To Live and Shave in L.A. - Les Tricoteuses - CD Cover

The new CD from To Live and Shave in LA with my cover art is now out on the fantastic French record label, Savage Land. I had a good time working with Tom Smith conceptualizing the cover...it was a perfect match- Tom's lyrics bulge with hilariously grotesque images and ideas.



To Live and Shave in LA is a long-running noise band founded by Tom Smith and Rat Bastard. Over the years, TLASILA's roster has included such liminaries as Don Flemming, Thurston Moore, Weasel Walter, Andrew WK, Ben Wolcott and Nandor Nevai. Their sound is a thick mesh of noise and oscillations minutely recombined into stuttering epics narrated by Tom Smith's tortured warble.

Les Tricoteuses is a release that has been gathering dust in the vaults for some time. Here is a bit about it from the Savage Land website...

To Live and Shave in L.A.’s An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers, the album written, tracked, mixed, and mastered in a day (on a dare from Audible Hiss president Ned Hayden), was nonetheless researched extensively prior to its August 14, 1995 recording. As the World Wide Web was in its consumer nascence, the bulk of composer Tom Smith’s investigations derived from books found in his own library (especially Kenneth Turan’s 1974 history Sinema), and faded, seldom viewed Mitchell Brothers videotapes rented from an adult film warehouse. From these sources, Smith wove a claustrophobic Todesbericht; the music Ben Wolcott, Rat Bastard and he crafted to accompany the libretto was equally obliterative. The resultant album was dimly received, scarcely recognized at all. With its grim, fratricidal narrative, unforgiving sonic crush, and liner note screed (penned by Ugly American editor Greg Chapman and Smith) declaring genre obsolete and noise passé (remember that this was 1995, long before the culture of din had coalesced or its products and personalities had achieved any sort of mainstream recognition), one can only imagine the bewilderment and disquiet M. Bros. engendered.



Smith was ultimately unhappy with the necessarily rushed effort, and in 1997 sought to craft a textual corollary to Mitchell Brothers. In shifting narrative focus from the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s to the gates of the Bastille in 1790s France, he reversed the gender of his voyeuristic antagonists. Les Tricoteuses was not only an expansive, dubwise reassessment of M. Bros., but an obsessively redacted dialogue about its year-long re-enactment. Thus, the titular conceit, and the layers of narrative foreboding ensnarled within meters of yarn and millions of feet of sixteen-millimeter film.



Les Tricoteuses was to have been issued by the long-dead Climax imprint in late 1997. It has languished in the TLASILA archive for nearly a decade.

Savage Land is pleased to at last present To Live and Shave in L.A.’s extraordinarily rigorous meta-narrative (and, like it or not, noise-dub deconstruction), Les Tricoteuses.



You can order the CD from Savage Land. You can also catch To Live and Shave in LA in your town this May! Check the TLASILA Myspace page for tour dates.

Listen to TLASILA's Gash Of The Nomenclature