconoclast Tom Smith, To Live and Shave in L.A. is a band that featured Ben Wolcott, Rat Bastard, Weasel Walter, Nandor Nevai and other noise luminaries. Their approach and energy inspired scores of similar bands, and eventually produced seven known offshoots, two of which included TLASILA members. To Live and Shave in L.A. 2 did not feature Smith, but To Live and Shave in L.A. 3 appeared on at least one occasion with Smith.

1 History
2 Philosophy
3 Discography
4 External links

[edit] History

To Live and Shave in L.A. (TLASILA) arose from Smith's previous band, Peach of Immortality, that terminated in 1990 after a six-year run. After moving to South Florida in 1991, Smith befriended South Beach post-punk scenester Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, and the two quickly set about crafting a new sound based on a mélange of the former's love of musique concrète, dub, '70s glam, free-improvised music, and the works of a variety of transgressive authors and filmmakers. TLASILA were acclaimed as the most literary group to arrive on the avant-garde rock scene since The Fall, and they made no effort to dilute their lyrics or soften their approach. Falestra was an experienced audio engineer and bassist with both manic technique and a penchant for throwing his instrument into the crowd. Smith wrote the lyrics, developed the sonic collages which served as the band's backdrops, and matched Felestra's stage aggression lurch for sybaritic lurch. They were initially associated with Miami's burgeoning noise-rock scene of the early 1990s, but neither To Live and Shave in L.A. nor their contemporaries (primarily Harry Pussy) could be so easily labeled.

1994 saw the release of their first compact disc, 1994's 30-minuten männercreme, and the addition of Oscillator player Benjamin Wolcott. A flood of recordings followed, many of which would not be issued until years later. With Wolcott's departure in 1996 (he joined another Miami group, the "neo-scum" quartet Frosty), TLASILA as a live entity weathered numerous changes. Following a pair of European tours featuring Smith, Falestra, and a revolving cast of stand-ins, To Live and Shave in L.A. returned to America with their "PRE (R)ocktober 1999" tour, featuring a newly expanded roster that included "brutal prog" kingpin Weasel Walter, percussionist Nandor Nevai, and stripper Misty Martinez.

The quintet split up following a festival appearance in 2000. Some sources say the newcomers (accompanied by Falestra) split from Smith to explore a different aesthetic approach, while others suggest that they resigned before Smith could dismiss them due to their poor performance at the aforementioned festival. After the formation of the TLASILA spin-off To Live and Shave in L.A. 2, a variety of "clones" flooded the underground, sporting such names as "I Love L.A.", "To Live and Shave in L.A. 1975", "I Live in L.A.", "Born in East L.A.", and the like. (There was also an "alternate" TLASILA 2, which only served to further blur the distinction between Shave-ian representation and reality.) There was no To Live and Shave in L.A. proper to meet the demand, however. Smith called a halt to the project in 2000, angered with Falestra's decision to tour with TLASILA 2 (and their recycling of old TLASILA radio broadcasts as "original" TLASILA 2 recordings). Instead, Smith formed the neo-actionist ensemble OHNE with Swiss performance art provocateur Dave Phillips, who had previously been a member of avant-garde outfits Schimpfluch Gruppe and Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock. Completed by the addition of German noisecore musician Daniel Lowenbrucke and Swiss laptop specialist Reto Mader in 2002, OHNE embarked on a thirteen nation tour of Eastern Europe, releasing their debut disc OHNE 1 on prestigious Austrian imprint Mego. Other live recordings followed.

The spin-off craze quickly subsided, and was already a receding memory when TLASILA's autobiographical two-disc set, the Smith-produced The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg, was released in 2002. Wigmaker received wide acclaim, landing at the top of many critics' best-of lists, and setting in motion a reconciliation between the group's founders.

Falestra and Smith revived To Live and Shave in L.A. in late 2003, assembling what many observers claim to be the best line-up in the group's history. Multi-instrumentalist (and MTV2 personality) Andrew W.K. joined the band, as did respected guitarist/producer Don Fleming (a friend of Smith's since the mid-1970s) and Mark Morgan of New York neo-No Wave trio Sightings; Ben Wolcott also rejoined the flock. An archival disc (God and Country Rally!) and tour followed in September 2004. Their next studio album, the W.K./Fleming/Smith-produced Noon and Eternity (recorded at Sonic Youth's Echo Canyon facility in New York, and featuring performances by Thurston Moore), is scheduled for an October 31, 2006 release.

The group, augmented by Moore and Washington, D.C.-based musician/writer Chris Grier, debuted the Noon... material in the nation's capitol in January 2005 at The Black Cat, at the Moore/Grier-curated Noise Against Fascism festival, which featured like-minded artists such as Magik Markers, Paul Flaherty & Chris Corsano, Moore and Kim Gordon, and Andrew W.K.'s old Wolf Eyes bandmates Nate Young and Twig Harper, among others. The performance was documented by Sonic Youth cohort Chris Habib and drew wide notice in the U.S. and UK.

In April 2006, To Live and Shave in L.A. grew to an octet with the addition of percussionist Richard Russo. An August/September 2006 tour of Canada and the United States in support of their "chronological remix" compilation Horoscopo: Sanatorio de Moliere will be followed in late November by a more comprehensive American trek in support of Noon and Eternity. European dates have been announced for 2007.

[edit] Philosophy

In a Blastitude interview, Smith said that he created the band to develop the idea of PRE in contrast to what he called the wrong idea of "POST" (compare with the genre term "post-rock," coined by music critic Simon Reynolds), which he derides as the fallacy of an "errant supposition that spiffed-up or newly hatched movements supplant others fit for retirement." In other words, Smith sees all genres and movements as being part of the same essential energy and movement, and equally valid—as opposed to a Platonic or historical hierarchy structure—mirroring Friedrich Nietzsche's rejection of the progressive in favor of an Eternal Recurrence of the Same. (Alternatively, Smith, who as of 2005 was pursuing a Master's degree in Ethics, has been quoted as having "serious problems with Martin Heidegger's aesthetics," preferring the social pragmatism of George Herbert Mead and the bold progressivism of John Stuart Mill.) Smith first wrote of "PRE" in a 1980 issue of short-lived Athens, Georgia fanzine Hot Java.

According to the philosophy of PRE, Smith sees all art, high and low, as equivalent in worth, with the idea of "genre" as obsolete. He cites Witold Lutosławski, The Three Stooges, James Joyce, a Tom Verlaine guitar solo from Patti Smith's Horses album, "global student revolt and the inevitable erotic aftermath," and Edgar Allan Poe as influences and aesthetically co-mingling examples. He named his group after a Ron Jeremy porno parody of the film To Live and Die in L.A. as an example of this idea. When The Wire questioned the wisdom of his decision to recontextualize the title of Jeremy's low-budget video, Smith's response was congruent with the tenets of PRE: "the more exalted one's intent, the more insipid the moniker should be."