MARCH 11, 2010 ISSUE
Lulo Plays 641rpm This Friday
First Show in Boone for Ahleuchatistas Side Project
Guitarist Shane Perlowin and drummer Ryan Oslance make up the Asheville-based band Ahleuchatistas. The band’s alter ego, Lulo, will give its debut Boone performance this Friday, March 12, at 641rpm. Photo submittedThis Friday, March 12, Lulo—the alter ego to the Asheville-based Ahleuchatistas—will play at 641rpm in Boone. The instrumental show, open to all ages, starts at 9:00 p.m., and the cover is $5.
“Lulo is something Ryan [Oslance] and I started on the side when he joined Ahleuchatistas in 2008,” said Shane Perlowin, guitar player for Ahleuchatistas and Lulo.
“It’s evolved into a pretty regularly performing act,” Perlowin said of Lulo. “We use it as an exploring act for getting ideas for more composed pieces. It’s a little more noise-oriented.”
Friday marks the first time Perlowin and Oslance have played in Boone as Lulo.
“I’ve performed in Boone with Ahleuchatistas at least half a dozen times, and once with my band Doom Ribbons,” Perlowin said. “Boone was a great discovery for me.”
He added that he first played in Boone around 2006.
Lulo’s sound is “television static into French ambulance into a drone from a theme of a David Lynch movie into Eastern melodies,” Perlowin said.
Its improvisation is “not so much in the linear sense of jazz music or other improvisational styles, [but] more block form arrangements,” he said. “[It is] certain sustained textures or sound over time, as opposed to a soloist interminably going on and on. It tends to be very rhythmic.”
Lulo is “our most artful expression,” Perlowin said. “It’s the most who we are, the most rewarding [and] the most fun.”
Originally from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Perlowin moved to Asheville in 2001 and founded Ahleuchatistas in 2002, he said.
The group started with Perlowin on guitar, Derek Poteat on bass and Sean Dail on drums. Poteat retired from the band in late 2009, according to a press release.
The band’s name came from a combination of “Ahleucha,” which means “to struggle” and is the title of a Charlie Parker song, and “tistas,” referring to the Zapatista revolutionary movement in Mexico or to simply an organization, Perlowin said.
“It captured where I was in my early 20s, musically and politically, and where I still am,” he said.
“Lulo has a nice ring to it and it’s also the name of Ryan’s grandfather,” he added.
Once a very distinctive, separate project from the much more composed, instrumental Ahleuchatistas project, the two sounds are now merging because the band is a duet, he said.
In 2008, Perlowin had posted a bulletin on MySpace.com stating that he needed a drummer, he said.
“It’s very difficult, demanding music,” he said, adding that he requested that potential drummers send mp3s of their playing to him.
Illinois-native Oslance was one of several who did so, and the two hit it off from their first phone call.
“We’re musical soulmates,” Perlowin said. “Ryan and I both listened to so many different styles of music and played so many different styles of music [growing up]. We have this idea of music as art.
“For me, as a teenager listening to Frank Zappa, progressive rock like King Crimson [and] finding music like John Coltrane ended up shaping my perspective on listening,” he continued. “Those things really excited me.”
As a result, Perlowin said he has “a constantly forward-thinking approach to music.”
He values the absence of lyrics, which allows the music alone to try “to create compelling sounds without verbally telling any kind of story. [This allows] the music to tell the story.”
The Ahleuchatistas’ fifth full album release of “Of the Body Prone” in 2009 brought increased national attention to the band, which was mentioned in a September 2009 New York Times article.
Ahleuchatistas is signed to the Tzadik record label, which is “the record label of John Zorn, [who] also happens to be one of our biggest musical heroes,” Perlowin said.
Audience members of the Boone show can expect a drum and guitar show that, at times, will probably not sound exactly like guitar and drums, he said.
In the vein of composer John Cage, who put screws, pieces of wood and other objects into the strings of his piano, making it sound more like a percussion instrument than a piano, the Lulo duo is highly experimental, Perlowin said.
“Sometimes Ryan will put a sheet over the drums,” he said, which “deadens the sound,” and sometimes Perlowin will put pieces of credit cards under his strings, also for a different effect.
“There’s a certain electronic music vibe to what we’re doing,” he said. “People seem to enjoy it. We do.”
After the Boone show, Ahleuchatistas will spend three weeks touring Europe—Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, he said.
“We tour the U.S. a good bit [and we tour] fairly extensively in Europe at this point,” he said.
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