2007: The GOWNS

California woven, The Gowns synthesize several musical interests: the formal minimalism and elasticity of folk music, the abrasion of crass-era anarchist punk, the directness and lyricism of grunge rock and the alienating, arguably anti-human time bending techniques of modern digital signal processing. They like to write songs that might fool you into thinking you’d heard before. They want to tell the bleakest and most affecting memories and fantasies of their childhood and adolescence.

Their first EP, dangers of intimacy, was released by whitman, a freaky denizen of Riverside CA, on his folktale handmade cdr label, in 2005. Their second project RED STATE will be released on cardboard records in brooklyn.

They have and continue to tour the country with thier cracked digital storytelling gospel “noise”, too wimpy for “rock”, too ugly and self-sabotaged for “folk”, too simple and straightforward for “free” music group.

Erika Anderson grew up in the dive bars and rotten graveyards of south dakota. she played guitar and oscillators in the cultworthy southern calfornia noise-folk outfit Amps for Christ, co-fronted the halloween hospital rock band Blue Silk Sutures with Tara Tavi, and has her own impressive stable of 4track acoustic death rock songs. she is a fierce and beautiful nordic freak and an effortless memorizer of pop lyrics.

Ezra Buchla was born in the same crumbling berkeley mansion the gowns practice in today. he is the son of synthesizer inventor don buchla and is an accomplished music technologist in his own right. he contributed the signature disjointed horrorshow vocals, noise slices and sour church melodies to the first 4 (or six?) albums by the los angeles rock band Mae Shi, thereby garnering piles of jittery praise and crushing disdain. he has also recorded an absurd number of half-baked solo and collaborative experiments.

Jacob Felix Heule is an improvising drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose music spans the spectrum from overwhelming brutality to reductionist austerity. Free improv, noise, black metal and gamelan all have influenced his aesthetic and technique.

Artist (photo by Photographer)