Live Journal: Toussaint, 3.10.05 The Fowler Museum

What a day day! In amazing musical events, I went to Persian dance party, saw an Indian man playing sitar in Kerckhoff Coffee Shop, decided Jon Brion’s Meaningless is a perfect sunny day album and Phoenix’s Alphabetical is a perfect guilty pleasure sunny day album, finally got a decent rip of the new Fiona Apple album (it sounds re-encoded to me, guys, so it’s a little fuzzy but it’ll tidal you over. Do I get a chuckle? A giggle, even?), AND saw a really great band called Toussaint, which is apparently composed of UCLA ethnomusicology students. The line-up included guitar, bass, drums, keys, and a DJ and saxophone on a few songs. The bassist is, according to the lead singer/guitarist, an accomplished hip-hop producer as well.

Their most obvious influence was Mogwai-style post-rock, the sound of which was what drew me to the Fowler Museum tonight. There’s an open-air courtyard in the middle of the museum as you can see above, and they were more than loud enough to hear from Janss Steps. The hip-hop and jazz touches meshed nicely as well, and the band played mostly instrumental songs with plenty of room for sonic exploration that I won’t demean for you pretentious indie rockers by calling “jamming.” To put it simply, they sounded like what Incubus might if Incubus was fucking awesome. And didn’t have wanky pseudo-poetic lyrics. Or heavy guitars. And was more like Sonic Youth. And…oh, whatever.

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The Fedora Project got off to a good start today, as well.