After playing in separate touring indie bands in LA, Terry and Ryan moved to SF to form a band that could develop an honest, unique, lush and soul-wrenching sound. Finding the infectious “less-is-more” rhythm section in Gavin and Arnie gave elephone it’s birth. The addition of Mauri, who was the singer and guitar player for girl-rockers Glitter Mini 9 and the touring guitar player for post-Pavement popsters Preston School of Industry, brought elephone it’s attitude and shape.

elephone is a San Francisco band whose dark guitar textures and dynamic vocal range have earned them comparisons to Radiohead, Grandaddy and The Cure in local and national press. The band describes their sound as a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Audio Out Send was established in the fall of 1996 (Oakland, CA). The band's performance route spans the greater California area, and is stadily spiraling outward, feeling out the Great West. A mixture of rock and roll, electronic noise, and sonic arrangement form the basis of the band's sound.

Cerberus Shoal: Chaiming the Knoblessone is, in a way, this experimental rock outfit's world album. Though don't expect anything remotely like glossy new age -- Cerberus Shoal takes influences from the Middle East, Africa, India (and maybe half a dozen other countries, not to mention planets) and builds a slithering, buzzing cacophony of avant-garde folk insanity. "Apatrides" starts simple enough (it's 14 minutes long, by the way) and eventually evolves into a kooky shout-along that falls somewhere between cLOUDDEAD's obtuse hip-hop poetry and some sort of cult revival. "Mrs. Shakespeare Torso" sounds like something :zoviet*france: might have done with cut-up found sound until it sounds like a Jim O'Rourke noise composition (off of say, I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1,2,3,4) but with ethereal female vocals. The "intermission," "A Paranoid Home Companion," is like an interrogation of Kubrick's HAL9000, literally on some bizarro-world version of Garrison Keillor's show. For all intensive purposes, this album sounds like absolute madness, but crazy or not, it's also an important entry into the new weird Americana free folk revolution of the 2000s. -- Charles Spano, Allmusic.com




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