After six years retooling its sublime noise and handling its tortured business, Los Angeles art-rock trio Autolux is releasing its highly anticipated Transit Transit in January. Now it just has to settle on who’s going to release the full-length, which is finished.
“We’re not signed right now, and all the labels we’re talking to don’t want to put it out in the fourth quarter,” explained titanium-enhanced drummer Carla Azar. Wired.com caught the band on the road to the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco, the first stop on Autolux’s national tour. “Decision on a label has been tough for us, because we’ve maintained ownership of our music, and we’ll be giving that up.”
Azar and her wall-of-sound compatriots — guitarist Greg Edwards and bassist Eugene Goreshter, who all share vocal duties, depending on the tune — considered going it alone and creating an independent online label to distribute its flawless 2004 debut Future Perfect and future work. But the time and tech just isn’t right yet.
“We considered it,” Azar said, “but that world is still being developed. We’re open to everything, but right now we don’t want to be a record label. It’s just too much work.”
That’s good news for what labels remain after the music industry, already wobbling on creaky knees thanks to the digital age, was severely downsized in the economic meltdown. Although it has only one full-length release to its name, Autolux is still one of the few bands that challenges listeners in accessible, riveting ways. It could be one of the few bands that considers music art at all, interested as it is in shredding sonic envelopes rather than pushing product. Not that it’s easy.
“That envelope gets heavier the older you get,” Azar confessed. “You try to outdo yourself, and at some point you realize that you’ve pushed quite a bit. But then it gets heavier again.”
Serving up a kinetic synesthesia of rock, psychedelia, punk, machine music and unabashed pop, Transit Transit hopscotches the genre matrix with confidence. “High Chair” marries digital beats to Edwards’ pedal fetish, sounding like Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” on steroids. The sustained angularity of “Census” unspools into a sexy jam, before fading into waves of distortion. From the anthemic thrash of “Supertoys” and the dissonant drone of “Kissproof” to the fractured lullabye of “The Science of Imaginary Solutions” and mechanized stomp of “Audience No. 2” (embedded below), Autolux’s latest release pushes its hybrid sound over the edge.
LISTEN: Autolux, “Audience No. 2”
“It has that element to it,” Azar said. “We were in an excited state when we made it. I’ve done things on Transit Transit that I’ve never done before.”
That’s saying something, given the trio’s decorated resume. Its roots formed after Edwards and Azar met while scoring Nobel-winning playwright Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Both served time in other bands: Edwards was the ax master of Failure. Azar has pounded skins for Ednaswap, Vincent Gallo, PJ Harvey and more.
With Goreshter, Autolux has collaborated with Australian graffiti artist Kill Pixie and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. The band was handpicked to open for musical hotshots like Nine Inch Nails, Beck and The White Stripes. Its first label? The now-defunct DMZ, formed by musician and producer T-Bone Burnett and cinema auteurs the Coen Brothers. The cultural hyperlinks go on.
“One of Greg’s favorite writers is James Joyce,” Azar added. “That’s just the way his mind works. But we’re all influenced by a wide spectrum of work, and gravitate towards the experimental and the mainstream, whether that’s The Beatles and The Kinks or Bat For Lashes and My Bloody Valentine. But it’s a natural thing, not something we try to affect. We approach songs simply, but try to warp them in ways we haven’t heard before.”
One towering influence is Jimi Hendrix, who revolutionized rock and tech onstage and in the studio. Using innovations in feedback, distortion, gear and more, Hendrix created Gordian knots to be untangled with spiritual fervor. You can sense his band’s legacy in the squalls of Edwards’ fretwork, Goreshter’s chilled vocals and especially in post-production.
“I’ve always loved the experimentation of Hendrix’s mixing,” Azar said. “The way it was interwoven and panned was mind-blowing. At its time, no one had heard anything like it. He had a huge influence on all of us.”
Hendrix’s obsessive attention to the realm beyond conventional reach is nearly a lost art, Azar argued. Some of the blame can be laid at technology’s doorstep. In our age of Garageband, artistic production is a minute-made possibility, watered down in vision and exponentially increased in volume and distribution. The music industry’s dogged mass production of bubble-pop hasn’t helped either. But Azar thinks the problem is simpler.
“I think it’s laziness,” she concluded. “Music has become too referential. Artists like Hendrix were trying to find new paths, but that era is going away. Artists today don’t really have their own identities, because they give too much of themselves away. I love being on the edge in my work. I love feeling like I’ve accomplished something.”
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