It’s a bustling Sunday night at Bar 355, and Oakland guitarist Ava Mendoza is leading her avant-garde trio Unnatural Ways through a particularly exhausting section of music, when suddenly, Dominique Leone’s keyboard cuts out. He glances at drummer Nick Tamburro, who fiddles with Leone’s amplifier

while maintaining a frantic rhythm single-handedly. Tamburro remedies Leone’s synth, Mendoza stares at each player, grins, and the group intuitively restarts the section. That knowing smile is signature Mendoza — she’s made an art out of improvisation.

Unnatural Ways had just returned from its European tour, and the group was clearly tightened by rigorous nightly performances. The stylistic breadth of Unnatural Ways’ material lent the set a thrilling unpredictability: Clamorous cymbals gave way to an R&B beat beneath Leone’s keyboard solo, but suddenly the track spiraled into tonal dissonance and Mendoza throttled her guitar strings with a screwdriver.

There’s grace and ease in Mendoza’s experimental sound. At Bar 355, she didn’t pander to the crowd with banter or engage onlookers with a forced smile. Her gaze moved from Leone’s fingers to his focused expression and back to her instrument, then quickly signaled a change with her guitar neck. Mendoza’s virtuosity is staggering, but more important is her ability to make expressive guitar work meaningful to the audience. Her fans span the gamut from academic experimental music aficionados to guitar virtuoso sycophants to followers of progressive rock and free jazz. And the kinds of venues she plays are just as diverse: “I’ll play a squat one night and a high-brow jazz venue the next and what I do doesn’t fit in either,” she said.

Mendoza began playing music as a teenager in Los Angeles. She asked Wilco guitarist Nels Cline for lessons after seeing him perform in The Geraldine Fibbers. “We met up once a month to listen to records, talk about music, and play a little bit,” she recalled. At the time, Mendoza studied classical guitar, but she started experimenting at Mills College, from which she graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in Intermedia Arts. Resting firmly in Mills’ lineage of progressive music, she wed electronic experimentalism with her lifelong love of guitar by using a pedal board and a broad sonic palette.

After graduating, Mendoza toured exhaustively with other bands. “When I got out [of Mills], I thought I would do anything for

music,” Mendoza said. “I wanted to tour all of the time. I thought, ‘I’ll die for music.’” She formed high-brow post-punk group Mute Socialite in 2006 with avant-percussionist Moe Staiano, and later played in his group Surplus 1980, which also showcased jarring rhythm and guitar histrionics. Fred Frith, a Mills’ faculty member and founder of experimental rock group Henry Cow, included Mendoza in a special performance of his landmark 1980 LP Gravity at Slim’s last year.

With every project, Mendoza was developing a sound for what would later become Unnatural Ways. “I learned a lot from these collaborations, but developed ideas that couldn’t be realized in them,” she said. Mendoza met drummer Nick Tamburro at the San Francisco Rock Project, a nonprofit music school where she teaches kids to play songs by Captain Beefheart, Deerhoof, and Cline. They began performing as a duo, but she explained that, “a year later, Dominique [Leone] showed up at a show and said he wanted to play bass.” Leone ended up on keyboards, completing the Unnatural Ways trio in early 2012. “What I do now is in this little bubble between a few different genres,” Mendoza said.

As such, she has collaborated with tUnE-yArDs on a live score for several Buster Keaton silent films at The Castro Theatre last year, which they also performed at Bonnaroo, and has shared the stage with such notable musicians as Carla Bozulich, Weasel Walter, and Mike Watt. Cline also champions her work: “Could this be some skilled, overlooked master …? It would be easy to think so,” he wrote in the liner notes of Mendoza’s 2010 solo album, Shadow Stories.

Despite her formal training and music studies, Mendoza evades academic elitism and discusses music without pretense. Her performances are distinctly expressive and evocative, relying much on the art of improvisation.

Even her most experimental songs are grounded by a warm humanity that she traces to her interest in Sixties and Seventies free jazz, which strove for spiritual vitality through rejection of conventional musical forms.

“For me, abstract music is rooted in free jazz: Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Sharrock,” Mendoza said. “They were about expressing things that can’t be expressed in not-free music and that’s my attraction to it.” l

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AVA MENDOZA’S NATURAL WAYThe experimental guitarist dabbles in the difficult realm of free jazz, but grounds it in a warm humanity.By Sam Lefebvre

April 3, 2013ASSOCIATION OF ALTERNATIVE NEWSMEDIA

Whether fronting pop or hardcore bands, Tony Molina heavily indulges in the characteristics of each genre. “If I’m playing hardcore all of the time, I’m listening to pop the whole time,” said the Millbrae native, who now lives in San Francisco. “If I’m playing pop all of the time, I’m listening to hardcore.” Since

2002, Molina has strictly applied this maxim to a slew of groups, including Dystrophy, Ovens, Lifetime Problems, and, currently, Caged Animal and his solo work.

For the frenetic and intense 28-year-old, it’s not a self-imposed creative constraint but a practical necessity. “I think I need the fucking balance, dude …. I can’t do one without the other, but I don’t know that because I’ve never tried,” Molina said.

In both hardcore and pop, Molina values lyrical simplicity, structural concision, and the emotional impact of guitar riffs. Two recent releases — the wistful riff rock of his first solo album, Dissed and Dismissed, and his new hardcore band Caged Animal’s barbaric debut EP — illustrate the striking dichotomy that runs throughout Molina’s discography over the last eleven years. On Dissed and Dismissed, Molina intensifies the slacker clichés and self-deprecation of Nineties indie rock into absurdist hyperbole. He expresses vulnerability and melodrama through bizarre truisms while referencing his forebears: Thin Lizzy leads, Radiohead lyrics, Replacements sneer. Molina appropriates unapologetically, but distills the past into bursts of reverence less than a minute long. With Caged Animal, Molina indulges just as heavily in the traditional tropes of hardcore and similarly amplifies them to extremity.

Based on the strength of Dissed and Dismissed, which was released by local imprint Melters in February, Berkeley’s Slumberland Records plans to release a split record with Molina and San Francisco lo-fi project Swiftumz. Slumberland is arguably responsible for putting out more enduring pop releases than any other local label. Molina was also recently invited to contribute a seven-inch for an upcoming series of singles released by indie titan Matador Records.

Molina’s simultaneous affinity for both hardcore and pop began far before Dissed and Dismissed and Caged Animal. He started Millbrae hardcore group Dystrophy when he was sixteen and played alongside such punk bands as Life’s Halt and What Happens Next? A few years later he founded Ovens, the first incarnation of his singular take on guitar-centric pop, with Beau Monnot and Kyle Spleiss, also of Dystrophy. Ovens debuted in February 2002 on a hardcore bill with The Lab Rats, The Damage Done, Our Turn, and Stockholm Syndrome. “I threw up before we played,” Molina recalled.

Despite his trepidation over premiering Ovens’ grandiose hooks and vulnerable lyrics on a hardcore bill, Molina said the response was

overwhelmingly positive. By 2004, the lineup settled with Molina, who wrote, sang, and played guitar, plus Monnot, Andrew Kerwin, and Max Schneider-Schumacher. The band toured the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, and in 2010, opened for San Francisco’s Grass Widow in New York City. Ovens’ lyrics grappled with classic pop tropes — broken relationships, self-deprecation, and melancholic resignation. Song titles like “Puke When I’m Sad,” “We Know We Suck,” and “I’m a Creep” reveal that these lyrical themes aren’t fit for hardcore, but share the genre’s simplicity and directness.

Molina was at first wary of brandishing his affinity for guitar hooks and melody in the hardcore scene: “We were hella afraid to play out with Ovens for years because everyone knew us from hardcore,” Molina explained. “How could the same dudes come out and play pop music?” Yet, his hardcore credibility remains intact, and is even bolstered by his gall to defy the scene’s codified sounds. Molina’s hardcore peers haven’t criticized his seemingly incompatible interests.

Most musicians avoid citing their immediate influences, but Molina specifically discussed his early interest in Weezer with a refreshing lack of pretense: “I heard Pinkerton for the first time in sixth grade and it was my favorite album for most of my childhood …. I’ve always loved pop.” He cited the guitar-based Nineties rock of Guided by Voices as another clear forebear. On Dissed and Dismissed, Molina covers Guided by Voices’ “Wondering Boy Poet.” It flows seamlessly with Molina’s own songs — which hardly ever exceed two minutes — partly because of its similarly short length.

In 2009, Andee Connors, of vaunted San Francisco music institution Aquarius Records, attempted to catch up with Molina’s bountiful recordings, releasing a 44-track, self-titled Ovens CD on his own tUMULt imprint. The massive compilation contains recordings from 2006 to 2008. In his writing for the Aquarius catalog, Connors has repeatedly christened Molina a “pop genius.” Justin Briggs, who released Caged Animal’s debut on his Warthog Speak label, described Molina’s newest hardcore project as “knuckle-dragging, no nonsense, ignorant [and] mosh-able hardcore” in the press release. Slumberland owner Mike Schulman admitted he isn’t familiar with Caged Animal, but readily compared Molina’s solo work to Nineties power-pop greats Teenage Fanclub.

Molina’s music evokes strong reactions, whether for its beauty or ferocity, depending on the project. To some, he’s the brooding hardcore frontman hunched over on stage like he is on the cover of Caged Animal’s debut. To others, Molina is an eccentric pop guru. However, he’s best understood as both. His respective roles cross-pollinate, mingle, and instill a singular character in his music, whatever genre it might be. l

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THE TWO SIDES OF TONY MOLINAConstantly juggling hardcore and pop projects, the veteran musician has won over fans in both camps, most recently Slumberland and Matador Records.By Sam Lefebvre

ASSOCIATION OF ALTERNATIVE NEWSMEDIA May 8, 2013

At a recent show at Bar 355 in downtown Oakland, local songwriter Michael Beach mounted the stage alone and slung an electric guitar over his shoulder. The Tuesday-night crowd chatted and vied for the bartender’s attention, while Beach stomped an array of pedals to conjure the unwieldy intro of “Mountains & Valleys,”

a climactic cut from his new solo album, Golden Theft. Beach’s intensity grew — his brow furrowed above his focused glare — and by the end of the song, he tilted his body forward, cocked his head sideways, and sang from one side of his mouth. His pose looked utterly determined, like he was challenging listeners to ignore him. Correspondingly, the crowd was transfixed.

Golden Theft is equally dramatic in its themes: The album ascends from moody folk balladry on tracks such as “Dirt” to exuberant crescendos on the aptly named “The Exhilarating Rise.” It’s beautiful, anguished, and rife with the theme of alienation, which Beach explained was directly informed by his life. Three years ago, Beach was deported from Australia, where he had been living for five years, due to visa issues. He channeled the upheaval into eleven erudite, ruminative songs.

During his final year of college, Beach studied in Melbourne, Australia and fell in with a group of musicians there. When he returned to his native Los Angeles, he missed the collaborative relationships he had just forged abroad. Beach returned to Melbourne in 2005 and lived there for the next five years. In America, he was a fledgling songwriter, but in Australia, alongside similarly minded, brash rock bands like The Stabs and Straight Arrows, Beach found his voice in a tight-knit music community.

In 2008, Beach founded the power-trio Electric Jellyfish, which accrued respectable critical acclaim, released several records, and toured internationally. The group specializes in dynamic rock prone to discordant passages, paired with Beach’s anxious and menacing vocals. Electric Jellyfish writes songs in a completely collaborative process, but Beach amassed enough work independently to release his first solo album in 2008 called Blood Courses. With only vocals and guitar, the cerebral and personal songs on Blood Courses foreshadow Beach’s more complex themes on Golden Theft.

By 2010, when complications with his visa arose, Beach could feel his comfortable life as a touring musician and music teacher in Melbourne quickly unraveling. He said he began writing material for Golden Theft during this period. “Most of that was written when I knew my days were

numbered in Australia,” Beach recalled. “There was a sudden lack of permanence.” Then the Australian government forced Beach to leave the country.

Upon returning to the US, the first thing Beach did was record music: “Right when I moved back, I went up to Portland because the only person I knew musically was Ray Raposa from the Castanets,” he said. “I needed somebody I felt some kind of connection with to tell me whether I lost my mind. I had no circle.” The journey yielded a seven-inch EP A Horse, and soon after, Beach settled in the Bay Area.

In 2011, he started recording what would become Golden Theft at Lucky Cat Studios in San Francisco. Over the next year, Beach made inroads with local musicians and sought to reconstitute the sort of support system he had in Australia. In 2012, he and drummer Utrillo Kushner committed another batch of songs to tape at Lucky Cat.

Golden Theft seems to speak from that middle ground between sorrow and recovery. Opener “The Exhilarating Rise” is joyful and determined, but by the time the country-tinged ballad “There Is No Edge of the World to Run to” comes up, Beach sounds as spent and exhausted as the song’s downtrodden melody. The title track opens with the line: There were several illusions/now there are none; it’s the beginning of an emotional upswing, in which Beach finds some clarity. By the eight-minute closer “Eve,” he even recovers his sense of humor. It tells the story of him riding in a car with Henry Miller, Jane Austen, and Jesus Christ. (There’s nothing here to learn inside this car of useless hypocrites, Miller proclaims.)

“A lot of those songs come out of places where you have a slump,” Beach said, adding that writing the album was therapeutic. “I generally can’t write from the bottom of the pit, but there’s something that happens before I get back — some serene place where I can still identify with the low place, but that’s not low enough to keep me from writing.”

Touring helps offset the restlessness that led Beach to leave the country in the first place. Since 2010, he has toured across US three times and traveled around Europe and Australia playing music with Electric Jellyfish. He vividly recalled a stunning sunrise in Warsaw and an ugly encounter with border patrol agents in Texas (he’s understandably biased against immigration officials). But it’s through songwriting that Beach travels the strangest places. l

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A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRYAfter establishing his career in Australia, songwriter Michael Beach had to start over in the Bay Area.By Sam Lefebvre

ASSOCIATION OF ALTERNATIVE NEWSMEDIA August 28, 2013