To Live and Shave in L.A. is both collective and corrective. Begun in late spring 1990 by Tom Smith, at the time a 17-year veteran of deepest American underground redoubts, and joined soon after by Miami proto-noise magnate Frank „Rat Bastard“ Falestra, TLASILA had, by the early 2000s, swelled into an ever-mutating nebula of hardcore clamor freaks, guided by the ameliorative desire to fuse literature and dark filmic tropes with an experimental, densely-wrought, propulsively theatrical music that owed as much to Rorty or Bazin as it did to Xenakis or Brecht. (Or, third-generation Stooges cassette bootlegs.) Over a 25-year limbic blitz they’ve assailed, assaulted and cryptically asseverated with compositions that simultaneously serve as cultural criticism. Tellingly, their primary target is TLASILA itself. Smith has long described To Live and Shave in L.A. as „antithesis, energized at the juncture of aesthetic revulsion.“ Theirs is not an easy trot through a quarter-century of light improvisation. TLASILA walks the walk and makes the talk indecipherable, but strangely beautiful.

On the September tour, TLASILA will comprise Hungarian percussionist Balazs Pandi, Australian performance artist Lucas Abela, Atlanta-based composer Graham Moore, Rat Bastard, and Smith, who now resides in Hannover, Germany.

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