Kick off Memorial Day and summer with music, art and drinks at the free Luce Unplugged Community Showcase next Friday, May 22 from 6–8 p.m. The show, presented with Washington City Paper, will feature sets by two well-loved D.C. bands: Pleasure Curses and Young Rapids. Hellbender Brewing Company will provide free beer tastings (ages 21+), and you can grab snacks and drinks from a cash bar.
Young Rapids are a psychedelic indie pop band who played a sold out show at the 9:30 Club and have been lauded by DCist for their live performances. The quartet received national attention from Spin and Vice for their latest album Pretty Ugly. They'll play following Pleasure Curses, a duo at the forefront of D.C.'s electronic scene who make dark and dancey synthpop (check out "Lust," a single off their new EP Pure / Lust). We talked to the duo AKA Evan Grice and Jahn Alexander Teetsov, who filled us in on their recent release, their creative process, and what we have to look forward at their show (spoiler alert: Iggy Pop).
Eye Level: You played Luce Unplugged last August. What's new since then?
Evan Grice: We have and are finishing a bunch of new music, which is exciting. And we've got records and cassette tapes out of our work now, which is awesome. Physical releases of music are great and only possible through the help we've gotten through the friends we've worked with at Prince George Records in D.C.
Jahn Alexander Teetsov: New songs, new material on deck and we've been playing around with our live setup every show by introducing different instruments or ways to process our sounds and vocals live onstage. The purpose of this cassette was to reacquaint people with what we are experimenting with and give a hint to the direction we are heading.
EL: Can you give our readers a hint too?
JT: Well, the recent release was somewhat of a merging of new wave with samba and we've been toying with more disco and house related material that we've been developing as well as some interesting collaborations that some people might not expect from us.
EL: What's your songwriting process like?
JT: Each time is a little different but generally one of us will bring an instrumental or scratch demo to the table and then we will try to add or replace parts together in our studio. Evan's engineering skills have improved leaps and bounds since we first met (he actually reads the manuals) and it's nice having someone who can smooth out the wrinkles I make when I'm just throwing ideas down by myself. My first instrument was the guitar and I used to write more traditionally guitar-driven songs but there's a different method and delivery to playing with abstract sounds and frequencies that is fun to explore. There's a benefit to both Evan and me having a musical upbringing "outside the box" and applying that to electronic music.
EL: Jahn, the video you directed for "Lust" really brought your new track to life. What went into that in terms of inspiration and technical work?
JT: Thank you. The 'ooh' samples for 'Lust' were initially taken from an audio book of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World when the characters take a drug called "soma" and go to the "feelies" which are a cross between virtual reality, the opera, and a pornographic laser light show. In that fictional society it is their means of distraction. I ended up going through old commercials for phone chat lines that had been recorded on VHS and cut them up for the video. The rest of the footage was filmed by us in my bedroom with dollar store items that we painted an unnatural blue using those 68 cent poster boards that kids use for science fair projects as a backdrop.
I was also inspired by Bauhaus abstract ballet and a scene in an Eddie Murphy movie called Boomerang where Geoffrey Holder's character shows him a ridiculously suggestive commercial for lipstick. The loose concept for the video is a repetitive desk job in the distant future where they are trying to determine the purpose of these objects but don't quite know what their use is because too much time has passed and eventually everything flies off the rails.
EL: You also have some other great visual content, like press photos (see above), and it seems your visual presence is as well-articulated as your sound. How would you describe the relationship between the two?
JT: For us, the visual output and the musical output go hand in hand and (hopefully) the image conveys the sound. It just seems natural to have the visuals be an extension of the music we made.
EG: I think it's really cool (in a nerdy way) that we're at a point where work Jahn does visually inspires and informs things I want to try musically, and things we try in our songs. Jahn tries to communicate our creative message through visual works, and those things have actually started inspiring the message itself, musically and all around.
JT: For our recent press photos, I was inspired by George Lucas' first movie THX1138 where people tried of crimes are banished to a jail that is just an expanse of white emptiness. I also had the image in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when the inmates are walking in a circle at the back of my mind during the shoot. If I had to boil down the underlying theme it would probably be "futuristic imprisonment."
EL: How would you describe your stage antics?
EG: A lot of it depends on if the audience is feeling it. Things have been tame, and we've played plenty of tame shows. But we also play shows where Jahn ventures into the audience while singing and gets lost in the crowd.
JT: Yeah I usually think, "what would Iggy Pop do?" and then scale it back a couple hundred notches because I am only human. With an audience there is usually a defined set of roles, and I like breaching people's comfort levels a little bit, especially if the environment is uptight.
Pleasure Curses will perform at 6 p.m. followed by Young Rapids at 7 p.m. After the show, go down stairs and check out Pilobolus and Portraiture, National Portrait Gallery's kick-off event for America Now!, a new Smithsonian series that celebrates innovation in art, history and culture.
