New haunts
No tears for the survivors and town criers of San Francisco rock band evening.

By Kimberly Chun

THE SPECTER OF past traumas, archaic figures, forgotten Victorians, UFOs, little boys lost – these all haunt San Francisco's evening.

And make that the quintet that calls itself evening – lowercase, thank you.

Their music surprises you each time you revisit it, winking and challenging you to lift and examine another layer – this sheer, dizzying sheet of reverb, that perverse fascination with things like breast milk or biker speed. It's densely layered, offbeat pop that's boldly old-school in its rejection of current pop formulas and in its longing gaze back to the realm of pre-'90s AOR and prog, yet also unmistakably new-school in the sleek contours of its production and the almost Interpol-ish chill coming off its beats. Neo-goth? Rather, on evening's Lookout! debut album, Other Victorians, the attractions are neo-Dickensian in their affection for busy ornament and bracing structure. Referencing Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality with their album title and tapping their obsessions at the time of recording, evening repel and compel simultaneously, constructing at times forbiddingly complicated musical landscapes in which they frolic with frightened eyes and get their conflicted kicks.

Why run scared? Because behind the analog gloss of their musical surfaces, evening are obviously as haunted as a house – be it a San Francisco Victorian or the brick-lined live-work space overlooking Market Street the band call their base and others call Stain Gallery.

Soft-spoken, dark-haired, and mustached, guitarist Lee Burik apologizes like a gentleman about the tagging in the stairwell to the gallery – reminders of a raucous party last week while he and the rest of evening were busy winning over a tough crowd at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. A massive, color-coded Russian map and bass-drum light fixtures overlook a parquet dance floor. Instruments and cases are everywhere, including a pair of pianos, one black and one white, stationed, like a devil and an angel, on either side of the room. Outside, the late-night Civic Center scene is straight out of Nighthawks, strafed with wandering tourists and panhandlers. Inside, it's a great space any self-respecting hipster would be proud to call a communal home – and bassist-keyboardist Zach Brewer and drummer Brian Kim, as well as members of Vue and the Boy Explodes, have done just that. Art and music shows, after-parties, salon gatherings, and the writing of Other Victorians have all happened here.

There's only one wrinkle.

"I almost didn't move in because of the ... apparition," Salon 1941 host and housemate Michael Phillips Moskowitz drawls, between draws on a cigarette.

"Yeah, there's a ghost. He lives up there," Burik says, pointing to the ceiling. He's never seen the figure of the little boy, but his housemates claim to have spotted the uninvited roommate poking his head out of a hole in the corner of the ceiling or joining them in the nearby bathroom for some toilet-side canoodling. Kids get into the darndest things – and I remind myself to use the facilities at the fast-food joint on the street below.

But the haunting doesn't stop there. Burik makes a beeline for his poison-green cranny of a room that's jammed with bric-a-brac, guitars of all shapes and sizes, and sock monkeys. He dons a rough, hooded Jesuit-style robe and picks up a big English bell. With his grown-out beard, he's ready to fulfill an obsession he's had for the past few years – to become San Francisco's town crier and ring in visitors at Golden Gate Bridge. His first day of work: April 1, April Fool's Day.

Burik seems fully prepared to be arrested for acting like a dangerous kook on the bridge before he can get more than a few greetings out. But consider that a small toll, a price he's prepared to fork over, in the grand oddball tradition of S.F. eccentrics like Emperor Norton. He seems determined to carve out his own piece of the world, following some spectral diagram or map.

A similar inconoclastic passion overtook him when he embraced activism at the height of the dot-com boom. The closure of Downtown Rehearsal studios and escalating rents – his own space went from $2,500 to $5,000 a month in a couple months – made life hard for local musicians. In 1999 he put together the "Death to the Arts S.F." protest march with a casket and a crew of musicians, dancers, and performers, which paraded down Market Street in protest of the economic marginalization of artists and musicians in the Bay Area. "It was really a beautiful thing," Burik says. "Everyone came in costumes, and there were Butoh dancers. There was this guy who led the parade with a really eerie, dissonant-sounding flute, and everyone was dead silent, and we were walking down Powell Street, and all the tourists were, like, mouths gaping."

The avarice and consumerism of those boom years found their way into songs such as the jittery "Vivixc," on which vocalist-keyboardist Matt Rist sings of leaving Planet Greed in his spaceship. The money grab that brought so many to the city during those years didn't draw the evening, whose day jobs include driving cabs, bartending at the Beauty Bar, and working as a tailor. They've made do with their persnickety, "janky, broken" gear, as Brewer puts it, including an ancient Echoplex and wheezing Moog Prodigy – and monetary success has been no object. "After we made the record, a lot of what we heard – from various people involved and the, like, quote-unquote music industry – was that there really aren't any radio hits on the record," Brewer says. "It's totally true. And I think we're all totally fine with that."

They found each other about seven years ago when Burik and guitarist Patrik Sklenar, then jazz students at San Francisco State University, began playing together as Sutra V. With the arrival of Rist, followed by Kim and then Brewer, the band considered changing their name first to Vermillion Fervor, then to La Fong, then to Laguna Honda, before finally settling on evening.

"We had a good six-month period where people were threatening to quit the band because we were called this or that. They were like, 'There's no way I'm going to be called 'NASA,' " Lee says. "Yeah, evening – I really like that word. It could be the incorporation of dark and light. For me, evening is my favorite time of day. And I like when there's long shadows and everyone's kind of in between, after work, in that hovering zone."

That could mean hovering like a spook – or like ashes, suspended in air. In fact, the song "Wither in Bloom" was inspired by the midnight dispersal of ashes belonging to Rist's father, Gilbert Atta Rist, over a Cleveland lake. "It just happened to be one of those nights when there were comet showers, and when they dumped the ashes, they didn't go into the water; they hovered over the water and slowly crept out over the water and disappeared," Rist says from his home after a day's labor as a construction worker.

Rist's tragic year, 2002, inevitably wound its way onto Other Victorians. A former jazz trumpet player, Gilbert Rist committed suicide after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. "He was an only child, and he decided he wanted a big family, so he had eight kids, and all of sudden, he had to take care of these kids, so he wasn't able to play music," Rist recalls. "So on my father's deathbed, he said something to the effect of 'Through my death, you can take a couple years off working, and I want you to pursue music.' Here was a person I didn't really like, but I admired his talents. If he's saying I'm talented, pursue it, then I'm doing it. And I was anyway, but it put a new kind of drive on what I was trying to accomplish."

But the plans took a horrific turn when, shortly after his father's death, Rist was attacked with a tire iron after trading words with a man in a Marina District bar, where the singer was attending a friend's party. "Imagine sitting between two cars, waiting for a half hour, with a tire iron," he muses, thinking about the assault. "You couldn't be in your right mind. They got caught, and they're being put through the American judicial system, so now they're walking around free ... and my life has been changed by the attack."

Rist underwent facial reconstruction, but he's still dealing with physical – and psychological – pain. The case has yet to go to trial, witnesses have disappeared, he calls the District Attorney's Office every two weeks, and, he says, "it feels like I have a vice on my head for most of the time. My sinuses are screwed up, and there's nerve damage in my lip. The head is a tricky thing. The tire iron was just inches away from my temple."

"A Given Time," the last song on the album, takes a level, direct look at the attack from an alien perspective. "Fear them hiding within your mind ...," Rist wails above a stately piano and simmering Moog. "Why confess there's problems in your head." It turns out aliens and outsiders, within and without, figure into evening's journey as much as the paranormal does.

"I'm really a different person now," Rist explains. "When I was eight, I got hit by a car and I was in a coma, and I thought I was never the same since then, and here I am, I get another head injury. It really uprooted some things that I didn't deal with when I was eight. Some of our deepest scars are in our subconscious, so a tire iron to the head resurfaces some things. It's pretty much sucked, but I'm at the point where life is precious and why be miserable even when it hurts?" evening play with Elephone and Midnight Movies Fri/2, 9 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, S.F. $10. (415) 771-1420.