Author: Chris McCoy

Robin Pack and Kyle Johnson have been friends since high school, long before their shared interest in rock and recording technology led them to found Rocket Science Audio. Pack, an IT project manager by day, and Johnson, who works full time as a sound engineer, were hoarding all of the audio gear they could get their hands on with the eventual goal of starting a recording studio. “There are so many people doing so much great stuff in this town, and we’re just trying to document it,” Pack says.

But what sets Rocket Science apart from other studios is their eagerness to get out of the studio space and into the clubs. “We do studio albums, and we are happy to do it, and Kyle is really, really good at it,” Pack says. “But we specialize in live stuff.”

“Reigning Sound Live At Goner was the first official Rocket Science project,” Johnson says. The 2005 album started out as an experimental recording of an in-store performance by Greg Cartwright’s garage group. “We were just trying stuff to see if it would work,” Johnson says. But Goner Records’ Zac Ives and Eric Friedl were so impressed by the results that they put out the recordings as a full-fledged live album and subsequently asked the pair to record the second Gonerfest, which would eventually be married with a Live From Memphis-produced video for a DVD. Both the record and the DVD were mixed in Johnson’s tiny Midtown apartment, where he had crammed a full studio mixing board into the living room.

“We’ve tried to get progressively larger,” says Pack, who describes Rocket Science as “little pranksters just seeing what we can do and document.

“We just want people to be able to play their show,” Pack continues. “Every musician who has ever walked into a studio is totally cognizant of the fact that they are playing for a recording.” That influences how they play. “Live performance is the ultimate test of a band.”

“That’s when you really know what a band is,” Johnson adds.

In addition to recording Gonerfest, the Memphis Hates You metal festival, and the Church Health Center benefit Rock For Love, they also branched out into live-streaming audio and video from shows over the internet, a set of skills that, like everything else the pair does, was learned by trial and error. “It’s only in the past two years that we have been able to record and stream every act from every venue [at Gonerfest],” Pack says.

The Gonerfest streams have steadily increased in popularity over the years, pulling in well over a thousand unique IP addresses. “And that’s fully worldwide, from Australia, all over Europe, and Japan,” Johnson says.

In 2011, Rocket Science found a home in a makeshift studio space on Madison Avenue, and the guys decided to branch out into something new. Pack says the idea for a variety show came from “hanging out late-night at the studio and talking. We’re always asking, ‘What else can we do?'”

On the last Thursday of the month, Rocket Science Audio invites two bands into their studio to perform in front of a small, motley audience and streams it live on the internet. “It’s live! It’s a variety show! It’s just like Sonny and Cher!” says Pack, the show’s host.

The bands alternate songs, their performances punctuated by the occasional prerecorded remote segment and comedy bits. “We decided to add comedians from Memphis, because that’s another scene that doesn’t get enough attention,” Pack says. “We could have gone the cable-access route, but then we would have to be beholden to the FCC and that would limit what the comedians could say and what the bands could play.”

With help from technical director Jackson Gilman and IT admin Chris Hoerske, Pack says they want to give some exposure to Memphis’ vast, underrated pool of talent. “People get to catch bands that they normally wouldn’t go out to see or they have wanted to see and never got around to it.” And so far, they seem to be succeeding. After their first show, Chris Owen’s new band Time, whose first record hasn’t even been released yet, got rave reviews. “My 73-year-old dad even liked Time,” Johnson says.

The audio quality for the first shows has been good, the video, produced by pawn-shop cameras, is much rougher. But that adds a charming, cable-access ’80s feel to the proceedings. “Bit by bit, we’re figuring this out. We’ve been a studio. We’ve been a live recording entity. Now we have to figure out how to be a TV show, and do that on the fly,” Pack says.

The next show, which airs Thursday, July 25th, will feature two bands that Pack says are “in his top five all-time Memphis bands”: Gringos and True Sons of Thunder. Mike McCarthy will provide the comedy, and there will be lots of lo-fi hijinx. “Everything we do is put together by duct tape and Radio Shack,” Pack says.

“And we just bought more duct tape,” Johnson says.

Rocket Science Audio Variety Show

Thursday, July 25th, 9 p.m.

Live streaming at rocketscienceaudio.com

Have you ever had a bad break-up? Maybe you caught your boyfriend with another girl who happened to be your best friend, or maybe your ex-girlfriend just wouldn’t take “Go away and stop slashing my tires!” for an answer. Savannah Bearden is a connoisseur of such stories, and this weekend she will bring some of the most extreme stories of emotional pain, self-loathing, and completely inappropriate social behavior to the stage at Crosstown Arts.

This is the third year Bearden, Bruce Bui, Jami Hale, Dustin Holden, and Brandon Sams have put on The Break-Up Show and the first outside the auspices of the Emerald Theater Company, which meant a move from TheatreWorks to Crosstown Arts.

“We think the space is the perfect match for the format of the show,” Bearden says. “Because this space is real open and casual, I just want to make this a party every night. I want people to feel like they have come to our house and are laughing at the same kind of stuff we laugh at.”

Bearden got the idea for The Break-Up Show when she saw a musical comedy team in Chicago set angry break-up messages to music. “I thought it would be better to stage dramatic readings of the stories and emails, because they’re often funny, pathetic, and passive-aggressive,” she says.

The break-up stories in the show are all true and are submitted by friends and fans during an annual call for entries. According to Bearden, “When we started the show, we just straight up did readings of these emails and messages that were sent to us. Since then, we’ve all kind of grown into our own characters. We’re kind of caricatures of ourselves.”

Eventually, the idea grew to include not only monologues but also skits and videos.

“We have video segments this year that range from music videos to a man-on-the-street piece where we went to the Levitt Shell and asked people what was wrong with us, why are we still single?” Bearden says. “That was fun.”

The stories reflect the changing face of dating in the internet age. “We got a lot of submissions from people on dating websites, because they just have so much material,” Bearden adds. “Most people submit things that another person had inflicted on them, because who really wants to air the embarrassing stuff you have done yourself? That said, all five cast members reveal our embarrassing stuff. We can dish it out, and we can take it. We all make fun of ourselves in the show. We put it all out there.”

The Break-Up Show runs Thursday-Saturday, July 18th-20th, at Crosstown Arts. Doors open at 7 p.m., show starts at 8 p.m. $10.

Ex-Cult Record-Release Show

Goner Records punk marvels Ex-Cult just got back from a successful West Coast tour, and now they’re ready to hit the Midwest and East, kicking off a whirlwind fortnight barnstorming with like-minded Austin rockers The OBNIIIs with a show at The Buccaneer.

The show will not only inaugurate the tour but also serve as a record-release party for Ex-Cult’s new single, “Mr. Fantasy,” which they will be selling at the venues on tour before it hits the Goner shelves on July 23rd. The new song, recorded with Doug Easley, whose work with the Grifters, Sonic Youth, and the White Stripes made Memphis a recording mecca for indie rock in the ’90s, is a tense rave-up that expands the band’s sonic palette while showing off a rhythm section dialed in by months of relentless touring.

The OBNIIIs are named for founder Orville Bateman Neely III’s initials. Memphis audiences may remember the big splash they made at Gonerfest 8. Now on their second album of fuzzy, analog, Johnny Thunders-style gutter punk, the band’s live performances are as sweaty as they are relentlessly rowdy, making them a perfect complement to Ex-Cult’s precision assault.

The bands will be joined at the Buccaneer on Thursday, July 18th, by The Sheiks.

On Saturday, February 23rd, an era will end in Memphis music. The Hi-Tone Café, which has been the most prolific new-music venue in the city for the last 15 years, will close with a final concert by the legendary — and recently reunited — Memphis garage-punk pioneers the Oblivians. Opening the show will be another reunited Memphis band whose legend, albeit much smaller, is almost as twisty.

The Barbaras sprang out of the friendship between Will McElroy and Billy Hayes. In 2002, the pair of Cordova High School students posted a notice on makeoutclub.com, an indie-rock-themed dating site that Hayes describes as “a place for nasty hipsters to find other nasty hipsters to hook up with.” They were looking for some people with similar musical interests to form a band, and they found guitarist Alex Gates.

For the next few years, they experimented, playing shows under different names, such as the Chicago Bulls. “We probably had about 20 different bands that only played one show,” McElroy says. “They were very different bands in our minds, but in practice, they probably just sounded like noise.”

The initial group accumulated other players, such as Bennett Foster and Stephen Pope, and eventually settled on the Barbaras as a full-time name. By then, the earlier noise-rock experiments had mutated into an indie pop sound that owed as much to the Beach Boys, ’60s garage rock, and classic girl groups as it did to punk or ’90s alternative.

“The Barbaras was the first band we were in when we started to have a vague idea of how to use a guitar or keyboard in some kind of musical way,” McElroy says. The earlier material was “chaotic and abrasive. By the time we got to the Barbaras, pop music seemed like a real revelation to us. There wasn’t any cynicism about it.”

Meanwhile, their stage shows were becoming more elaborate. “Costumes were always a big part of it,” Hayes says. “We’re all influenced by over-the-top, hilarious bands. I got a lot of my ideas from Parliament, but it’s nowhere near on the scale of Parliament. It’s like dumpster Parliament.”

Jay Reatard was an early fan of the group and started recording them with an eye toward putting out an album. But progress was slow, the difficulty compounded by the fact that Hayes and Pope started touring as Reatard’s rhythm section. “Jay was extremely overworked,” Hayes says. “When we were home from tour, it was a struggle just to get him to answer his phone, so it was a real struggle to get the record recorded.”

The Barbaras’ following grew in Memphis, compounded by a now-legendary set at Gonerfest in 2007. But Reatard’s career was taking off, and so, with part of the band on tour for much of the year, the Barbaras languished. Finally, exhausted from touring and worn down by Reatard’s increasingly self-destructive behavior, Hayes and Pope decided they wanted out. “It was just really unfun,” Hayes recalls. But that decision was to have a disastrous impact on the Barbaras. Reatard still controlled most of their recorded output, and he was never one to back down from a conflict. “He said, just out of spite, ‘I’m canceling the check I wrote you, and I’m deleting the Barbaras LP,'” Hayes says.

The Barbaras splintered. McElroy, Foster, and Gates formed the Magic Kids, who produced a great album but whose 2010 single “Superball” was a leftover Barbaras song. Hayes and Pope, who had garnered attention as a crack rhythm section from touring with Reatard, were recruited by the California punk band Waaves. But after recording an album and touring with Waaves, a disillusioned Hayes quit the band and swore off music. “I didn’t spend three years in bed like Brian Wilson, but I was a recluse,” he says.

Reatard died of a drug overdose in January 2010. But then, a break occurred. Reatard’s former girlfriend and bandmate from the Lost Sounds, Alicja Trout, tracked down the musician’s digital recorder and computer at a pawn shop, and on the hard drive she found the Barbaras’ songs. “We thought they were lost forever,” McElroy says. But with the help of Trout and Goner Records’ (and Oblivians guitarist) Eric Friedl, the songs were resurrected and, late last year, released on Goner.

The occasion for the Barbaras’ first show in almost five years is the closing of the venue that is the most strongly associated with the scene from which they sprang.

“I keep thinking about the first time I went to the Hi-Tone,” McElroy says. “I was in high school, and I went to see some indie rock show. I think about how strange high school me would have found it that later me eventually started a weird band and would end up closing the venue.”

Hayes is anxious to get back onstage. “I haven’t played a show in about three years,” he says. “I’m going to let out a lot of pent-up aggression on the audience. But in an entertaining way. Hopefully.”

The Barbaras and The Oblivians

Hi-Tone Café, Saturday, February 23rd, 9 p.m., $15

When you see him perform today, it’s hard to believe that Tupelo, Mississippi, native Onyx Ashanti started out as a saxophone player. But after mastering conventional jazz saxophone and making his living as a busker in Atlanta and California, he became fascinated by electronic music.

“I liked that it was such a varied and open new world,” Ashanti says. “I saw synergies in music that could be applied to society. Here is this music that can be so many things at the same time. It can be cheap and cheesy, or it can be really emotional and powerful in ways that we are just starting to grasp.”

Soon, Ashanti had become a laptop noodler, playing synthesized sounds with a saxophone-style breath controller over preprogrammed beats and loops he had created. “I didn’t have to get a bass player. I could be the bass player. I could play all of the instruments. But back then, I didn’t play all the instruments at once like I do now.” Eventually, he found himself drawn to Berlin, Germany, where he now resides.

The music that Ashanti will bring to Memphis this week bears some resemblance to both “conventional” electronic music and the kind of mutated jazz that Miles Davis explored in the late ’60s. But to get a sense of what Ashanti is trying to do, imagine if Miles Davis had not only been an innovative trumpet player and bandleader but had also designed and built all of his own instruments. Ashanti creates his beatjazz by using custom controllers he designed and built using a 3D printer, which allows his hands, body movement, and breath to signal and manipulate a bank of computers and synthesizers in a way that was simply not possible even a few years ago.

Onyx Ashanti will lecture and perform at Five in One (423 N. Watkins) on Friday, February 15th. Doors open at 7 p.m. “Tech talk” at 8 p.m. Performance at 9 p.m. Admission is $10.

If you’re looking for a night of loud, unhinged punk, then the Lamplighter is the place to be on Thursday, December 20th, when two Ohio acts bring the noise to the Midtown haunt. The Unholy Two, a misnamed trio consisting of Chris Lutzko, Adam Smith (on “power electronics”), and drummer Bo Davis, had been busting up buckeye bars in Columbus for three years before the release of their 2011 album $kum of the Earth. The mix of jackhammer drums, blinding-white noise guitar, synth assault, and Lutzko’s completely psycho vocalizations harks back to Amphetamine Reptile ’90s bands like the Jesus Lizard, Steel Pole Bathtub, and Killdozer.

Touring with the Unholy Two is the more melodic Obnox, aka Lamont “Bim” Thomas, a Cleveland lo-fi noisemaker who has played with bands such as the Bassholes and Puffy Areolas. Working with only guitar and drums, Thomas wraps his Oblivians/Bob Log III-style bluesy punk in swaths of swirling flange and assaultive feedback. On his self-recorded 2011 record I’m Bleeding, the psych noise hides some truly skillful songwriting on tracks such as “The Get It Inn” and “The Cowboy and Cowgirl.” But for this kind of noise rock, picking the gems out of the sludge is all part of the fun.