The Miami collective, built around Tom Smith, that countered noise's usual obliteration with a flood of detail, and became the project a philosopher reached for to argue that genre itself was obsolete.
To Live and Shave in L.A., often shortened to TLASILA, is the experimental collective I keep at Tier II as one of noise's most influential and most theorised projects. It was founded in 1993 in Miami Beach by Tom Smith and the producer Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, soon joined by oscillator player Ben Wolcott, and named, deadpan, after a Ron Jeremy film, a high-and-low joke Smith said fit his aesthetics exactly: stupid but immediate. Around that core moved a vast and ever-changing cast.
The method set it apart from most of its peers. The 1994 debut 30-Minuten Männercreme, made by Smith in his off-hours as an audio engineer at Telemundo, was a dense cut-and-paste barrage modelled on the production of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad. Where most noise compresses information into a deluge that obliterates detail, TLASILA did the opposite: it built song-structures out of an overwhelming surfeit of sonic data, a maximal overload that the philosopher Ray Brassier, in his essay Genre Is Obsolete, took as the emblem of noise's genrelessness. Smith's own mantra, "genre is obsolete", became the band's organising idea.
Smith was the constant. Born in Adel, Georgia, in 1956, he had come up through Boat Of (with the future R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe), Peach of Immortality and a brief stint in Pussy Galore before TLASILA became his longest-lived work; he died in Hanover, Germany, in 2022. Across the decades the band drew in a remarkable cast, Thurston Moore, Andrew W.K., Weasel Walter, Don Fleming, Nándor Nevai, Balázs Pandi and Joke Lanz among them, and recorded Noon and Eternity (2004) at Sonic Youth's New York studio.
The project's standing in this archive is helped by who carried its influence forward. Aaron Dilloway reissued the debut on Hanson Records in 2010, calling it a masterpiece that had blown his teenage mind wide open, and Smith's offshoot band Ohne tied the work to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe circle of Dave Phillips and Daniel Löwenbrück. After a hiatus the collective returned in 2015 and resumed touring, releasing throughout.
My reading. To Live and Shave in L.A. is at Tier II as a foundational and widely theorised noise project, the band that turned cut-up overload into a method and a philosophy, and as a mentor node whose reach across the international scene, through Smith and through its enormous cast, no honest account of American noise can omit.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene