Checking up on: Fresno drummers out in the world.
Plus, a new single from Otis Reed and a "Lost 90s EP."
One way to quick check the health of a community’s music scene is to count the number of musicians it’s putting out into the world. Like, how many Fresno band/players are out there doing cool shit?
This week, we’ll look at drummers.
Last we saw Audrey Johnson, she was playing on tour (and on several festival dates) with the the psychedelic noir surf band La Luz.
Currently, she is winding down a set of tour dates with Teri Gender Bender, who is the founding member of Le Butcherettes. The band is on its final night opening for The Mars Volta.
Trivia: Johnson is also part of ORLG, the experimental rock collective/side project from the Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López.
Upcoming: Johnson will be back in town next weekend to join Fatty Cakes and the Puff Pastries singer Amber Fargano as part of the The Fresno Music Industry Meetup. The event runs from 1-3 p.m. Oct. 29 at the Labyrinth Art Collective and is free.
Ray Moore is currently out on tour with Postmodern Jukebox. The band is a rotating musical collective known for doing vintage interpretations of more modern-day hits.
For instance, this version of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” a live version of which the band shared last week. It features Moore on drums AND vocals and is fairly mesmerizing.
Moore has played with any number of projects in Fresno, including his own Ray Moore Band (and the Ray Moore Experience). He was also part of the weekly jazz nights at the old Landmark nightclub.
Recently, Antonio (Tony) Montanez showed up looking all official like in pictures with Y La Bamba. The band (with Montanez on drums) was playing/recording a segment for the second season of Bands of Enchantment Albuquerque Sessions.
Y La Bamba is the indie alternative/experimental band from singer-songwriter/guitarist Luz Elena Mendoza.
Montanez has sat behind the kit a slew of Fresno projects including, by not limited to Sun Umbra, Kings of Blackstone, Neptunes, Style Like Revelators, The Jules Winnfield, Danielle Rondero and the Nitty Gritty and a bunch of stuff with Richard Giddens. He is also behind the psych-soul project Fats LaBell.
Otis Reed, ‘Don’t Go Public’
Rapper Otis Reed dropped a video tease of his latest single (and a possible new project in the works).
The song is called “Don’t Go Public.” It’s produced by Lil Dillionaire and is available on streaming platforms now.
The one-minute video tease is being hash tagged as yellowroomsessions.
What we’ve seen so far is quick video footage of Reed in a yellow room (obviously) rapping to a single mic hanging from the ceiling. The song is “Don’t Go Public,” though the video is labeled “Yellow Room Session 1,” and because it is just a teaser, leads one to believe there is likely more coming.
From the Archives: Strip Twister, ‘The Lost 1990 EP (Remastered)’
Here’s a bit of Fresno music history/trivia/six degrees of separation-ness that I didn’t know until now.
In the early 1990s, Nate Butler played with Mark Ribera, Darren Embry, Perry Hodge and Brian Hamada in a band called Strip Twister.
The band recorded a handful of studio tracks in 1990, but, as often happens in these cases, broke up before the recordings could be officially released.
The songs (and the band) were kind of lost to the history of it all until earlier this year, when the original two-inch master tapes were found, restored and remastered.
The seven songs were originally Ken Carlton Recording in Madera. Peter Wolf did the remastering at his WolfSound Audio Engineering studio and Butler released the so-called “The Lost 1990 EP” on Bandcamp, last week.
The songs have an early Steely Dan-ness to them, in the vocal harmonies and instrumentation (it’s the horns maybe?). But there is also harder California funk vibe that runs underneath the whole thing (like, Faith No More, pre ”Angle Dust”??).
Check out the comments on this post for some cool thoughts from Butler on his relationship with the late guitarist Perry Hodge.
That’s it for this week. Remember you can now hear me on the Homegrown Show Sundays at 8 p.m. on New Rock 104.1 FM. If you have anything you think I need to be looking at or listening to, feel free to let me know: jtehee@gmail.com