TWO L.A. ACTS TALK MUSIC
Miguel and Chicano Batman “Sky Walker” and “Black Lipstick” video (Tuguther/Mitú)
For a new video series by online channel Mitú, the two L.A.-area acts converge to swap songs and talk music. The resulting 10-minute clip captures artists amid the collaborative process and in doing so magnifies the mixand-match nature of Southern California music.
“People need to understand that culture is a lot more complex than they think,” Chicano Batman’s Bardo Martinez says at one point. “Things are definitely not just black and white. There’s brown.”
“There’s a lot of brown,” Miguel adds, smiling.
Miguel’s sounds mix contemporary R&B, pop and hip-hop with magnificently imagined rock and soul; Chicano Batman draws on the region’s deep history of Latin rock, fueling garage rock, surf and soul with the energy of modern Los Angeles.
“You can sense energy in music,” Miguel says as he describes the uncertainty of meeting new collaborators. “You don’t know what you’re going to walk into. And as soon as we got in, man, it was even more of a breeze than I could have imagined.”
Miguel tackles “Black Lipstick,” a Batman track originally sung by Martinez. He looks on in awe as Miguel jumps into falsetto during rehearsals. We watch as they harmonize through a take.
They then work out Miguel’s “Sky Walker,” with Batman providing instrumentation via fuzzy tremolo guitar, organ clusters and bassist Eduardo Arenas’ deep lines. The mini-doc climaxes at the seven-minute mark with full performances of the two songs, and by the time they’re finished, it’s hard not to hope for a “Miguel Batman” album.
Chromatics “Blue Girl” (Italians Do It Better)
Los Angeles-based Johnny Jewel and his band Chromatics have been threatening to release “Dear Tommy,” its forthcoming album, for a few years now. Jewel, however, has been busy composing for the screen.
“Blue Girl,” as well as a video for “Black Walls,” suggests the delay might be over — though nothing ’s ever certain with Chromatics except the dry drum tones, evocative ’80s synth melodies and singer Ruth Radelet’s detached demeanor.
Directed by the group with director of photography Rene Hallen, the video glistens as though the camera lens were coated with Vaseline. It features drummer Nat Walker tapping his snare with long-stemmed roses and offers loving images of a glowing-eyed Jewel gazing at a faraway place.
Pioneer 11 “RF Daze: A Compilation” (POW Recordings)
L.A. cosmic explorers Alex Hastings and Bryan Gomez are teasing their forthcoming album as Pioneer 11 with a collection of what release notes describe as “acid trip jam sessions in abandoned ghost towns, collaborations with [producer] Paul White (Danny Brown, Open Mike Eagle) and miscellaneous astral odysseys.” The band is drawing attention to the roll-out with a video for one of its highlights, “Mango Storm.”
The delicate guitar-andsynth work seems to drift through its 41⁄2 minutes as untethered as the space probe from which the band draws its name. This year, POW Recordings will issue Pioneer 11’s studio debut album, “Gravitorium.”