New music alert: Tchiz/Chango offer up an improvisational tinnitus lullaby

Plus, Crystal Palace closes the doors on a country music landmark.

As a musical entity, there is the thing Tchiz/Chango was meant to be and the thing that it became.

The idea was to start a synth-and-guitar duo to play live gigs.

What actually happened was an experimental recording project and a set of albums that were released earlier this month. You can find them now across streaming platforms.

The Tchiz in Tchiz/Chango is Tracy Chisholm, a sound engineer/producer out of Pasadena whose credits include work with Mark Lanegan, Scott Weiland and American Music Club.

Story has it Chisholm was asked to work on one of Frank Black’s solo albums, but turned it down because Black wanted to do stuff with drum machines.

Chisholm did produce the Miss Alans “Big Sun,” Ep in 1995 and more recently collaborated with band’s singer/guitarist Scott Oliver on Electron Graffiti Kult. They released a pair of albums in 2021, which I wrote about at the time.

Chango is Sparklejet guitarist/vocalist Victor Sotello, channeling Zoot Suit Chango, the moniker he used when playing solo gigs in Fresno back in the day.

Side note reminder on that Fresno show Sparklejet has coming up Aug. 31 at the Tower Theatre Lounge.

Technically, Tchiz/Chango is an offshoot of Electron Graffiti Kult.

Chisholm was looking to recreate that synth/guitar sound for live performances and reached out to Sotelo, who had recently moved to southern California and was available.

“He came over a couple of weekends and we recorded direct, with headphones on,” Chisholm told me in an interview last week. “It started as that.”

Those recordings became the thing.

All of the sudden, the pair had 12 or 15 different ideas, which would eventually become two albums; the 10-track “A Tinnitus Lullabye” and the accompanying 13-track “External Acoustic Meatus.”

The albums were crafted a few hours at a time, over the course of a several nonconsecutive weekends.

But the pair weren’t writing songs. At least, not in the tweaking sort of hem- and haw- way of the perfectionists. Instead, they recorded whatever came up, and then let that sit for a week or two, Chisholm says, just to forget about it for awhile.

“And this kind of stuff surfaced.”

In a way, the process was like working backwards into a song. “Instead of starting with a song and adding the frilly stuff, it started with the frilly stuff.”

Which suited Sotelo. He’s known as a loud rock-band guy, but he grew up a jazz kid and never stopped appreciating instrumental, improvised music. With Chisholm, he was able to dip his feet into those things, and a do a bit of experimentation, too.

They eschewed the linear idea of songwriting and approached the compositions with minimal amounts of front-end editing.

“We just played the thing,” Sotelo says. “It was almost like the song writing itself in a way.”

The result is a set of musical collages that pull influence from Kings Crimson, Brian Eno and DJ Shadow’s seminal album “Endtroducing.”

Some key moments include: The guitar solo on “Elephants,” that Sotelo played, but Chisholm controlled and transformed through a series of whammy and delay pedals.

The sample of a Middle Eastern violin played forward and backwards that became the catalyst for “Baghdad Holiday.”

The field-recorded crickets chirps that became the rhythmic base on “Ganbri Groove.”

Closed: Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace

Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace was landmark music venue.

No less than the Los Angles Times called it a county music mecca, and even if you’ve never been there, or know anything about the guy the place is named for, there’s a fair chance you saw the highway sign while headed up or down the 99 on your way through Bakersfield.

The restaurant/concert hall/museum closed this week, for business reasons and also because the people who kept it running were just getting old.

Owens opened the place in 1996 and over the years did host some county-music royalty there. It was where Garth Brooks proposed to Trisha Yearwood in 2005.

I went there only once, for an interview I did with Rudy Parris for the Fresno Bee in 2019.

Parris, who had seen some success off his run on the Voice, was doing series of gigs as a featured artist with the famous Buckaroos and invited a photographer and I out before the show. We got a tour of the venue and sat in on soundcheck before watching Parris perform for the night.

There was certainly a hollowed-ground feeling to the place and plenty of appeal for a capital B Bandgeeek like myself.

Like, at some point during sound check, someone suggests Parris might want to play Owen’s red-white-and-blue telecaster for the night And just like that it gets pulled out of its storage and is there on stage ready for him to use.

There was also a museum’s worth of really cool memorabilia including a custom white Cadillac mounted over the restaurant’s bar.

But the place also had a downtown Disney quality to it. It wasn’t an actual honky-tonk, but a nostalgic dupe made for the tourists.

Side note: That night was the first time I’d ever seen line dancing in person. But that’s mostly because I’ve never been to Jimbo’s, I guess.

That’s it for this week. Remember you can also hear me on the Homegrown Show Sundays at 8 p.m. on New Rock 104.1 FM. Tonight, I’m in studio with a playlist of Fresno/greater Central San Joaquin Valley music. You’ll love it. Follow my other writing at The Fresno Bee. If you have anything you think I need to be looking at or listening to, feel free to let me know: jtehee@gmail.com