Crank it up

>> Erase Errata want your nerves

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Emitting as much raw tension as a chain-smoker on a 10-hour flight, Erase Errata is a quartet from the school of adrena-rock, with honours in keeping listeners on their toes. Their debut LP, Other Animals (Troubleman Unlimited), offers jagged shocks of guitar, trumpet, edgy vocals and fleeting, danceable beats among frantic time signatures. Gang of Four, LiLiPut and Captain Beefheart are the oft-cited influences on these half San Francisco, half Oakland-based ladies, whose rubbery punk has won over avant-garde scenesters (Sonic Youth etc.) and crazy kids alike. The Mirror spoke to guitarist Sara Jaffe about Gay Shame, pop shame and those killer chops.

Mirror: My hands hurt just listening to you play. Where did you pick that up?
Sara Jaffe: I took lessons when I was 15 but got fed up with them pretty quickly. I’d been doing classical piano for years and I got really excited by the idea of being able to take off on my own and do something that wasn’t just about playing the right chords and following the right notation. In my senior year in high school, I started volunteering at this freeform radio station in New Jersey called WFMU and I got exposed to a lot of different, less straightforward guitar styles there. Around that time, I started seeing bands like God Is My Co-Pilot in New York and then I got into the early ’80s post-punk and no wave bands, but by that point I was already doing my own thing.

M: Are you a metal fan, by any chance?
SJ: I’m not.

M: Is it fair to say that your sound juggles accessibility and confrontation?
SJ: To me, a lot of the songs we write are pop songs, but maybe that’s just my twisted take on pop. We really like to show that a song can be kind of experimental and interesting and still be catchy and danceable, we’re definitely conscious of that balance.

M: What’s your feeling about being pegged as a feminist band?
SJ: We’re not trying to align ourselves with riot grrrl or being a girl band, but there’s no doubt that being a girl making music is still a politicized thing to do. And, as far as the actual music goes, when we first started out, I didn’t see a lot of girls playing fucked up guitar styles.

M: Tell me about the Gay Shame event.
SJ: It’s basically an anti-capitalist alternative to gay pride celebrations because Pride in San Francisco has become totally corporate and mainstream. It takes different forms every year, this year there were no bands, but last year there were spoken word and political speakers and a really diverse roster of bands from all over California. It was at this industrial waste beach in front of the Bay. The cops were gonna come and the sound guy freaked out, he thought that all his gear would get confiscated, so he just packed up and left, and we didn’t get to play. :

With les Georges Leningrad and the Accident at Casa del Popolo on Thursday, Aug. 15, 9pm, $8 in advance, $10 at the door

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