by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Ezra Buchla and Ericka Anderson made out in a bush and then started a band.
The Gowns, a trio from the Oakland-Bay area, played at a house at 1400 Wilmoore Drive S.E. on Monday as part of their tour across the U.S.
Anderson sings and plays the guitar, the megaphone and walkie-talkies. Buchla does vocals and plays the viola, synthesizers and electronics.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Drummer Corey Fogel is a disturbing percussionist.
"I just disturb a lot of things in my life, like my belongings and my relationships and my finances and my drums," Fogel said. "Except, not my health."
The Gowns' sounds are scrappy and loose.
"There are song structures, but they're not written down," Anderson said. "It's not like a verse-chorus-verse type of thing. It's like, 'OK, we're going to do this until it feels right to stop, and I'm going to come in when it feels like the right time to come in.'"
They use improv and ad-libbing in their performances.
"Some songs, we only know the words or the key and very little else," Buchla said. "Or, we know some people's parts but not other people's parts."
The Gowns' music has bizarre aspects because the members grew up under the influence of bizarre surroundings, like Anderson's childhood and adolescence spent in South Dakota.
"Dive bars and cemeteries and serial killer sites," Buchla said about his experiences visiting Anderson in South Dakota. "That's all I saw. It's my impression of South Dakota."
It's easy for people to be bizarre in such a large area, Anderson added.
"It's a huge space, and there aren't even a million people in the whole state," she said.
From there, she moved to L.A. before meeting Buchla and Fogel.
"I moved out to the L.A. area kind of for dumb reasons," she said. "I was like 'Oh, there are good songs about Los Angeles,' and I started playing music with a couple different groups - one of which was Amps for Christ - and met Ezra playing
shows together."
They later moved to Oakland and joined forces with Fogel.
They tried to be a folk band at first, but they were too dramatic to pull off the low-key style that goes with playing folk music.
"We're not small enough performers for that," Anderson said. "We like to yell."
Anderson said she likes how the current music scene allows musicians to do whatever they want.
"That's always been true, I guess, but at least it feels to me like you don't need to pick a style," she said. "You don't need to play verse-chorus-verse stuff. You can record yourself, and music's becoming freer than it ever was. It allows people to express themselves that wouldn't have been able to before. People who wouldn't have been able to get a record deal can record whatever they want to."
The drawback is that it's harder to sell CDs because people can download music for free, she said.
"But it's hard to complain about, because you want everyone to hear what you're doing," she said.
Gowns
CD available at CardboardRecords.com
Web site at MySpace.com/Gowns
