Sonic Reducer | San Francisco Bay Guardian

Sonic Reducer

By Kimberly Chun

Hella cool

AH, HELLA – how do I love them? Let me count the ways. One, I love the way I first saw 'em, opening for Sleater-Kinney at the height of their Time magazine-endorsed "America's Best Rock Band" fame in 2001 – and blowing the minds of all assembled riot grrrl vets, gray-haired tastemakers, and indie rock snobs with their deconstructo, mighty morphed-out power rock – down to the way drummer Zach Hill lost his drumstick but continued bashing at the cymbal with his fist. Two, I love the moment, four years later, that I wandered from Sleater-Kinney's performance on the big stage at Emo's during this year's South by Southwest to the next, smaller room, where I was blown away anew by a now-four-piece Hella, mixing together blood, sweat, hard rock, battering-ram punk, primitivo game music, and other sonic unmentionables with more virtuosity, energy, and utter strangeness than S-K, or any other band at SXSW for that matter. In a Nintendo battle of bands, they win – Bay Bridge shout-outs, Middle Eastern flourishes, flurries of noise, and all, as heard on their recent double disc, Church Gone Wind/Chirpin Hard (Suicide Squeeze).

I tracked down Hill and guitarist Spencer Seim in late April, at the end of their last tour, playing with Fantomas and Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant at the Fillmore. "This is probably the largest-capacity venue we've played so far," Hill confessed, standing outside on the fire escape. They're in for it now, however, touring arenas with System of a Down and the Mars Volta – and long from the days when they began writing songs together in Nevada City in 2000, a twosome simply because they couldn't find anybody else to play with.

So what is it about Nevada City, where legend (of Zelda) has it, the streets are filled with "elf girls" who look like Joanna Newsom? "I dunno, it's a weird feeling up there," Seim said. "It kind of started as a large artists' community up there in the '60s and '70s. There's so many different types of landscapes in Nevada County – there are desertlike parts, the river, places that are rocky. It's like a small state or something."

"Yeah, I think it's a pretty progressive place, but at the same time, not," added Hill, who grew up in Sacramento but moved to Nevada City in his late teens. "Definitely a weird tug-of-war between being progressive and being stuck in the old ways. I think that probably spawns a lot of creativity when there's a friction like that."

Growing up and teaching themselves to play, Seim and Hill listened to a lot of Bay Area bands like Primus, but at the same time delved into the Beatles, the Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, "just the regular stuff," Hill said. They did go through a "pretty heavy era" when a friend introduced them to proggers like Magma, Gentle Giant, Yes, and early Genesis. "He definitely opened up a door as far as showing us a world of technical music in rock, or whatever, I guess," the drummer continued. "At the same time, we never focused on those types of things. We always felt our music is much more inspired by things that don't have to do with music."

Hill makes art and writes, whereas Seim tinkers. "I used to build all kinds of weird stuff when I was a kid," the latter explained. "Weird contraptions that would light a match that would be able to light a stick of dynamite 50 feet out. Speakers, microphones – I'd be winding wires for two days straight around a paper towel tube."

Church Gone Wind/Chirpin Hard is the product of the twosome's efforts to "record what our brains were thinking at that point in time" in summer 2004, the guitarist said; the former disc is devoted to Hill's cogitations and the latter to Seim's. "We work very well together musically, but we have much different ideas about music and just different views on certain aspects of it. So I think it will give people a really good picture of how the two sounds come together as Hella," he observed as an unearthly howl echoed through the Fillmore, followed shortly by a thud. Otherwise, listeners can get a taste of the pair's separate but equal sensibilities in their side projects: Hill's Goon Moon and Team Sleep collaboration with old Sacto homies like the Deftones' Chico Moreno, and Seim's Advantage. Like Nevada City, the Nintendo soundtrack band the Advantage is "a really weird thing," Seim drawled. "It's like someone in some time period's interpretation of current music, put into a really primitive medium. I just like it because the music is really weird and it weirds me out to think of some Japanese guy sitting at a computer for months just composing this music that's supposed to be metal-esque, or whatever the popular thing was in the US or Japan."

But the pair don't really feel the need to compose soundtracks for new games – they're setting their sights higher: "We've talked about that for a long time – one of our main desires is to score a film, and that's definitely on our minds as far as trying to make that happen in the future," Hill said. "We'd like to do animated features, but we'd also like to do things with video installation dudes like Bill Viola. We consider our music to be highly visual without the visuals." Visually conscious, indeed. I ask the duo to pose for a snapshot, and they immediately muss up their hair and slacken their jaws to achieve the desired effect – America's best band of windblown refugees from Spahn Ranch. Smile!

Hella play with System of a Down and the Mars Volta Sat/8, 7 p.m., Oakland Arena, Oakl. $32.50-$45. www.ticketmaster.com.

Get it off your chest, but I get the last word; e-mail kimberly@sfbg.com.