Bat Noise: Still \'freaking the streets\'

Who’s in Bat Noise and what do you play?
Roxy Monoxide and LuLu Gammaray. Roxy plays tenor sax, floor tom, FX loop and screams. LuLu plays theremin, synthesizer/sequencer, FX, sampler.

When did you first get together?
We started dating spring 2001 and started playing together in The Floating Corpses later that year. Moira Scar has been a group since 2009 while Bat Noise had our first official show in January of this year.

What’s the origin of the name?
Bat Noise started as a description for our music, for our groups Moira Scar and V.E.X., and then it became our label for self-released records as well as what we’d call ourselves as event producers.

Moira Scar is back as trio, with killer new drummer and set, our V.E.X. Darkwave Industrial duo incarnation is no more or maybe just on hiatus, and we needed a new outlet for our aural explorations, one that was less song structured and more in the moment of the muse, and we had started playing tenor sax and theremin on the street and then expanded our instruments while keeping that core of source in our sonic expressions.

How would you describe your sound to people who haven’t heard you before?
Haunted Improv, Punk-Jazz Death-Wave.

What are your biggest musical and artistic inspirations?
These seem to always be changing and always coming back around, birds, storms, spirits, moon, madness, Musique Concrète and experimental Death Rock, Sun Ra, Xenakis, Delia Derbyshire, Diamanda Galas, Billie Holiday, John & Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Gitane Demone, Morten Subotnick, Minimal Man, Factrix, Fad Gadget, Alien Sex Fiend, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, our previous projects and what we were or were not able to express in them (Moira Scar started as a duo to get back to our core when our previous band The Floating Corpses had become too rock band formulaic, and now that Moira Scar has honed itself into a goth punk industrial trio we are inspired to again get back to the root of the sound), bands we’ve played with over the years, the splendor and misery of bodies, of cities—Samuel Delaney reference, a fave author, along with other sci-fi speculative fiction authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Phillip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Stanislaw Lem, Ray Bradbury, whose labyrinths one gets lost in help to feel a deeper truth beyond so-thought reality, doesn’t need to be sci-fi, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Toni Morrison, many more, our fave new author is Fernando A. Flores!

Who are the best underground music makers in LA right now?
We play Friday with awesome Myriad Slits and powerful Pain Behavior, we decline to answer further in that our answers might incriminate us.

Cute & difficult & fun: Myriad Slits this Friday at Oracle Tavern

Are you working on anything new? Please tell us about it
Yes! Bat Noise is our freshest incarnation and that’s the way we try and keep it! We have been recording Bat Noise live sets in our garage-cave onto four-track cassette, picking the most passionate performances that the magnetic tape has captured which we will eventually release in album forms.

We are also recording a new Moira Scar album, which is 9 songs so far, we each sing on 4 with one instrumental, recording onto half-inch 8 track reel-to-reel tape, we have vinyl planned. Another project we do as Bat Noise, besides playing on the streets, is we play on bridges, we play the material and ethereal structures themselves, architecture and environment as resonating instruments.

Where online can we experience Bat Noise and Moira Scar?
Connect with Bat Noise here.

On Instagram, follow @bat_noise and @moira_scar.

What can folks expect from your show at Oracle Tavern this Friday?
A twenty minute set of surreal soundtrack and ceremonial channeling, ranging from moody sax and theremin to aggressive synth sequences with live floor tom drumming as well as live looping, with samples and sound effects and screams thrown in the mix, as we chew on our instruments the spirits chew on us!

Do you have any other shows coming up?
We are playing Last Projects Gallery in DTLA on Saturday, May 13, part of a salon of strange sounds and cinema happening between 8-10pm.

On Friday May 19th we play Oaklash, a multi-day Drag fest happening in Oakland, we play the live music night at Thee Stork Club.

What’s your favorite place to hang out in Los Angeles and why?
Can’t really play favorites but dig underground venues and street life, we are playing two shows in DTLA and we do often end up hanging in our van when on tour between Chinatown and Elysian Park, such as that corner where Human Resources meets Pho 87, and used to love to get coffee and read at Stories in Echo Park but the crowd gotten way more bland bougie hipster but we still freaking these streets as well as our instruments.

Don’t miss Bat Noise this Friday at Oracle Tavern