by Brad Rose

I had moved to NYC from Boston in the spring of 2003. I put an ad up on craigslist soon after I arrived looking to form a band with heavy psychedelic/progressive rock motives, and was lucky enough to find a guitarist who was into all this and he lived only 3 blocks away. This was Josh Anzano. The first time we met up he actually played some Flower Travellin’ Band stuff on guitar and I was sold! We were a good fit cause we both came from the punk/hardcore scenes and were now really stoked on all this obscure freak-out shit. Soon after, we found Kris D’Agostino to play keys, and then Dan Bates moved to town and we grabbed his ass for bass. Somewhere along the line, I came up with the band name La Otracina, it’s more of a phonetic thing really, it doesn’t REALLY mean anything, I just thought it sounded nice, and still do! There are actual interpretations of what it could mean in slang forms and those aren’t far from the truth I’d say. We just practiced our asses off writing these mammoth compositions with tons of parts!

There have been several line-up variations along the way, I am the only original member of the band at this point. Although it has been difficult to maintain momentum at times, it keeps on truckin'! Unfortunately most of the variations didn’t work out on personal levels, I mean the group has always made amazing music, no matter who was doing it, but finding the right chemistry to keep a band together in NYC is no easy task. Obviously I would prefer to never change line-ups, but shit happens, things flow, and change ensues, so I let it take La Otracina to its next place. And it’s cool to have recordings of all these variations and release them together, I think it’s an impressive body of work made up of all these like-minded sonic freaks that I get to create with.

I am most excited about the current line-up with Ninni Morgia on guitar and Evan Sobel on bass though, and not just because they are the current line-up. Ninni and I have been doing free-improvisation together for a few years now, he’s bad-ass motherfucker and does a lot of noise/out playing, but we really are working out some amazing ideas with our new compositions and are developing these really brilliant spontaneous pieces, which grow into much more than ‘jams’ or ‘improvs’, we are writing full songs on the spot, its scary. And Evan just fell from the sky, he’s new to our musical family and easily one of the top bassists I’ve ever played with, his musicality is top notch and he’s a drummer’s wet dream of sorts.

My other current active projects include my free-jazz group Owl Xounds and improv/experimental unit Quivers. Owl Xounds has been doing shit for about 3 years now, and is basically me on drums and upright bassist Gene Janas, and we just play with all these extremely fucked-up and musically shattering out-jazz/improv/noise folks. Quivers was formed by La Otracina guitarist Ninni Morgia and ex-La Otracina bassist Jordon Schranz, and it has a tendency to range from no-wave skullfuck to very European style free-improvisation. Both of these groups have recordings available as do all of our other currently inactive groups.

I always have several projects ‘pending’ or ‘inactive’, usually because of time constraints or where someone lives. I wish I could just make music with all of my friends all the time every day, there are so many talented folks I want to work with! But I think we’re focusing hard on La Otracina now because we’re doing this 4 week US tour this summer and the new album will be out on Holy Mountain as well, so time to step it up a bit!

Like most people, I played in concert/marching band in grade/high school, but most of that was playing clarinet and flute, my switch to drums was late in high school. It was something I had always wanted to do but my mother (understandably) forbade me, we couldn’t afford drums and I couldn’t play them in the apartment we lived in, but since I was 12, I would set up small containers as drums in my room, have chopsticks in my hands as drumsticks and play along with Metallica, secretly awaiting my chance to beat the skins for real!

But my senior year of high school, I got a kit and then set about playing in various forms of punk and hardcore bands and just teaching myself and practicing. Although I have taken a few private lessons, my ears have been my best teachers, and I feel confident in stating that I am self-taught, my technique is for shit, but I’ve got my own style, so that’s what counts I’d say.

There is no inspiration for me here, this is just where I do my work. I don’t even want to be here, its miserable, but this is where my life is right now, but ideally I’d be in California or Europe, I think those sorts of landscapes reflect the sounds I make/hear and certainly they are better to look at in a visual sense, and I think my personal/political viewpoints would make more sense to peoples in those places. But in a creative sense, La Otracina allows me to leave, to travel away in a spiritual sense from this ‘home’ place where I live. NYC has long ago ceased to be a place where artists/musicians thrive and true outsider communities exist. Life is hard and painful here and everyone is literally out to destroy each other here, it’s a continually difficult existence. Brooklyn doesn’t deserve ANY credit in what I do, and I hardly feel tied to any 'movement'/'scene' here.

I am nervous about police cars pulling us over and maybe finding drugs or my Dodge Ram Van “The White Buffalo” getting sick along the way, please say a prayer:-)!

I am excited about EVERYTHING ELSE, about bringing music to folks who are AVAILABLE to HEAR things, who are stoked that there is actually live music to see, who are excited to see a concert! I am excited to drive across country again, I love it! I am excited to hang with and learn from my band mates and eat new foods and find cool new stores and go swimming in new rivers and play totally insane psychedelic music every night and hear all these weirdo bands in every town every night! I am excited to get the fuck out of NYC and play music for real HUMANS! I am excited to see old friends that I see every tour and get drunk and stoned and buy records and get that INSPIRATION you mentioned in the previous question! I am excited to be excited!

This would be August 4, 2005. This was when we were just a duo of me on drums and Tyler Nolan on guitar. We were playing this loft party near Astor Place in NYC with all these crazy bands, it was a NASTY HOT summer night, show was running late, everyone was stoned and drunk out of their mind. We finally get to play and we had this crazy light show and shit too, and the place was going crazy, it was super fun, but all of a sudden I was puzzled by some ‘sounds’ that I couldn’t quite account for, since I knew all of Tyler’s parts I had no idea what the hell was happening, and all of a sudden this bad-ass brother who looked like a mix of Mr. T and Sid Vicious walks right up to us out of the crowd blowing his saxophone hard as hell, totally going for it and we’re just playing loud and heavy as hell, and the whole place freaked out when they saw this guy, it was epic! And he played with us, improvising, for the remaining 10 minutes of our set. We had no idea who he was! Turns out he was Micah Gaugh, a well known NYC player who’s performed/recorded with Arto Lindsay, Burnt Sugar, DJ Spooky, and Storm And Stress, to name a few. So we talked after the show, I guess he was randomly there and really dug out set enough to join in. I’d say this was probably the most important thing to ever have happen at a show for me, in a sense, moving someone enough that they HAD to join in, wow, I was honored, not to mention that he was a pro player! This is the kind of thing that I wish would happen all the time, this fucking spirit, this community vibe of ‘I’m just gonna join your set and it’s cool’, so if any of you out there can bring it, walk on up brothers and sisters!

Ok, a few things to set this answer up, 1) I had done an Owl Sounds recording with Arrington from Old Time Relijun who is from the Northwest US, 2) I had heard of Ed via the NYC improv scene but we had actually never met, 3) Ed and Doug had a long history of playing music together, Ed lives in NYC, Doug lives in Portland, OR, 4) When Doug was visiting Ed in NYC, Arrington had mentioned that the two of them should meet up with me and play together 5) we agreed to do that, and that is how we met.

We met up at an old loft I lived in in Brooklyn (with an engineer, convenient indeed!) and I had never met those guys (Ed and Doug) before. All the mics were ready to go, and we just fucking played, our first meeting as a trio, my first time ever with either of them, although those two had a history previously of much recording. And that became the Rust Ionics "Moving/Pictures" LP, we were all so psyched about our first and only meeting ever that we decided to release it on vinyl.

Very soon after this, I began to jam with Ed and his wife Motoko who have the duo Spin-17 together and we had this really fucked up improv/no-wave thing going on, kinda like Mars or some early NY avant shit, it was very cool. We recorded and called it the Sons of Fire "Saung" CD-R which was released in very limited quantity, but those two didn't like the name so we changed it to Lust Ionics and then played a sick show in Rhode Island, recorded that, edited it and released it as the "Live Singles In Providence" 3" CD-R, and at that point decided to call the trio with Doug Rust Ionics, get it, Lust Ionics vs. Rust Ionics? yeah....Lust Ionics did a few more shows, a lot of unreleased recordings, and kinda faded away without ever really amounting to much, and Rust Ionics put out the LP and never played together again, mostly because of location logistics.

Ed is one of the most talented NYC improv musicians, he's really amazing at a lot of instruments and doing noise stuff as well, he's got tons going on, check his Quodlibet label out! Hopefully he'll be recognized one of these days and playing on a more international scene like he deserves instead of the unfortunately stagnant NYC out scene. I wish I had more time to collaborate with him, but he's got a wife, full time job, and two cats, and I told him I won't play with him unless he grows his hair long again! Doug is up in Portland doing his thing, building synth-computer-guitar things and I do hope to play with him in the future again, he really slays on the axe! He's got his own label called Outer Limits too!

We're all on good terms, just busy with our own stuff nowadays, hopefully all the older recordings will come out sooner/later...

Funny story.

After various line-ups of the band had come and gone, I was swamped with recordings of basement jams, live shows, and multi-track experiments from all the different versions of the group, so I decided to select the best stuff and I ended up with almost 2 CDs worth of music, and eventually self-released on my Colour Sounds Recordings label as the "Love Love Love" 2xCD-R. This ended up being very well received by lots of folks. Volcanic Tongue, who distributes for my label in the UK are pretty into the stuff I release so they wrote up a nice review of the album and John from Holy Mountain saw it and decided to order it direct from me. Of course I was stoked to get the order but hesitated to be all like 'Hey I'd love to work with you, ..blah blah blah'.

A few weeks goes by and I then released the aforementioned Rust Ionics "Moving/Pictures" LP and John writes me this e-mail like 'hey, if you don't want me to put our your album, that's ok, I still wanna order your new LP', and I was totally confused. It turns out my hotmail account was rejecting e-mails sent via my website and essentially John had e-mailed me through my website address and offered to officially release 'Love Love Love' on Holy Mountain, but I never got the e-mail...ha...

Very quickly we sorted out the situation and began talking about plans. At that point I was maybe 80% done with recording "Tonal Ellipse Of The One" and I knew it would be rad to have it finished and since it was new, it was more important on a personal level to put it out than 'Love Love Love', which was already available and I felt was purely archival, I just wanted to move forward with newer recordings.

It was weird though, I didn't have a band. La Otracina had been a duo earlier that year, and the guitarist I was working with who had written all the music with me on the album had quit two weeks before our tour, just vanished without a word, I was quite heartbroken (but yes I still did the tour as a duo with the completely unknown yet genius musician Matt Lavallee). So I had decided to 'shelve' the band after the tour.

But once Holy Mountain got involved, I decided to start the band AGAIN, and recruited guitarist Ninni Morgia, who I had worked with in other improv/free music scenarios in NYC and we began writing new music and I brought him in to help me finish the album.

So we finished it up and brought in bassists Jordon Schranz (of Quivers and Eastern Seaboard) and Gene Janas (of Owl Xounds) to help too. Jordon was playing with us for the first few months of '07 but now he lives in New Mexico, doing rad art, taking rad drugs, and planning our collective revolution.

"Tonal Ellipse Of The One" was written by me and Tyler Nolan in about 5 months, and the recording process took about 21 months, for various reasons. But it is the greatest musical achievement of my life, undoubtedly. I think it exemplifies a lot of the theories I have about compositional structures and rhythmic games, and it is my offering to the gods of progressive/psychedelic musics! I think its a great record, it is completely unlike any other La Otracina recordings, heavily produced, painstakingly mixed, and brilliantly recorded by Andrea Zavareei (who has recorded MUCH of the Colour Sounds back catalog). I hope people enjoy listening to it and are inspired by it somehow, even if it shakes up their universe for just one moment, I'll feel satisfied. I think it's funny I am known more as a free-player because of the Owl Xounds stuff and various other free groups I have worked with but I am a rock drummer, born and raised on rock n roll, punk, and heavy metal, the free-jazz/improv stuff is relatively recent for me, but I think people are gonna be surprised by how absolutely composed the album is, with very little improvising at all.

The name of the album...just came to me.....my dearest bestest friend Ryan Eggensperger (who has written some 'liners' for two Owl Xounds releases, "Cow On Mushrooms" and "Toxic Raga") inspired me to tap into linguistics and language and since then I have had more fun finding words to fit or match images of sounds, yes.

I didn't know him at all, but I gave James a copy of the first Owl Sounds CD-R, "Cry Of The Saw-Whet" (before there was an 'X' in the name) many moons ago when he was in NYC on a Wooden Wand tour, and he wrote me months later that it was one of the only CD-Rs he ever got on a tour that he actually liked, and we should one day release stuff on vinyl. well years later, he started his Mad Monk vinyl only label and Owl Xounds had this stuff we wanted to do on vinyl, so we agreed to co-release it on both of our labels. I wish the story was more flamboyant, well I did forget he part about the sexual plumber and the plum tree soup...

I am not sure how to answer, maybe 'tension' is not something I ever consider, is my music tense? I just like to create a sound story for people to get lost in, whether it be improvised or fully composed (although the Universal Will behind those two are quite different), to create a soundtrack for their moment, they can decide the images and the colors. My music feels like energy flow to me, channeling cosmic stuff out/in/through. I don't know what happens, at this point in my studies as a musician, I just get up there and do it, kind of like sex, (who remembers what happens specifically during a sexual encounter?), if you are IN it (no joke intended), it's a total experience, it's just a deep level of intense emotion, of every emotion, all at once.

As far as albums that I are new to my knowledge (but not necessarily NEW at all), I have two answers:

older album; Lucifer's Friend "Where The Groupies Killed The Blues"...talk about a brilliant mix of manly hard-rock, glorious proto-metal, krautrock, and a smidge of experimental art-rock...yeah, this album helped me want to really re-investigate and explore the boundaries of rock n' roll, something I thought I was over (which I am not) and something in which I honour in a legacy of forward thinking musicians who play with loud guitars and mammoth drum sets. (Note, an easy find on Ebay for $15 or less.)

new album; well I'll just say this, I don't think a new/current band will ever 'get' to me the way the classic grandpappy psych/prog/freejazz groups do from the elder days, but there are a few current groups that I am extremely excited about and feel a true contemporary musical kinship with/inspiration from...here goes...Odawas, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, Numinous Eye, Rahdunes, Psychic Paramount, Kurse Go Back, White Hills, These Are Powers, Primordial Undermind, Tight Meat Duo, Kin Kon/Where the Moon Came From, Circle, and Acid Mothers Temple, of course...basically bands that resonate with my ideas about SOUND!

Come see us on tour, we got love and sounds to share with you; we love green smoke-ables, fresh fruits, and smiling faces!

Look out for our new album on Holy Mountain as well as older material on my Colour Sounds Recordings label.

Check out our various other projects including Owl Xounds and Quivers.

Everyone should own King Crimson's "Beat", "Discipline", and "Three Of A Perfect Pair" albums, yes all three of them, and then once completely digested with those, get the "Neal And Jack And Me" DVD, and then your life is nearly complete.

Lastly, the fucking universe is a beautiful massive brilliant jelly donut, what the hell are you LOOKING at it for, go on, EAT IT, NOW!

La Otracina Tour Dates
Tuesday 19-Jun Murphy's (1589 Madison Ave), Memphis, TN with True Sons of Thunder, and more

Wednesday 20-Jun Spooky Action Palace (e-mail venue for location), St. Louis, MO with Ataraxic Ataxia, Sum Of Heroes

Thursday 21-Jun Lazer Mansion (133 54th street), Moline, IL with Mondo Drag, Lazer Mountain

Friday 22-Jun Hideout (1354 W Wabansia), Chicago, IL with Plastic Crimewave Sound, Matthew Wascovich, Druids of Huge

Saturday 23-Jun South Union Arts (1352 S. Union), Chicago, IL with Matthew Wascovich/Plastic Crimewave Duo, Plastic Boner Band, Folk and Violence

Sunday 24-Jun Basement Show (216 E Hillside Drive), Bloomington, IN with Resting Rooster, Hot Fighter #1

Monday 25-Jun Skull Lab, (271 W McMicken ) Cincinnati, OH with Ryan Jewell, and more

Tuesday 26-Jun TBA, Columbus, OH with Ryan Jewell, more

Wednesday 27-Jun Pat’s In The Flats (2233 West Third), Cleveland, OH with Mootdak, 9 Yr Old Mudflesh, The Flat Can Co.

Thursday 28-Jun House Show (114 1/2 Erie Street), Edinboro, PA with Droopy Septum, Tusk Lord, Forest Dweller

Friday 29-Jun Garfield Artworks (4931 Penn Ave), Pittsburgh, PA with Dan Koshute, Hackles, Lordbirdgoldencobra

Saturday 30-Jun Test Pattern Gallery (334 Adams Ave), Scranton, PA with The Marshmallow Staircase, The Ultra Violet Rays

Sunday 1-Jul Helderberg Palace (96 Sycamore St,) Albany, NY with Burnt Hills

Monday 2-Jul Brilliant Corners (163 water street), Keane, New Hampshire with Kendra, Ian Joseph and The Toys

Tuesday 3-Jul Grow Room, Providence, RI with Xerxesx, Barnacled, Cinnamon Anemone

Wednesday 4-Jul off

Thursday 5-Jul Soundfix Records (110 Bedford Ave), Brooklyn, NY in-store performance