A. T. Vish

A. T. Vish
You can trace the Pittsburgh music scene fairly linearly, from the crooners to the jazz era to the R&B/doo-wop bands segueing into the pop/punk sound of more recent decades.

But beyond the club bands, musical genres of all stripes have bubbled just under the mainstream radar in the 'Burgh. Goth and industrial rock have been underground mainstays in the region, and some strong if locally underloved experimental electronica groups have emerged.

One of the veterans of the area's side stream scene is drummer A.T. (Al) Vish.

He's played the kit for Pittsburgh bands like the 90's garage-psych Thickhead Grin, InShalla, MACE, Una De Luna, electronica Jilted Brides, and perhaps the best-known of his groups, of New York's Projekt label, the goth/darkwave Lowsunday.

Lowsunday was named by Alternative Press as one of the "Top 100 Bands You Need to Know of 2002," and was featured on MTV and The Real World TV series before their breakup, when Vish departed to work on some solo projects.

In the summer of 2003, Vish was the drummer in South Side's City Theater and Hartford Stage production of the rock musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," starring Anthony Rapp. He also backed Rapp during his "Without You" show that premiered at the City Theatre in 2008.

But his raison d' etre has been Carol Blaze, the collective name for his solo work.

Apart from a couple of guest vocalists, the CD "Carol Blaze" is Vish's love child, featuring a mixture of drone, psychedelia, goth, darkwave, and rock, originally conceived as the soundtrack to a fictional character by the same name.

Written, performed, and recorded by Vish, he claims that the tracks are "the product of a confused sexual relationship between Nick Cave, The Sneaker Pimps, Bowery Electric, Tangerine Dream, Peter Gabriel, U2, and Monster Magnet."

Well, we don't know about all that; the mind shudders at contemplating a sexual bond between Sneaker Pimp and Monster Magnet. But it is an interesting sound, kind of a Bowie meets Pink Floyd mash-up with generally bleak, gloomy undertones.

One reviewer compared it to a "cleaned up Bauhaus mixed with New Order." The songs range from analog to darkwave to lo-fi to radio rock, quite a lot of genres to wrap one's ears around.

While the approach is an honest representation of Vish's collective musical experience, if you're a hard-core fan of one style over another, you'll find some tracks awesome, but will pound the "skip" button on others.

Even Vish recognizes that a melange doesn't suit everyone. So he's put together a pretty unique sales pitch - he offers 32 different tracks at his MySpace Music site, and will customize a mix-and-match Carol Blaze CD to your liking. How's that for service?

It's also available at other e-outlets, like i-Tunes and Amazon, for the less ambitious or more catholic listener.

Cuts from "Carol Blaze" have also been snapped up by a couple of indie film-makers, who used its dark, foreboding tracks to evoke the right mood for their flicks.

He's just followed up 2003's "Carol Blaze" with the September release of "Soul Surrender," on his All Terrain Vehicles label.

Vish also stays busy in his ATV recording studio. He's recorded and/or produced bands such as Peace Project, Between the Waters, Debutante, Boxstep, The Drag Strippers, Violaria, and Freddy Hall, among others.

So hey, remember there's life beyond the pop/punk scene in Pittsburgh. A.T. Vish is living proof.


A. T. Vish "Staring," video by Jilted Bride's Tanya Andrea Stadelmann

Black Moth Super Rainbow

Black Moth Super Rainbow, photo by Jae Rumberto
Black Moth Super Rainbow is... well, you decide. Their music contains elements of psychedelia, folk, electronica, and pop. Their unique sound is created by blending electronic instruments like synthesizers, Moogs, a vocoder, Rhodes piano, and Novatron, giving their stuff a distinctive "Lucy In The Sky" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" vibe. We'll stick with indie synth-pop.

Rolling Stone's David Fricke tried to explain their scene in April of 2007: "They didn't look psychedelic, just confused. The female drummer wore a toucan mask and her sweat-shirt hood pulled druid-style over her head. A woman playing keyboards had on a fur hat with bobcat ears. The singer sat on the floor, invisible, crooning through a vocoder."

(The singer would be Tobacco; he's known for sitting hidden behind an amp while on stage, heard but not seen by the audience. His real name is Tom Fec, who supposedly became Tobacco in honor of a Roger Corman zombie flick.)

"But musically, this bucolic-futurist quintet was a firmly directed trip: pillowy synth chords and day-glo songcraft nailed to Earth by insistent backbeats. Formed in 2003, Black Moth have a sizable library of CDs to their name. Renown should follow."

Rolling Stone was impressed enough to tag the band "artists to watch."

Its members are The Seven Fields of Aphelion (Maureen Boyle), IFfernaut/D.Kyler (Donna Kyler), Father Hummingbird (Seth Ciotti), Tobacco, and Ryan Graveface (who just replaced Power Pill Fist, Tobacco's cousin Ken Fec of Brookline, who's breaking out on his own).

According to its MySpace site, the band's influences are "Neckface, Odd Nosdam, Olivia Tremor Control, Led Zeppelin in search of the perfect riff, folk tales of western Pennsylvania, and people who broadcast stuff from hidden places."

It's said that Fec got his start when he began recording on his four-track in his bedroom. Not exactly singing along to the radio, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere.

From 1996 to 2000, beginning as a high school sophomore, Tom Fec performed with the Allegheny White Fish, local patois for a condom floating down the river; now there's some vivid hippy imagery.

From 2000 to 2002, he went by satanstompingcaterpillars. As SSC, he self-released his music, the albums "F**keroo (Flower Slides)" and "Side 8."

After a third album in 2002, "The Most Wonderfulest Thing," SSC added Father Hummingbird, The Seven Fields of Aphelion, and IFfernaut (D. Kyler) to the roster, morphing into Black Moth Super Rainbow in 2003 and becoming a full-fledged band instead of a motley collection of part-time collaborators.

BMSR began releasing their music on the 70's Gymnastics Recording label, which is the band's own imprint. It's logo is a tree-person jumping rope in a dress. Black Moth Super Rainbow's first album, "Falling Through A Field," was actually satanstompingcaterpillars' greatest hits.

After 2005, Chicago's Graveface label picked up BMSR and released "Lost," "Picking Flowers in the Woods," and bonus reissues of the Tobacco albums. "Dandelion Gum" was BMSR's third album, released in 2007, loosely based on witches who make candy in the forest. It resulted in their first music video, for the track "Sun Lips," and was the record that gave them a national following, even if somewhat cultish.

They released "Zodiac Girls - Single and Drippers," an EP, in November of 2008. In May of this year, BMSR issued "Eating Us." The album was recorded at Tarbox Road Studios and marks the first time Black Moth has ventured into an actual recording studio and made a hi-fi album; the others were lo-fi, pretty much home-made disks.

BMSR is also preparing to release a private pressing CD from 2001, "The Autumn Kaleidoscope Got Changed" and an accompanying EP, "Sing To Us," available through the band's website. The records include some older stuff and several acoustic tracks.

In addition to the group's discography, the members have released several solo projects, too. Tobacco cut "F**ked Up Friends" and "Super Gum." Power Pill Fist recorded "Extra Life" in 2005, and "Kongmanivong" in 2008.

Seven Fields of Aphelion's first album "Periphery" is due in the fall, and she's also doing a music/photography project.

But hey, they're not just a studio creation. The band's busy, playing to an active schedule of festivals and other dates. Its supposed to be a great show.

While the band doesn't exactly nosh with its fans, except for a furry critter that mingles with the paying audience handing out candy, a stunning video display accompanying them is enough to make the crowd forget there are actual folk performing on stage, and the outfits make their performances memorable, even without any James Brown showmanship.

On March 17, 2007, the band played alongside The Octopus Project at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival, featuring music from their collaborative project, "The House of Apples and Eyeballs." And it was a true collaborative effort; the bands sat in together while recording the tracks.

Black Moth Super Rainbow opened for The Flaming Lips on their Fall 2007 tour, and again in 2008. They also played along with Aesop Rock in late 2008, and at the 2008 SXSW music festival.

Although they took a break this year while working on "Eating Us," they've been back on the road again since its May release. The only complaint among local fans is that BMSR is the only Pittsburgh band that doesn't perform in Pittsburgh.

Maybe they learned the lesson of so many other local acts - if you wanna break out, get outta town, although Tobacco had publicly griped about the local coverage, too.

And what community spawned our local mind-melters? The lore is that they're from rural western PA, and that they emerged from an obscure Pennsylvania forest glen to make their music.

But Fec admits that tale started as a dodge to avoid giving out his 411, and it's grown into BMSR mythology since, further fueled by some liner notes in "Dandelion Gum."

While it's true that their home studio is an exurban cabin, Tom Fec originally hails from Hampton and now lives in South Side while his cousin Ken is from the West End. The other members are identified hazily as Pittsburgh-area musicians. Hey, close enough.

Enjoy them while you can. Tobacco is sounding a little restless lately, having told Leilani Polk of Tampa's Calling that he has no real plans for any future recordings with Black Moth, and says that after this tour, “I think I just want to do something else for a minute and stop thinking about all this Black Moth stuff.”

So stay tuned to find out if this moth bursts into a butterfly or heads toward the flame.


Black Moth Super Rainbow - "Born On A Day The Sun Didn't Rise"

Jilted Brides

The Jilted Brides are a psychedelic folk/electronic duo originally from Melbourne, but now based in Lawrenceville. And yah, they do sing of love gone bad and the road to redemption.

"The name for us represents wanting to do songs about deep feelings and emotions, heartache and those journeys through the dark night of the soul," Nicole Skeltys told Patricia Sheridan of the Post Gazette. "We are sort of reclaiming the idea of the jilted bride."

The pair formed up in 2007, in Melbourne. Skeltys is a song writer and producer, with a long background in electronica with the bands Artificial and B(if)tek (which had Sony releases "2020" and "Frequencies Will Move Together"), and then performed folk rock with Dust, all in her native Australia. She sings, plays the keyboards, provides the electronics, and writes the songs.

Her partner, Tanya Andrea Stadelmann, sings and creates video projections for the performances.

After recording "Larceny of Love" in just six weeks in a backyard shed, the Jilted Brides decided to leave Australia.

They released their debut album in February after meeting PCA/Filmmakers director Charlie Humphrey, another 'Burgh bohemian, who took "Larceny of Love" for his Uh Oh Records label, and is pushing it via iTunes, CD Baby, and the JB's My Space site. It's also gotten some web love on Radio Freakout, an indy site that streams music that mainstream radio ignores.

The album features two concepts - psychedelic ballads on one hand, and electronic hymns that feature analogue synthesizers and choir on the other, entirely appropriate for artists as opposed to rockers. Pittsburgh-bred garage R&B it ain't.

They explain their sound as "...a little like a cross between Leonard Cohen, Air, the Carpenters, Boards of Canada, Bobbie Gentry, (and) Brigid Bardot (backed by) drum machines, old organs and '70s synthesizers."

The Jilted Brides got together in Australia in December of 2007. Skeltys had gone through a tough year: she had just broken up with her partner, dealt with her mother’s death, and been diagnosed with breast cancer, which is now in remission. She hooked up with her longtime friend Stadelman, a video artist and photographer.

The Aussies decided it was time to depart on an excellent American adventure, both having spent some time stateside earlier and bored with the down under life.

Stadelman spent six years here while her father worked in Chicago and Detroit, and came back later to live in San Francisco, where she studied photography for five years. Skeltys took a road trip with an American boyfriend across the US when she was in her teens.

The first stop was Vancouver, playing at the New Music West festival. From there they headed to the United States, where they spent several months traveling to various art colonies on residency status.

The pair visited avant garde hot spots in Montana, Washington state and Woodstock, documenting their travels through films, blog posts, and part of their book (what artist isn't writing one?). When the funded residencies dried up, they spent some time in New York City. The Big Apple didn't cut it for them; it was too much of an urban canyon; too expensive, too concrete, too gray.

They had met Pittsburgh poet (we do have some, and they are quite good if greatly undervalued by the locals) Scott Reagan while they were in Montana, and he invited them to the Steel City if they ever reached the east coast. They took him up on the offer in October of last year, and been here ever since.

The Rust Belt image and the reality of Pittsburgh were quite different, they found. The vibrant arts scene, green spaces, friendly vibe, and affordable living blew them away. They rented a flat in Lawrenceville, scored artist visas, and planted roots.

They've played several gigs around town, released their CD, and found studio space and day jobs to support their arts jones. They met drummer Al Vish (Una De Luna) and guitarist David Wallace (ex-Boxstep/Underflowers), who back the Jilted Brides' live show, and were dubbed the "Jilted Grooms" by Caralyn Green of Pop City.

Stadelman, who is a filmmaker and a photographer by calling, is teaching a course in film production at Point Park University. She's also involved with the Squonk Opera, doing video clips for them. She and Skeltys just finished a vid for Pittsburgh Citiparks.

Skeltys has started up a music-writing shop called "Pittsburgh In Love," crafting songs for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, and other special occasions.

Hey, so Jilted Brides they may be, but we wouldn't feel very sorry for them. Nicole Skeltys and Tanya Andrea Stadelmann are riding life's waves just fine, thank you.


Jilted Brides - "Feelings Never Felt Before"