From nastiness to happiness
YAY! Records brings pretty, “playful” pop to Oxnard and beyond
By David Cotner 04/05/2007
Rising out of the dead sands of Oxnard, name scrawled inside the doodle of a strawberry, Eric Bello’s YAY! Records stands as one of the last bastions of active culture in a town that, at even at its least entertaining, can still boast being the cradle of Nardcore, turntablism and literalism. YAY! is meant to stand out, stated in capital letters and followed by an exclamation point, a typeface shout-out to the effervescence of youthful pleasures.
“A new pop is here to challenge the current conceptions and negative connotations of pop,” they promise. “The YAY! label is here to bring the fun back in pop!”
Formed in 2003, Maria, the main group on the plucky little seven-inch label, began as a quintet of confrontational free improvisation, calling on logical predecessors like No Wave and Throbbing Gristle for its energy essence and sounding like music dragged backwards through a garden hedge in the process. Current lineup: Bello and Nicole Chaparro on vocals, basses and guitars; drummer Pat Partida; and additional guitarist Adrian Pillado. Their genesis, founded in a hazy musical apocalypse of inscrutable tunes delivered on vacuum cleaners, cinderblocks and blenders, was gradually reformed as they learned to play actual instruments, into what they call “playful pop sound filled with jangly guitars and sweet boy-girl vocals.”
Connecting one cultural sepulcher to another via its camaraderie with Santa Paula-area event producers Songs From A Window, Maria has introduced the new, gentle sounds of YAY! into the worlds of longtime downtown Los Angeles club/proving ground the Smell, live sessions on KXLU 88.9 and Grady’s Record Refuge in-stores. Through the label, the band has carried with it other like-minded Ventura County groups like Ventura combo Catwalk and Fillmore band Pam & Teri. That there might be any fertile ground for creativity in such far-flung places as Santa Paula and Fillmore is a testament to the YAY! ideal of inclusion and positivism despite the loneliness of endless citrus fields.
When asked if there are any advantages to creativity by living in Oxnard, Bello says, “There aren’t many. But I think the few advantages make our view so much more distinctive because there’s really nothing like us out here. Another way of looking at it is that we have to work much harder to get noticed, especially around here. It’s easier in L.A. I don’t know why. I guess they’re just more open.
“That’s another thing that makes it difficult [in Oxnard],” he continues. “There’s really not a scene at all. People can say there might be a scene in Ventura, but it’s a fact that there’s nothing in Oxnard. That’s almost been a handicap because we almost never play in Oxnard, even though we’re from here.”
Plus, “there are a lot of gangs over here,” Bello says. “There are two gang injunctions in this city, and that means that they have a certain mile radius [of enforcement] and that anybody who looks like a gang member can get stopped for any reason by cops. They have curfews. It’s kind of a tough city. It’s a nice city, too. There are a lot of paradoxes: you have all the beaches and the million-dollar houses, and then you go not so far from downtown and Colonia and it’s a much different story.”
So just what is it that makes today's Maria so different, so appealing?
“As a group, we kind of started out focusing more on the nastier sides of where we came from in Oxnard,” Bello says. “But there are a lot of beautiful things: the beach and the farmland, and I think that’s kind of coming out as a softer, more fun sound nowadays.”
Maria’s natural movement from formless noise into the happy home of twee-popdom caught the attention of the Part Time Punks salon at hairy Los Angeles hotspot the Echo, with Maria’s as-yet-untitled full-length CD due out later this year on the Punks’ record label. Later on the way from YAY!: branded YAY Records! portable record players; a summer tour; and the arcane charm of the fanzine, which they’re publishing this spring, including a Maria five-inch vinyl record inside it.
How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet? A will-o'-the wisp? A clown?
Yeah, they’re a little like that.
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