Biography
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Years Active
1991 – present (33 years)
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Members
- Andrew W.K.
- Frank Falestra
- Mark Morgan
- Thurston Moore
- Tom Smith
To Live and Shave in L.A. (aka TLASILA) rip through sonic boundaries and demolish cultural mythologies with a kinetic mélange of violent, constantly shifting musique concrète structures, splintered electronics, and stark, dramatic vocalizations. Their powerfully evocative compositions can take the form of forty-minute
Kuiper Belt freak-outs or dense, demonic, two-minute pipe bomb pop. Their avowed enemy is genre itself, their ultimate goal, unknowing. Hyper-literate texts, ungovernable performances, and a ruthlessly meticulous production regimen yield recordings without referent, sounds that garrote taxonomy.
TLASILA was formed in Miami Beach, Florida in 1991 by Tom Smith, an alumnus of late 1970s-early 1980s dada-improv outsider cabals Boat Of and Peach of Immortality, and the earliest (1985) incarnation of Jon Spencer's legendary Pussy Galore. He was soon joined in TL&S by Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, a veteran of many aesthetically disruptive South Florida projects (most infamously, Scraping Teeth, and since the mid-1990s, the Laundry Room Squelchers), and Ben Wolcott, a filmmaker and lifelong circuit bender whose mammoth screeching oscillators sent early Shave audiences running for cover. Now a full-fledged collective comprising nearly 20 members, To Live and Shave in L.A. have released dozens of albums on a variety of international labels and have toured the world with jagged frequency for more than seventeen years.
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