Devoutly Dynamic

TBD Festival, West Sacramento, Oct. 4, 2014: Even though the sun went down hours ago, warm dust still erupts into the air like the billion microscopic remnants of an obliterated world. My mind is already reeling from the gauntlet of great acts I’ve been shuttling back and forth to glimpse from one patch of riverfront land to the next; brilliant, virtuosic performances seem to flare out on all sides from different vistas, pushing the inter-stage wanderer towards a kind of polyphonic high. The sound, the flashes of light, the smell of incredible food and the miasmatic, billowing dust after a full day of sun have started to take their toll.

Determined yet tired, I trek towards the far side of the concert area, into the volume and light, to secure bodyspace for the concluding main stage performance of the evening. But somewhere around the halfway point, I pause, struck by a bluish ethereal glow and the thrum of brooding synth and bass accompanied by emotive, full-bodied vocals. I am caught off guard; the sound beckons, the conflicted groove is perfectly in sync with my mental state; it zeroes in on me with an intensity that isolates instead of pummeling the senses. I gaze up at the stage, and enter the realm of Sister Crayon.

Shine Coffee, Sacramento, July 11 2015: I’m sitting across from Terra Lopez and Dani Fernandez, the creative force known collectively as Sister Crayon. The two are remarkably down-to-earth and open, a fact which their otherworldly, often mercurial music belies. Never before has their sound been honed so sharp as on their newest release, Devoted, released early last month. Pared down from a four-piece to their current duo, the project has plunged ahead with the carefully crafted sonic workings of Fernandez and the intensely personal lyrical performances of Lopez. Both are keen to show the specific sources from which their creative output arises, whether it be turbulent personal relationships or a diverse array of contemporary artists and budding music genres. The night before our meeting, the two even showcased some of their favorite material at Dive Bar as a DJ set, and are gearing up for a live show at Harlow’s in early August—their first locally since the release of Devoted.

Our caffeine-fueled discussion, recorded here, skirts topics ranging from spirituality, love and hate and the risks of creativity. Enjoy!

How did the DJ set last night go? What sort of material did you select?
Terra Lopez: Last night was a lot of fun. Good crowd, good energy. It’s always fun coming back to our hometown. We just like to play songs that we like really loud [laughs]. For our set we selected a lot of footwork, a lot of juke stuff from Chicago, deep house, a lot of drum/bass-heavy stuff that’s really influenced our sound and resonated with us. A lot of beat-driven songs, a lot of bassline.

How was the process in crafting the production on Devoted?
Dani Fernandez: We wanted to focus more on a beat-heavy sound and showcase the vocals, and we’ve never really done that on our last albums. There were so many other things going on before, and we wanted to strip that away.
TL: We wanted to make a sound that was undeniable, with how I was feeling lyrically, we wanted that to take precedence along with the beats, and not have anything crowd it—almost a minimalist approach the whole time.

What was the first creative step taken with that album?
TL: We demoed a lot in Sacramento and in Oakland, [Fernandez] lived here at the time. And we would just send each other ideas back and forth. For the first time, we got on a plane with 20 unfinished tracks—we had never gone into a studio with unfinished ideas, so it was really scary. We both didn’t know what to expect.
DF: This was the first time we had done a record on our own.
TL: Yeah, it was nerve-wracking. We got to Florida to work with our producer Wes Jones in St. Augustine and we spent two weeks there in this tiny little town. We didn’t know anyone except for Wes, and we slept and lived at the studio for two weeks—it was a very isolating experience. We were basically in our heads for two straight weeks, and it drove us a little crazy … But it was awesome. It was incredible to be so isolated, it felt like an alternate world that we were in.
DF: Almost all of it just spilled out in those two weeks, very easily. There was never really any arguing.
TL: It was pretty much a dream to be able to work that way. To have that freedom. And then literally on the last day, on our way to the airport, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez [of The Mars Volta] wrote me and asked if he could help produce the record.

I understand Omar had been a fan of your project before he stepped up to produce?
TL: We were lucky enough to go on tour with one of his projects in 2013, and we toured with them extensively and from that tour, we built a friendship with him and his band and so they really liked what we were doing, they would watch us every night, and hang out with us. You know, he’s a pretty reclusive guy, so the fact that he even wanted anything to do with us was a big deal.
DF: We knew that he liked us when he invited us to the movies one night on tour. He doesn’t do that regularly. He likes to stay to himself on tour, not really be on the scene with everybody, but he was totally talkative, wanted to get to know us, loved what we were doing, loved the sound. And you could tell that he was really curious as to what we were setting out to do. It was really cool.

So overall, it was a pretty tension-free recording process?
TL: Yeah, we were very grateful to have had the team that we had, because it was such an organic process. We would spend eight-nine hours working with Wes on the songs, and if we needed a break, we’d go jump in the ocean, and then come back and work until two, three or four in the morning, and then start over the next day—and it was like that for two weeks.
DF: Now I get why artists tend to record in secluded areas. They’re always holed up near a beach, or at a cabin in the woods somewhere. It makes you really focus and hone in on your music. It’s probably going to be the way we record from now on.

I understand you featured “Ride or Die” as a video to coincide with the recent SCOTUS decision?
TL: We did. We had actually shot it a week prior, and it wasn’t a planned thing. I had woken up that morning and seen the Supreme Court’s ruling and was so inspired. So I reached out to the director and was like, “If there is any way that we could release that video today, it would be so fitting.” The song is a celebration of love; the video definitely is. We really just wanted to celebrate the day. Dani and I had never really put ourselves out there with our orientation; it’s a known thing among people who ask us, we’re very open, but we had never really put it out there in a video. Everyone was on board, so we just released it. It was a beautiful day, just a gorgeous day, a really proud moment. To release something in correlation with it meant a lot to us. We were finally able to put the message of our music forward in our own subtle way.

Along with these feelings of a triumph of love over hate, there’s also been a good deal of ambivalence towards the concept of love in your work …
TL: It’s incredible that you picked up on that, because I’ve done a few interviews where that kind of goes over their heads. For me, I was in a place when I wrote that, when I was starting to write the lyrics for these songs, I was heartbroken. I’d been in a five-year relationship, had my heart broken, and I’d never experienced a loss like that before. A loss of love, but also a loss of self-motivation—it was the first time it had ever happened to me, and I really clung to this record with Dani, in order to get out of bed most days back then. So for me, I wasn’t singing about that love loss, necessarily, I just didn’t believe in love at all. During those months when we were writing, I really didn’t, and I was questioning it, dissecting it. I had always believed in love, and I’ve always wanted to, but I was definitely in a place where I was trying to figure out if I still did. And so the whole album was basically a way—we called it Devoted because it was our way of practicing devotion as a way to restore our faith in it. And so there’s definitely moments, it’s kind of like a roller coaster where I’m clinging to that belief that it’s still there, even though I don’t feel it.

It seems like many of your releases have been influenced by particular relationships?
TL: I think that with Bellow and Cynic I was very vague in my language. Especially on Bellow … we were so young and didn’t think anyone would even hear that album, so we made it for ourselves. As a songwriter, I was very, very vague. I would speak about people in metaphors—you would never know what the hell I was singing about. And Cynic was very much straightforwardly about my mother and my father and my childhood, but I still was a little vague about expressing myself. When the time came for Devoted, there was no way around it. I didn’t have the time or the energy to make metaphors, I had to express exactly what I felt.

Do you think it’s necessary to suffer for art?
TL: I’ve never been able to write when I’m happy, and I admire those who can, but I’ve never been able to. I don’t necessarily need to be in a dark place, but I do need to contemplate. I dwell a lot.

What’s next for Sister Crayon? What should we expect at Harlows on Aug. 1, 2015?
TL: We’re working on two videos and some remixes; a lot of content coming out in the summer and in the fall. As for Harlow’s, expect a brand new set of songs that we’ve never played here. Just an entirely new experience, new merchandise and new feelings We’re coming out with a completely different kind of performance.

Give Dani and Terra a warm welcome home to Sacramento! Sister Crayon will play Harlow’s on Aug. 1 with DLRN and Stevie Nader. Doors open at 9:30 p.m. Tickets for this 21-and-over show can be purchased in advance for $12 at Harlows.com.

Terra Lopez of Sister Crayon will be hosting all-ages live music nights at Broadacre Coffee (1014 10th Street) starting on Friday, Jan. 27, 2012. “I’m looking forward to it, and I think this city needs more all-ages venues,” Lopez recently told Submerge in an e-mail. “I want to host my favorite local and non-local acts in an intimate setting where the bands play a different set than they normally would, say at a bigger and louder venue.” She also noted that the shows will always be cheap, never more than $5. The Jan. 27 bill features Exquisite Corps, Garrett Pierce and a special DJ set from Lopez and Sister Crayon band mate Dani Fernandez. Doors open at 8 p.m. Keep an eye out at Facebook.com/broadacrecoffee for future shows and events.

Sister Crayon Steps It Up Further on Debut LP

It was a gray and windy afternoon on the beaches of Malibu. A tidal wave warning was in effect, but there local band Sister Crayon stood, fully-clothed, sharp shoreline rock at their ankles, as photographer Eliot Lee Hazel barked orders to capture the frozen chaos of crashing white caps for the band’s debut album art.

Lead singer Terra Lopez slipped during one shot, cutting her leg, but Hazel ran his shoot like a drill sergeant. “He just said, ‘Get up. Don’t smile. Don’t look at me,’” Lopez said. “Well, he’s a sweetheart, nice guy, you can sit down and talk to him, but when he’s taking photos he is so intense.”

As absurd as it feels to the members of Sister Crayon, Lopez and drummer Nicholas Suhr spoke of the shoot as one of their most memorable music experiences–even though it had little to do with music. Along with Hazel’s artwork, the band has a high-def music video done by celebrity photographer Robert Ascroft. Browsing both photographers’ websites, perusing the tastefully gratuitous images of Devendra Banhart, Usher, Mariah Carey, Edward Sharpe and Brad Pitt, Sister Crayon will be the first to tell you how privileged, yet out of place they feel. Are these the last remaining minor moments of Sister Crayon before they receive Coachella bookings and Japan tour offers?

In the next few weeks, the band is playing humbler venues like Townhouse for the Sacramento Electronic Music Festival and Luigi’s Fungarden for the Bellow album release party. So our indie darlings have yet to grow too big for our sleepy city. Lopez looks like a siren Viking vixen in the video for “(In) Reverse,” but when I met with her and Suhr at Mondo Bizarro (formerly Butch & Nellie’s) for an interview, she was back in her Midtown garb, a second-hand green army jacket and jeans–the Lindsay Weir of Freaks and Geeks look. She’s still the same shy songwriter, fronting a gloomy pop act that seeks inspiration in the lonesome despair of poets like Jean Genet and Fernando Pessoa.

The Bellow sessions scattered across the span of a year and a half. The newly realized lineup of Sister Crayon crammed in 18-hour shifts at The Hangar with engineer Scott McShane, who described the process as “tense” and a “guerilla recording style.” McShane produced the first Sister Crayon EP, Enter Into Holy (Or)ders, and the band never entertained the thought of working with anyone else. “Recording already is a really intimate thing. We bond so well with him. He gets what we’re trying to do, even before we understand it,” Lopez said.

“He’s able to throw out ideas that’s not in an insulting way. It’s just full-on experimenting and you know that it’s for the best. He pushes us to succeed,” Suhr added.

The tension came from the hourglass pressure of paying for studio time and the unfamiliarity of having a new drummer join two weeks prior, writing his parts on the fly. Suhr was not a complete stranger, knowing Lopez from her stint in The Evening Episode, but he and Lopez talked of the anxieties surrounding a debut full length. “We were zombies. We’d spend 18 hours in the studio and you can hear it in the record,” she said.

Originally, Bellows was intended to be a five-song EP, written by Lopez and synth-keyboardist Dani Fernandez, with “I’m Still the Same Person” being the only pre-released song to make the album. But once the band wrapped recording those five songs, creativity was running high and five more songs were written collectively. “Scott kept telling us there was a lot of tension on the record,” Suhr said. “If you know what was going on at the time it makes sense. There was a lot of time spent coming to an agreement on things, but whenever we’re writing together there’s no awkwardness. It was easy to go into the next five songs with an open mindset.”

Indeed, the settling in is brazen and culminates with a spacious piano ballad called “Ixchel, The Lady Rainbow,” in which Lopez’s visceral croon soars over a piece written by former member Genaro Ulloa. “Ixchel” was the last song the band recorded, a one-take recording done well past the midnight hour. “We did it live tracking,” Lopez said. “He was in the other room and I was in the main room singing. We could see each other through a little window, but that was it. It was the first take and it was incredible. I know it sounds corny, but there were tears in everyone’s eyes. We were all exhausted. Even Scott had tears in his eyes.”

Suhr added, “It’s one of those songs. Every other song on the record we did multiple takes because we felt we could do better. At the end of that song, everyone was just like what the fuck. It’s one of those songs where if it didn’t sound like that, with the imperfections left in, it wouldn’t have worked.”

The gloomy pop instrumentation informed by the troubled words of dead poets is an appropriate setting for an album titled Bellow, but Suhr said a lot of the mood is owed to McShane’s guidance. “I heard the five songs written before I joined, but the mood had changed through Scott’s ears.” Lopez said his touch is most prevalent on “Here We Never Die and “(In) Reverse” as he took the band’s ideas and focused them into a cohesive sound.

In addition to McShane, the Sister Crayon sound, most notably the lyrics, is in homage to the writings of Fernando Pessoa, a 20th Century poet and literary critic. Lopez only admitted her obsession with Pessoa’s work. She has a Pessoa tattoo and her Pug’s name is Ophelia, after Pessoa’s secret crush to whom he never confessed his love. “It’s the despair,” she said. “It sounds dramatic, but he was such a lonely individual. He was very mysterious and obviously people are drawn to that.

“I think that is a huge part of Bellow. ‘Here We Never Die’ is my talking to a lover in that way. The despair and sadness that he wrote is so sad that I can’t even finish one of his books. I have to read a sentence a day sometimes because it’s so much. It just floors me. I have no option when it comes to his presence in my music.”

As intense as Sister Crayon is sonically and visually portrayed, Hazel’s insistency that the band stop smiling as the chilly Pacific waves capsized on their heads speaks of the band’s unbridled joy in its work. As arresting as “Ixchel, The Lady Rainbow” is, Bellow closes with “Souls of Gold,” a cheery campfire sing-a-long with a blasting brass section and woozy synths. “We’re always such a serious band and a lot of our songs are really dark,” Lopez said. “I do like that the album ends on a lighter note than what it could have been.”

See Sister Crayon live at their release party for their new album Bellows at Luigi’s Fungarden on Feb. 19.

Sister Crayon to Release Its First Album as a Full Band

When Submerge spoke to Sister Crayon’s Terra Lopez, she and the band were mired in Southern California traffic. Currently on the road on the Broke Bitches tour along with fellow Sacramentans Agent Ribbons, Sister Crayon weren’t holed up “in a big van” like their tourmates. Instead, Lopez and company were situated in a cozy station wagon—a red Volvo.

Genaro in The Crawdad, a reliable yet cramped tour vehicle. She got us to where we needed to be

“It’s all over the place, actually,” Lopez says of Sister Crayon’s modest transportation. “But it’s been really good overall.”

Sister Crayon is still relatively young. The seeds for the band were first sown three years ago when Lopez’s prior band broke up and left her performing solo. She went on alone for about a year until she met Dani Fernandez, who plays drum machine and synthesizer for Sister Crayon. It was through this pairing that Sister Crayon’s sound began to take shape. Lopez says that when she was on her own, her music was “very quiet”—just Lopez and her guitar. Though she had used loop pedals and beat machines in her previous band, it wasn’t until she started working with Fernandez that Lopez began pooling all of her influences into her music. Lopez says that she and Fernandez “just clicked” and the two began incorporating hip-hop elements into Lopez’s not-quite-folksy singer/songwriter material.

“We both love hip-hop, but we like just all kinds of different music,” Lopez explains. “The first song we wrote together was ‘Lavender Liars'”¦ I played this weird organ and she just played beats over it, and it just stuck. We figured out that was what we wanted to do. When I met Dani, that’s when things changed. I was like, ‘I finally met someone who could help me out with the sounds I had.'”

Chelsea Wolfe and I at the Smell in L.A. This show was with VOICEs VOICEs
and had Keith Haring murals!

Even when Lopez was performing on her own, she recalls that she always felt as if her music would lend itself to a bigger sound.

“When I was playing by myself, I liked what I was doing, but I always heard more,” Lopez says. “I always wanted more.”

Sister Crayon’s sound became even fuller with the addition of keyboardist Genaro Ulloa-Juno. The band operated as a twosome for about a year until Ulloa-Juno entered into the mix. Lopez says that the multi-instrumentalist was an easy fit into the band’s dynamic.

“It came together really simply, actually,” she says. “I asked him over to my house one day to listen to some stuff and see if he could add any thing, and we just hit it off.”

The band grew even further only just recently. Nicholas Suhr hopped on board only a few months ago. Hailing from the Bay Area, Suhr is now Sister Crayon’s drummer, adding a visceral snap to the band’s ethereal electronic beats.

Dani at a mansion (literally) 5 houses down from Snoop Dogg. Crazy story how we ended up staying at a mansion but it was by far the best night on tour. Thank you Pomona, Calif.!

“It’s really awesome to have a fuller sound,” Lopez says.

Suhr’s drumming came at a crucial time for the band as they were preparing their first proper CD release. Lopez released a Sister Crayon album, Loneliness Is My Mother’s Gun, earlier in 2009 via Chicago indie label Juene Été Records; however, she says their upcoming effort will be more indicative of Sister Crayon’s current sound.

“That album is just my stuff; they’re bedroom recordings,” Lopez says of Loneliness”¦. “Dani’s on a couple of tracks on that as well. I never intended to put that out. I was just going to sell that for $5 at shows”¦but the label contacted me and they were like, ‘We really like what you’re doing. Can we put this out?’ And I was like, ‘Wow.’ They paid for it all, so I was like, ‘Sure.'”

On the other hand, Enter Into Holy (Or)ders, Sister Crayon’s upcoming release, features the entire band—including Suhr, who had only joined the group a “week or two” before they went into the studio.

Chelsea Wolfe, Nicholas Suhr and I passed out after the house party in Pomona, Calif. We were up until 5 a.m. with the most amazing new friends we met earlier that night.

“He had to learn and write all of his parts while we were recording,” Lopez says of Suhr’s kind of trial by fire. “It was really cool that he was able to do that, because we had all been playing those songs for months, and he had to learn everything in the studio.” Lopez called the recording sessions for the album “intense,” saying that the band was logging 14 – 18 hour days at The Hangar, where “¦Holy (Or)ders was recorded, produced by the band with help from Scott McChane, including “really long practices.”

The intensity with which “¦Holy (Or)ders was recorded is reflected in the music. Though Lopez says her lyrics and vocals are important to her, she says the album’s focus was more on the music.

“For me, for this album, I wanted the music to be the main focus because it was finally getting more intense, which is what I think we all wanted,” she explains.

Though her lyrics may have been more of an appetizer than “¦Holy (Or)ders‘s main course, Lopez believes the force of the band’s music has definitely rubbed off on her lyric writing. She says that her lyrics may have been more personal when Sister Crayon was a one-woman show; and though they still pull from her private life, her writing has become more aggressive. She says that the lyrics she wrote to the songs on “¦Holy (Or)ders revolve around the events of this past summer: including a relationship she’d entered into and a book she had been reading by controversial 20th century French writer Jean Genet. In fact, the title of the album is taken from a line in one of Genet’s books.

“He was one of the first French homosexual writers,” Lopez says. “His writing is really dirty and really aggressive. That kind of intrigued me.”

Performance-wise, Lopez is also no longer the quiet singer/songwriter with a guitar. She says that now that she has the power of a full band behind her, she’s had to become more assertive on stage.

“I sing a lot louder than I used to,” Lopez says through laughter.

Blessed with a stirring and soulful voice, a louder Lopez can only be considered a good thing. The band should be back home from the Broke Bitches Tour by the time this issue hits the streets. However, the band won’t be able to relax once they’re back in Sacramento. Lopez says Sister Crayon will quickly return to The Hangar to finish mixing “¦Holy (Or)ders so that it’s done by their CD release party on Aug. 21. Further on the horizon, Lopez says the band is hoping to have more of a nationwide tour, and in January, the band will perform in Spain, where their album will also see release.

Sister Crayon

Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009
Luigi’s Fun Garden

On a cold Saturday night, Sister Crayon kept me warm. Not with blankets or pea coats, but with hope for a better Sacramento music scene. Some say it’s dead and gone; that all the good bands are broken up and nothing new can replace them. Others remain optimistic—attending the shows that get ignored and filling the dance floors that are void of moving feet. What we all agree on is our love of good music and the desire to have it here in our great city. Sister Crayon’s recent performance at Luigi’s Fun Garden was a step in the right direction.

The crowd that gathered outside Luigi’s Fun Garden squeaked about on the wooden deck that hugs the outside of the impressive MARRS building on 20th and K. As Sister Crayon set up on the cobalt colored stage, they had a certain air about them. The four of them were positioned patiently behind their respective instruments, fondling them appropriately with an unbreakable focus.

Surrounded by keyboards and synthesizers, Genaro Ulloa was tucked neatly into the left corner, methodically turning knobs and wrestling cables that twisted and hooked like octopus tentacles. Dani Fernandez hovered over an MPC beat machine, picking at it like an impatient child at the dinner table, deciding what she liked and what needed changing. Leon Smith sat hunched over his drum set, a long gray scarf fastened neatly to his neck. After catching up with Terra Lopez, the high priestess of Sister Canyon, I learned that during the course of writing the record Loneliness Is My Mother’s Gun, a Beatles-inspired title no doubt, she’d been slowly compiling a full band, and tonight was their first performance together.

Fernandez played a straight-ahead 808 beat that concisely anchored their first song as an airy, backward guitar loop smeared across our eardrums; thick as paint. The music opened up to a bleeding chorus by Lopez. “It’s so easy to get distracted”¦“ she repeated over and over, her voice mimicking a sampler. The texture took precedence over a constantly changing song structure. The songs were very linear and built with each new layer, be it Smith’s minimal drum playing or Lopez’s use of the Kaos pad to echo and distort her voice, which was undeniably strong. Each ‘down tempo’ gem sucked the easily entranced audience deeper and deeper into Sister Crayon’s universe of other-worldly noises, samples and synth lines. The overall effect was a little reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor, Coco Rosie and Björk, the latter two being a big influence on Terra. The sound was minimal drums with maximum vocals that glide over the carefully quieting sounds of Ulloa’s keyboard melodies.

The rabbit hole took us to the last song, a nine-minute masterpiece filled with nearly inaudible field recordings of strange voices, reverberated harmonica, dissident guitar and a tardy drum build by Smith. The last note faded and the cold night was forgotten by an eruption of fiery applause.