Soulful, Danceable and Real, Groovincible Plans to Get You Moving with Their New Album

If you are ever in search of a vocalist and partner in crime, you might try spotting the flyest girl in the bar and asking her to sing for you. The odds that she will deliver are slim. But it must have been Matt Klee’s lucky night, because Bianca Wright sang him a song she wrote that left an impression, and the two have been side by side musically and romantically ever since.

Three years later, Wright and Klee joined Jacob Gleason to form Groovincible in 2011 in Klee’s garage in Fair Oaks. The idea was to put Wright’s voice at the forefront of the band, with Klee on drums, Gleason on guitar and tenor sax and Wright on the mic, shared with Gleason. Prior, Gleason and Klee bonded over tacos and hours spent in the backseat of a crusty old tour van during the 2009 Hippy Feet tour with Sacramento’s well-known fusion band ZuhG. Each have been involved in other musical projects, including ZuhG, but after Wright performed as a guest singer on Free Love, ZuhG’s self-released album, the three broke away to form Groovinicible, allowing them an opportunity to write their own material.

Now, after wrapping up their self-titled debut album recorded at Pus Cavern Studios (currently available for purchase and streaming online) they are prepping for their CD release show, which is on Saturday, July 27 at Blue Lamp. They have also added on three members: Tony Marks on bass, Sam Phelps on keys and Edward Hurff on baritone sax.

If you’re limited on words, you could say Groovincible is somewhere in the funk/soul/jazz realm, with moments of rock. Their aim is to keep things grooving, interesting and danceable, hence “Groovincible.” Those are the words that Gleason offered up during a phone interview with him and Wright. But that’s just brushing the surface.

For those who like to turn on a dynamic album and listen the whole way through, Groovincible is for you. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, the band pulls something else out of their sleeve, whether its ethereal harmonies or tempo changes and distortion.

In the span of 43 minutes laid over 12 tracks, Groovincible throws one drop (the reggae groove), Klezmer, tablas (Indian drums) and distorted sax into the mix. Of the 12, only four are under five minutes in length, and two of the songs are broken up over two tracks. That’s just how Gleason writes, with at least three “parts” per song.

As he explains it, a song amounts to “whatever amount of time it takes to express the idea,” whether it’s five minutes or 30.

This album evolved out of several months of Klee and Gleason jamming in Klee’s garage. Everything was recorded. At the end of the recording sessions they cut out whatever didn’t sound good from each track, leaving behind the cream of the crop to make up the songs. Gleason actually ended up cutting out a lot of guitar, leaving “implied” guitar parts in a number of songs while layering saxophone, keys, bass and flute.

The exception was a “magical take” of “Bari Krishna,” recorded in one go. “Bari Krishna,” with the overlap of fluttering guitar and horn segments, brings to mind a chase scene in a spy film, blazing through alleys in a getaway car in Cairo or Kabul.

Other songs, such as opening track “Downtown Shindig” or “Punk Step,” could easily sound off during one of Quentin Taratino’s killing sprees.

As far as Gleason is concerned, if their songs have cinematic flavor, then they are succeeding.

Aside from “Bari Krishna,” which is instrumental, Gleason and Wright wrote the vocals over the songs, with Wright penning a lot of the hooks and choruses, and adding a soulful touch.

“A lot of people homogenize soul, R&B and hip-hop,” Wright says. “But when people are singing they’re really pushing for what they’re inspired by… My lyrical style is more soulful.”

She takes her cues from the likes of Jill Scott and Erykah Badu.

Beyond recording, Wright’s feminine energy is critical to the band, Gleason says.

As Wright sees it, she contributes both nurturing and vulnerable elements to the band, particularly during live performances.

“If I’m going to be up there on stage, then I like everything I do to be ‘real,’” Wright explains. “I like to set the vibe and be comfortable with people, looking at people, looking at who I’m singing to.”

While Wright brings the soul, it is apparent that Gleason brings the glue. Or is the glue, when it comes to the band. That includes music theory and recording.

“I live, eat and dream music,” he says.

While it’s definitely not an unusual thing to hear coming from a musician, it doesn’t feel like false advertising. He’s one of those who got an early start in music theory, coming from an upbringing where instruments and encouragement were consistently available, starting with mom breaking out the pans, to a keyboard, saxophone and eventually a guitar. By age 15 he was in his first rock band, and music has been an everyday part of life ever since.

“I sit on my ass and watch Game of Thrones once in a while,” he confesses.

Beyond that, however, time boils down to songwriting and performing.

However they manage to do it, between Gleason, Wright and Klee and those who have hopped on board since, Groovincible has developed an unmistakable sound.

“We’re just a bunch of people who make noise together,” Gleason says. “We get to play music we love with people we love.”

Whether or not Klee realized it at the time, he was doing everyone a favor when he asked Wright to sing.

Groovincible’s CD Release show is Saturday, July 27, 2013 at Blue Lamp (1400 Alhambra Blvd). Also performing will be Tao Jiriki and Brian Rogers. $10 cover includes the new Groovincible CD. Doors open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m., 21-and-over only. For more information visit Groovincible.com

How local graphic designer and poster artist Jason Malmberg came up through the ranks

If you look at a Jason Malmberg poster and you’re unsure at first of what you’re looking at, if you need a minute to stare and process, if things seem off balance, if for a moment you feel like you are looking at a worksheet out of a German school book—don’t be alarmed. This is just the effect the local graphic designer is going for.

In the ‘70s, even public service announcement posters were psychedelic, Malmberg remembers, including one he’ll never forget. It was of a sobbing child throwing his arms over his head in horror, except his arms were 13 or 14 snakes. The poster read, “Why you shouldn’t take LSD” and went on to list what happens in the first 15 minutes, and in the second.

Take a look at the poster Malmberg made for the Foals show at Ace of Spades last month, and in the midst of colliding geometric shapes, you’ll see two intersecting male arms, each turning into the head of a snake from the elbow up.

Malmberg sampled two to four hands, arms and snakes to put together that image alone. “I don’t like hacking on other images,” he explains over the phone from his home office. “I want it to be more my own.”

So he salvages bits and pieces from historical images and online library archives public libraries, sometimes drawing on top of them, to recreate entirely new concepts, often with a ‘60s and ‘70s feel. Then he’ll lay out some type—and as a self-proclaimed typography nerd, this is key.

For the last 13 years, Malmberg has designed posters for just under 100 shows, including mainstream acts like Mos Def and the Violent Femmes as well as indie rock band Foals and former underground pop band Luna. Next month, he will showcase some of his pieces in his second-ever poster art show, Modern Lehzure, at Cuffs in Midtown.

Visit Decabet.com and you will get a taste of Malmberg’s work. Yes, decabet, as in Dan Aykroyd’s 10-letter alphabet on Saturday Night Live.

Poster design is Malmberg’s ultimate outlet. What he hasn’t been able to get away with in his day job, he has gotten away with in poster art.

Within the last year Malmberg landed a job with a branding agency in Washington, D.C, where he is now developing his Web skills. Before that, he worked in print, as an art director for a handful of local publications, like Sacramento News & Review, Sactown Magazine and MGW.

While he was with Sactown Magazine, one of his designs popped up on T-shirts at Nordstrom sometime in 2007. You’d never know it, he says, and that’s probably all for the best. Unfortunately, his unique filigree design somehow became a part of the douche bag national uniform, he discloses.

Regardless, life wasn’t always peachy for Malmberg. If anyone has earned the seat they are sitting in now, he certainly has. It took a lengthy series of events to get him here.

To put it bluntly, “I’ve worked every shitty, low-paying job you could imagine,” he says.

This includes working fast food joints, at an eyeglass factory, in furniture assembly and smoothing down edges of windshields for eight hours a day.

Malmberg’s beginnings took place in Omaha, Neb. His teen years preceded Saddle Creek Records.

“It’s still not really cool to be from Omaha, but more than it was when I was there,” he says. “Now Omaha is sort of like a mini Athens kind of city—not Greek obviously—with their hipster cred. I was there in 1999, when it was a terrible wasteland and our claim to fame at the time, which everyone is still trying to live down, is 311.”

He studied under a “hands-off” kind of art teacher in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue, who provided Malmberg with just the right amount of guidance that made him successful. He had gallery shows before graduating from high school and went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Unfortunately, along with admittance into one of the best art schools in the country came unlimited pretentiousness.

He was surrounded by art students. To his dismay many of them were kids desperately attempting to fit social roles and convince the world they were someone other than themselves.

He quickly came to this realization: “I love people who make art, but I hate artists.”

He also realized that the Art Institute was not for him.

“I was making less art than when I was just a bum working at Taco Bell,” he remembers.

So, a year into it, Malmberg did what many students who find themselves in similar situations don’t have the courage to do—he left.

He returned to Omaha at 19 and began designing T-shirts for his friend’s skateboard gig. It seemed like a good idea at the time he said, but it didn’t last long. Then he took on the factory jobs. After that he spent three years as a rave promoter in Omaha. The last rave he threw was in 1997. It was going to be a huge party, outside. Tons of people were going to be there. This was the one that was going to lift him out of poverty, he thought.

Not quite. But it did result in him getting work laying out classified ads for a small local publication called The Reader. It started out as work to repay a debt. Up to that point he had never used a computer to design.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” he confesses.

The bus only ran twice daily between his place and the office, so rather than go home he would stay all night at the office and teach himself how to design. Eventually he was bumped up to art director.

Within about 18 months he redesigned the publication, drawing national accolades. Sacramento News & Review took notice and offered him a position as art director. He took it, and moved to Sacramento in 1999.

In 2006, he connected with the editors of Sactown Magazine when the publication was in its infancy. He became their art director, and helped create the look of the publication from its inception in 2006 until last year.

It was only a matter of time before he ran into local promoter and legend Brian McKenna in the early ‘00s. Next thing you know, Malmberg was designing posters for local shows on the side.

As his designs have improved he has become more selective about which shows he designs for. If he’s designing a poster for a show, it’s because he’s a fan of the band on the ticket. He doesn’t get paid much, if anything, for his work. He designed the Foals poster out-of-pocket. Hearing back from the band, however, is excellent compensation.

When Malmberg designed a poster for Luna’s show at Harlow’s in 2005, the band liked the design so much they asked to repurpose it as a limited edition sale item for their final show in New York. By the third show they sold out of 250 posters. The following year they used the design again for the DVD cover of their farewell tour.

Regardless of who he designs for, he makes it a point to represent the band properly through his design. For each band poster he designs, he’ll listen to the albums to come up with a theme. Each poster should have its own feel.

“You don’t want to be one of those guys who’s basically just churning out art prints and tacking band names on them, because that’s not cool,” he says. “If the bands don’t sound the same, the posters shouldn’t look the same.

“I don’t try to be literal or narrative,” he says.

That’s how he ends up with posters that look like German ice cream bar wrappers from the ‘70s, like the one he made for the Naked and Famous show. Both fun and grotesque, what looks like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wags its tongue beneath the noses of two interlinked revolvers.

Malmberg explains the look on his website.

“With the band’s bright candy-colored-yet-tasteful aesthetic in mind, I had the idea to try to make something a little European and a lot of odd,” he says. “I started out wanting to make something bizarre in the Polish movie poster vein but ended up with something a bit more like a German ice cream bar wrapper from the ‘70s. A little pop-art, a little glam, a lot of odd.”

Check out Jason Malmberg’s Modern Lehzure at Cuffs in Midtown (2523 J Street, Sacramento) on May 11, 2013. The event is part of Second Saturday. You can learn more about Malmberg at Decabet.com. While you’re online checking out his rad designs, why not check out Cuffs’ home on the Web at Shopcuffs.com?

Local singer/songwriter Justin Farren talks about his music and latest album, and why touring pushes his boundaries, in the best way

Introversion arguably produces the best artists. Those who can spend hours holed up in isolation working on a project often emerge with a gem. Land them at a party or social gathering, however, and they’re quickly making a beeline to the nearest bathroom or unoccupied space.

Justin Farren is an exemplary introvert. If he’s not out backpacking or camping, then he is keeping busy on a project—fixing up his yellow truck, woodworking or writing an album in his garage. For this local singer/songwriter, touring means treading outside his comfort zone.

You might not know it if you saw him perform, but it is nothing short of a challenge.

He was in fact on tour as he was explaining this over the phone, camping with some friends in Bellingham, Wash., and prepping for a show that same night.

Touring, he concludes, is good for him. Given any other circumstance, “I’d want to just go hide,” he says. But after a show, he has no choice but to open up and talk to people.

After three or four more shows along the North Coast, he returns to the Sacramento area for his April 6 CD release show at the CSA Event Center, celebrating the release of his album Another Bluebird Day. Then he’ll continue down to Southern California to promote the album.

This is Farren’s third album. With the exception of his friends Brian Rogers on drums and Emily Kollars singing backup vocals, the album is all Farren, from the guitar, bass, keyboard and shakers to the samples of him pounding aluminum cans. This project sums up his last six months, which were spent recording and mixing the entire thing in his garage-turned-studio at his house.

There is nothing obscure about Farren’s songs. Over immaculate finger picking and slide guitar, he sings with lighthearted honesty about life’s tougher blows, compacted into three to four minute folk pop, storytime songs.

“It has these kind of heartbreaking ideas, and I think that the whole album hopefully places these in a light of appreciation,” he says. “Stand in those moments where it would be easy to be depressed, and just appreciate that you got to have those experiences.”

Farren grew up in Elk Grove when it was nothing more than fields, long before it overdosed on suburban steroids. There are no known musicians in his family, though he says there’s talk of a bad-ass accordionist amongst his ancestry. But somewhere along the way, Farren taught himself how to play music, and he’s been at it ever since.

Within the last five or six years, he’s even been able to make a living off it. He’s opened for the likes of Hot Buttered Rum, Matt Costa and Jackie Greene. He was voted “Best Lyricist” in 2010 by Sacramento Magazine and “Best Musician” in 2009 and 2010 by the Sacramento News and Review.

Farren released his last album, Songs from Spare Rooms, in 2008. Those songs were all written in the two years he surfed couches while his house was being built. (It’s worth mentioning that Farren and his now-fiancée built their house in Oak Park from scratch, inspired by a trip they made to Alaska in 2004.)

“We thought, well, let’s just build a house and not think too much about it,” he says.

It’s where the two currently reside, with three dogs, two of which are lovingly named Pickle Breath and Mr. Pig. Indeed, they have been sources of inspiration. Pickle Breath inspired the song on the album, “Sometimes I Like to Kill Things Too.” Go on to Farren’s music page on Facebook, and you will see several flattering photos of Mr. Pig (who, by the way, needs a new happy home).

“Mr. Pig, the one in all the pictures, is maybe the nicest dog I’ve ever known,” Farren says with utmost sincerity. “So I can’t take him to the SPCA, I have to find him a home.”

Other than Mr. Pig, here is an excerpt of more interesting things that came up in the conversation.

So we were talking about your place in Oak Park, how long ago did you build that?
We started in 2005. It took a couple years, we moved in in late 2007.

What prompted you to do that?
The summer before, in 2004, my girlfriend and I went and worked in Alaska in a really tiny little town called McCarthy, just as something to do. We drove up and we worked in this little town, and a lot of the people up there build their own homes. Over the five or six months that we were there, we were talking to a lot of the locals and kind of getting inspired, like that might be some cool thing to do. We decided we wanted to try it when we got home.

I read that you consider yourself a little bit of an introvert, so I was wondering if touring was a challenge.
Oh yeah, it’s a huge challenge. It always has been and I think it always will be… The more tours I go on, the higher my threshold gets. I am able to comfortably sleep on a stranger’s couch and wake up and make them breakfast, and have a morning conversation with someone that I don’t know. Fifteen years ago that would have been mortifying and terribly difficult for me to even imagine doing.

I think maybe that’s the best thing I can do as a human being, is hopefully raise that threshold. Because the threshold is higher, I’m able to learn from more people and be around new ideas and broaden my horizons. So touring represents all of that, all at once to me, because I’m out and I’m sharing something that’s so important to me with people who have no idea who I am a lot of the time. It forces me to swallow my pride and just do my best and play the song, and hope someone gets on the page and buys a CD or whatever.

Do you generally write first-hand accounts when you write songs?
Yeah, in general. There’s a lot of first-person and talking about stuff that is affecting me. I’ve always admired writers who can read a book and write a song about a character in the book. I feel like I’m a selfish songwriter in that way, I’m always just writing about myself. But that’s kind of all that I have, that’s what comes out all the time.

It’s an outlet, then?
Yeah, it’s the outlet. It’s an outlet, and I try to think of the songs as a byproduct of living, and I want to live a really fun, interesting life, so that I can have fun, interesting songs.

Your music was featured on Laguna Beach?
Yeah, one of the songs I wrote was featured. It’s from the first album. It’s a song I wrote about my band breaking up. I had a piece of shit car, and I didn’t have much going on in my life. And they played that song during a scene in Laguna Beach when they were complaining about their car, and they were driving some fancy Escalade or something, and they were talking about how their car sucks. It’s an awful show. It’s terrible.

What is your least favorite song in the world of songs?
Oh my God, least favorite song in the world? I have to think about it, because that’s such a huge question. There’s just a dense forest of songs that I hate so much. I feel like it’s maybe the biggest question that we’ve talked about. For me to say that I hate it, I have to really mean it.

Justin Farren will celebrate the release of his latest album Another Bluebird Day at 7 p.m. on April 6, 2013 at the CSA Event Center, located at 1275 Starboard Drive in West Sacramento. For more info and to order tickets, go to http://justinfarren.com/ or http://www.csaeventcenter.com/

If people started eating a little more like cranes, nature and the economy might be a little better off for it.

This is what prompted the naming of Feeding Crane Farms, a small farming operation with a big vision that sits along a bird grove on the East Levee Corridor in Natomas.

“Cranes are a really wonderful example of what we’re doing with Feeding Crane Farms,” says general manager Shannin Stein. “Cranes eat locally, they eat seasonally.

“They will actually create habitats for small bugs where they live, they’ll tend to those areas and actually cultivate the bugs,” she adds.

Stein oversees Local Food Done Right, an umbrella company that owns both Feeding Crane Farms and Lulu’s Kitchen. The vision behind the two operations is to promote local, sustainable food production, from “farm to fork.”

She, alongside company owner and visionary Brian Shaad, farm manager Antonio Garza, and operations manager Dylan Keith, are part of a team of less than 10 keeping Lulu’s Kitchen and Feeding Crane Farms alive. Needless to say everyone wears a lot of hats, Stein says.

This is a very new operation. After prepping and plowing three-and-a-half acres, and adding all natural amendments like bloodmeal and oyster shell to the soil, the organic farm “broke ground” last September. They began selling crops to local restaurants and grocery stores early this year.

Beyond providing fresh produce for grocery stores, local restaurants and farmers’ markets in Oak Park, Natomas and Cesar Chavez Park, the small team has come up with some really innovative ideas along the way, like Farm to Fork dinners, where locals who already support farmers’ markets and buy organic can experience the talent of chefs in the community who are committed to using local, organic ingredients.

The company recently purchased Steel Magnolia, a commercial kitchen in Sacramento, which they are renaming Lulu’s Kitchen after Shaad’s grandmother, Mary Lou Cayocca. Lulu’s will be accessible to local producers who have recipes but don’t have access to a commercial kitchen or some of the logistics needed to get their products on grocery shelves, Stein says.

The team has its own products it is developing to sell, too. By the start of 2013, you can start looking out for things like arugula pasta, pepper pasta, handmade butternut squash ravioli, squash bread, arugula pesto, and roasted pepper chutney on store shelves. According to Stein, the recipes are being developed as you read.

They also plan to expand into two more properties along the East Levee Corridor, putting an additional 12 acres into production by January and quadrupling their production capacity.

And last but not least, if you’ve caught wind of the first annual Harvest Sunset Celebration, yes, they are planning that as well. But with all the events already happening this fall, they’ve decided to postpone it until the spring.

With so much going on, it’s hard to believe Stein has a moment to breathe, let alone talk through an interview. Yet Submerge somehow managed to catch up with her while she was on a drive through the Midwest.

You guys said you are along the East Levee in Natomas?
Yeah, we’re in North Natomas, and basically it’s called the East Levee Corridor. So it’s a levee bypass system that comes off the Sacramento River out in Yolo and Sutter counties.

Gotcha. There’s a fair bit of ag activity in that region, right?
Yes and no. A little bit further to the west of Sacramento, closer to I-5, there’s a lot of commercial rice production, there’s a lot of big ag. But along the East Levee Corridor, the majority of the land is fallow; it’s not in any form of production.

And so, you guys are trying to cultivate some of that land out there…
Our goal is to basically try and reinvigorate that entire East Levee Corridor, and to create a system and create farms that are duplicate-able. We want to be able to take what we’ve learned in starting our first small three-and-a-half-acre property and we want to be able to basically duplicate it on other properties along that corridor. Then we will create an actual, thriving agribusiness along that corridor to make that area two things: one, less susceptible to development, and two, to basically make Sacramento far more sustainable in regards to food production.

So what kind of stuff do you guys grow?
We have upward of about 30 different varieties of items in the ground at any given time. For this winter, we’ll have a full-crop harvest, we’re not going to take a break this winter. So we have salad mix, head lettuces, arugula. We did tomatoes this summer, eggplant, okra, lots of root vegetables, we grew beautiful beets and radishes, turnips. As Antonio, our farm manager, likes to refer to it, our main property right now is really kind of a salad bowl. There are carrots, onions. Amazingly for our harvest season, part of it has really been experimentation and learning what does well in the soil that we’re working with and getting a feel for crop rotation and our product demands by community.

What’s the plan with Steel Magnolia [now Lulu’s Kitchen], and why did you guys decide to buy it?
Well, as I mentioned, our motto is basically the same thing as our parent company, “local food done right.” And we really believe that “local food done right” doesn’t just mean growing the food locally, it means producing food locally… We want Lulu’s Kitchen to be an incubator kitchen for local producers to come work on their recipes [and] work on their processes. We have fully trained chefs on our team who can help mentor them… At the same time we want to help those producers navigate the often confusing and sticky system of working with the County Health Department and working with the city and learning how to do labeling so it’s FDA approved and how to get your ingredients improved, you know, all of that process. We want help small producers so it’s easier for them to go from concept to the shelf.

I thought I read something about you guys developing your own products to sell in stores, is that right?
We will be, yeah. Absolutely. In fact, you can go to the GOOD market and you can try some of our value-added items. You’ll hear us talk a lot about [value-added items] with small farms in particular. Farming itself is not necessarily a lucrative business. It’s a cash-heavy investment business, there’s a lot of investments needed to really get a farm going and keep a farm operating. Small producers, small farmers really need to have the opportunity and the outlet for additional revenue streams, and so creating value-added products: jams, jellies, breads, sauces, pastas, things along those lines, where the primary ingredients are from your farm, is a great way to do that. So we have a ton of summer squash still out in the field, so one of the chefs on our team is making squash bread.

Now Farm to Fork Dinners, whose idea was that?
Well, actually, that was a joint discussion. It started out where once every two months or so, the farmers and myself, just kind of our core team, we were going to one of the restaurants for dinner and we provided food, because the farmers work their butts off, and they deserve the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor occasionally. But in doing that, we also built these really beautiful relationships with the chefs we work with. They have given us fantastic feedback. It started out, actually, with Mama Kim, of Mama Kim Eats, who said almost immediately, “I want to do a brunch.” So we started out with a brunch at Mama Kim Eats, and she said, “I want to do a brunch and I want to focus specific dishes around your produce and your products.” And I was like, “That’s fantastic.” And so Farm to Fork was born. And now we work to do at least one Farm to Fork event each month with our partner restaurants to help bring in business for them on an off-shift. Like at Michelangelo’s, it was on a Sunday night, and we basically helped them triple their sales on a Sunday night.

Do you have an estimate of about how much you produce per season?
You know, we’re putting those numbers together, to be honest [laughs]. But what I can say is we have been able to sustain upward of about 20 to 25 restaurants, the Natural Foods Co-Op, Corti Brothers and three farmers’ markets for this entire season, so since January basically, off of three-and-a-half-acres. And that’s pretty amazing, to begin with.

To learn more about what Feeding Crane Farms and Lulu’s Kitchen have in store, follow Feeding Crane on Twitter @FeedingCrane or like it on Facebook.

Musical Charis’ band members discuss their penchant for collaboration and their mission to bring “real gold” back to the music scene

Two of the core members of local indie pop band Musical Charis are in separate rooms of the same apartment engaged in the same conversation. I am on the other end of the line. We’re speaking together on a conference call. It is a new experience for all of us.

I am talking to Blake Abbey and Jessica Brune, the band’s vocalists, and guitarist and keyboardist, respectively, about their upcoming Oct. 11, 2012 release of FOOL$ GOLD on JMB Records. Despite being miles away, I feel like I am dealing with a family.

They soon will be, I later find out. In addition to being band mates, they are engaged and live in the same apartment, along with the band’s bassist Colin Vieira, guitarist Bradley Abbey (Blake’s brother) and a bunny rabbit. It’s the apartment they are in now as they field my questions. Like family, they are talking over each other, and to make matters worse the reception is lousy. Despite the hiccups, we manage to carry out an engaging conversation as they fill me in on the album, touring and their musical values.

“It seems like a lot of things in music and art, fashion, and pop culture, a lot of it is like fool’s gold,” Abbey says, explaining how they came up with the album title. “It’s just shiny and bright, people want to hold it and touch it, but it doesn’t have the same value as gold.

“But the more that we grow in character and as a band, I think the closer we get to realizing how hard it is, how deep you have to dig for gold and the value of it when you get it,” he says.

Abbey, Brune, Bradley and Vieira spent about a week total, split before and after this year’s lengthy spring tour, recording with music engineer Joe Johnston at Pus Cavern. Now they have an album they hope will stand out against the bounty of overproduced, unoriginal material put forth in the music industry.

It was a collaborative process, a coast-to-coast exchange, Brune suggests. Others, including Jarrod Affonso on drums, Brian Brown on the keys and Shawn King, contributed. “Sunlight Stalker,” the last track on the album, was a joint effort between musician Chris King in Florida and Musical Charis. In a Postal Service-like exchange, King wrote the music, and the band wrote lyrics to accompany it.

The result was an album that Abbey says is quite unique, an attempt to produce “real gold.”

“I don’t think this CD is epic, but I think it’s one-of-a-kind, I haven’t heard anything like it,” he says.

Their fourth release following their 2011 album Ace of Space, FOOL$ GOLD is seven tracks of soothing indie pop and lush harmonies with progressive underpinnings.

It is somewhat more technical sonically than their previous albums, Abbey explains, and the rhythms are more intricate, adds Brune.

Since their formation in 2008, following the Abbey brothers’ and Vieira’s relocation from Florida to Sacramento, Musical Charis has been recognized for their folk appeal. In fact, they have been told on several occasions that they are living in the wrong generation. Brune and Abbey don’t dispute this.

“I think that musically we would be received better 30 years ago. Old people love our music, the folk stuff that we do,” Abbey says. “It’s dubstep nation now, dubstep is taking over the world.”

Whatever they have done musically, it seems to be working. They were nominated for Sammies in 2010 and 2012, for Best Album of the Year and Best Indie Band of the Year, respectively, and in 2011 they won the Best Indie Band of the Year Award.

While this album strays somewhat from that folk sound, Abbey and Brune agree that it is one they will likely revisit in the future. After all, it’s easy to switch up musical directions, Brune says, like whipping up a new batch of cupcakes.

“Some people might not like [the new album],” Abbey says. “But it was fun for me, which is the most important thing.”

If you want to produce something relevant in the art world, or bring back ‘the real gold,’ then you have to get your priorities straight, the way Brune and Blake see it.

Which simply means, “Do it because you love it,” Brune says, even if it means collecting pennies.

The drive, patience and desire all have to be there to move a band beyond the five-year mark, they say.

“The real dream is just living it,” Abbey adds.

The fourth track of the album, “The Gift,” is an ode to friends back in Kansas who are doing just this–living the “rock n’ roll” lifestyle of loving, having fun, being broke and not caring. It’s a fancy-free philosophy the members of Musical Charis put into practice as well.

They primarily work for themselves, sometimes working “under the table,” to make ends meet.

The same love of music inspired the band mates to open the Musical Charis Music School in 2009 in the building next to the Colonial Theatre. It started by just spotting the vacant building and asking the question, “What if?”

To this day, they teach music lessons out of Beatnik Studios, mentoring youth in playing guitar, piano, singing, songwriting and performing. Sometimes they will let their students open for the band.

Those who haven’t seen a Musical Charis show should know that no two performances are alike, partly because they are just as willing to share the stage with anyone who wants stage time. Thus they have become known for their high-energy, unpredictable performances.

“We never plan anything,” Brune says. “We’re not like, ‘Oh, it would be so epic if we did this and that.’ We just kind of roll with it and have fun.”

During a show, the stage is treated as a shared space. The band rotates auxiliary drummers and guitarists onstage or invites other bands to join in. Brune may take Abbey’s guitar mid-song, or Abbey might get on the drums. In any given performance, there might be a trumpet, saxophone, accordion, harmonica, congas or xylophone thrown in the mix. Additionally, just about anyone (with exception of belligerent drunks) from the audience is invited to come up and play an instrument.

“We consciously try to make it about everyone,” Abbey says. “It sucks being in a band playing the same show every night, especially in a small town.”

“I want people to go to [our] shows and be like, ‘We’re going to go have fun tonight and we’ll get to play an instrument,’” he says.

The invitation to participate is an intentional attempt to encourage local community-building, they explain, though they never force their audience members to participate.

So during any given show, 12 bodies might end up on stage. On one occasion an audience member was so engrossed in performing he fell off the back of the stage, Brune recalls.

“Sometimes it’s a train wreck, but [it’s] a beautiful train wreck,” Abbey says.

It’s worth mentioning that this band plays a lot of shows, as many as 150 per year. This includes a 65-day national spring tour they plan annually, in addition to smaller tours throughout the year.

Playing so many shows and tours, including SxSW, it’s no surprise that the band has grown a distaste for the predictable party-goers looking to get blitzed. It’s a common pattern the band has noticed, and it inspired one of the tracks on the album. Against a dreamy, circus-y tune, “Fortune Teller” takes a stab at the molly kids, who equate their live music experience with popping pills.

“It became about a culture of just partying, waking up the next day and starting all over,” Brune says.

No doubt they’ll run into more of that during their West Coast tour following the Oct. 11, 2012 album release at the Townhouse Lounge.

Pill poppers aside, right now the four are contemplating house sitters to look out for the apartment and the rabbit while they are gone. The last tour they went on, their turtle died.

Hop on stage and have a blast at The Townhouse Lounge on Oct. 11, 2012 at 9 p.m. when Musical Charis celebrate the release of FOOL$ GOLD. Also performing will be Autumn Sky, Hey Zeus and James Cavern… And maybe you? Pre-order your copy of the album at http://musicalcharis.com/, and if you’d like to babysit a rabbit, drop them a line.

Exquisite Corps hopes debut album will resonate with the band’s growing fan base

It is exactly 4 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon when Exquisite Corps’ frontman answers his cell phone.

“Dude, right on time,” Bryan Valenzuela says with a laugh, seemingly impressed.

Observing the magnetic character on stage lead a six-piece chamber rock band during a sold-out show at the Crocker Art Museum, one might imagine that the singer/guitarist of local band Exquisite Corps is unapproachable.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that this musician is in fact more approachable than most.

After a morning spent painting, and playing a late show for a full house in Nevada City, Calif., the night before, Valenzuela is in great spirits. Exquisite Corps played at the Haven Underground, where they shared the stage with The Still Sea from Nevada City and Pillars and Tongues from Chicago. Apparently people were stacked on each other to watch the show, and Valenzuela had nothing but good things to say about the experience.

“I always love playing in Nevada City,” Valenzuela says. “It’s super cool there, everyone is really chill and interested in music.

“It was kind of crazy to have a show on a Sunday. There was a lot of people staying until one in the morning,” he adds.

Valenzuela has plenty to be excited about. After a few hiccups and lulls in the recording process, which began last summer, the band is now preparing to release its debut self-titled album at this year’s Launch Festival, which Exquisite Corps will be playing for the third year in a row.

For those who ever fell for cellist Gretta Cohn on Cursive’s Ugly Organ, this album is worth a listen. Since the spring of 2010, Exquisite Corps sprung from a cello and guitar duo, with Valenzuela on the guitar and Krystyna Taylor on the cello, to a full band. The current ensemble includes violinists Reylynn Goessling and Kristin Arnold, drummer Robby Dean and bassist Nathan Webb, in addition to Taylor and Valenzuela.

On headphones, the seven-song album allures the listener from the start, enchanting and ominous. Track one, “Tone Poem,” begins with Valenzuela’s voice oozing over the airy, ethereal resonance of an organ, soon joined by the warm hum of the cello. Then violins come in, high pitched and full-bodied, moving the song forward as Valenzuela’s voice reaches fervent, wailing heights.

The subsequent tracks progress in the same vein, commencing with soft, mysterious beginnings, and erupting into opulent, racing symphonies conjoined with Valenzuela’s vocals, impassioned and raging as he sings about subject matter varying from the followers of Dionysus to winter landscapes. Following “Tone Poem” is “Light As a Feather,” which appeared on local music blog Live in the City of Trees.

Now the band is releasing previews of the album, song by song, leading up to the release show.

To record the album, the band of six spent a considerable amount of time at Hangar Studios with music engineer Scott McChane, who has worked with the likes of local acts Sister Crayon, Agent Ribbons, Chelsea Wolfe and Ellie Fortune.

Valenzuela had his hands in both the recording and mixing processes, ensuring that he could guide the direction of the final product.

“I was there for every single aspect of it,” he says. “It’s expensive to record, and we wanted to record as professionally as possible and make it sound as good as we could with what we had.”

Exquisite Corps’ songs begin with Valenzuela, who writes the music, working through the melodies in his head. Then he approaches the others to arrange the songs. Each member brings something to the table, coming up with pieces to add or ways to solidify the songs.

The progression is not unlike how Exquisite Corps originated, with some string compositions Valenzuela wrote a while back and wanted to put into action.

Valenzuela grew up in Orange County, relocating with his parents to Placerville when he began high school. Around the same time he took up the violin at school, and was drawn to chamber music ever since. He studied music theory in college. When he was the singer/guitarist of former local band Call Me Ishmael, he wrote string accompaniments for the band’s CD release show.

It went over well, but for some reason the band never used strings again after that performance. He wanted to do it again ever since.

“I guess I was just in love with the sound,” he professes. “The string instruments can be, in my opinion, super versatile. They can be really sweet and beautiful, and then they can be really gritty and dirty. There’s so much range there that is great to utilize in music.”

Upon running into the right people at the right time, likeminded people like Taylor, Valenzuela fell upon an opportunity to start a chamber rock band, and thus Exquisite Corps was born.

They eventually recruited Dean and Webb, who played with Valenzuela in Call Me Ishmael.

“[The band] kind of took on a life of its own, in some ways, just by having the thought a long time ago,” Valenzuela says. “Sometimes things just fall into place, I guess.”

Though Exquisite Corps has come a long way since its beginnings, gaining a loyal following in Sacramento and playing sold out shows at venues around town, Valenzuela remains modest about his musical capabilities. The following is an excerpt from the phone conversation between Valenzuela and Submerge.

It sounds like you had played in a lot of other bands prior to Exquisite Corps as well?
Yeah, some bands here and there. Nothing really that notable, not that I’d like to talk about [laughs].

OK, that’s fair.
Because…when you are younger you are in all these different bands, and later in life it’s a little embarrassing.

But what would you say your thoughts are on your progression, anyway, musically, from Call Me Ishmael to Exquisite Corps?
I don’t know, just more experience as far as songwriting and how to arrange music [goes]. Since that band I’ve been studying how to arrange for string instruments, and I’m not a classically trained musician. But [I’m] learning, maturing, trying to ensure that the content of the music is all together. When you are younger, you’re just super excited, and you’re throwing everything out there.

Some of your songs sound almost soundtrack-like on the album. I was particularly thinking that [about] “Windswept” and “I Want What I Want.” Do you ever visualize storylines as you’re writing the songs or writing the lyrics?
Yeah, totally. Either there’s a specific story or it’s like a loose story and images, you know? Maybe it’s a non-linear narrative or something. It may not always come through in a lyric but it’s something you think about when you’re writing or even when you’re playing it. You know who I thought is really good is Neko Case.

Yeah, I love her music.
Dude, she’s so rad. But she tells these stories, and I don’t really know what the story is. The story is totally a non-linear narrative. I know there’s a story in there, and it kind of draws you along.

Would you say that’s the same with some of your songs as well?
I’m always inspired to do that. I’m always inspired by that kind of thing.

Did you ever receive vocal training? You really belt it out during some of your songs, and I was wondering if you’re voice ever gets strained.
In college I took choir [laughs]. I wouldn’t say I ever had vocal training, though. It’s just listening to other singers and watching other singers. I have no formal training in singing. And actually, this wasn’t even something I aspired to do at first. I was mostly a musician, a guitar player most of the time. I was in band in high school, and I was never a singer. But you start playing with people, and no one wants to sing [laughs], that’s pretty much how I started singing. You just try to get better, you just work on it every day and keep working on it. I’m sure I was really bad, I know I was really bad when I started singing… As far as vocal straining, I’ll just drink more water the next day and everything’s fine.

What kind of music are you listening to these days?
Shit, I’ve been listening to PJ Harvey. I kind of got obsessed with the last PJ Harvey record [Let England Shake]. And then I’ve totally been listening to tUnE-yArDs, even though we’re not even close to that kind of music, it is pretty awesome. I mean, we’re not that type of music but I do love it. Beforehand I was listening to Elliott Smith. I always listen to a lot of different stuff, like old stuff and new stuff. The Beatles to Blonde Redhead. I love David Bowie. I was listening to David Bowie coming back from Nevada City the whole time. It kind of keeps you going. It’s a long drive and it was late.

Exquisite Corps will celebrate the release of its self-titled album as part of the Launch Festival on July 25, 2012. The show will take place in front of the MARRS Building in Midtown. Doom Bird, The Honey Trees and I’m Dirty Too will also perform. This is a free, all-ages event and starts at 5 p.m.