the hum / By Bob Doran

Good Sound

EOTO’s live electronica, plus Afromassive, Toubab Krewe and other worldly music

(Oct. 1, 2009)  Once upon a time EOTO was an acronym. “It used to stand for End of Time Observatory,” explained the duo’s drummer/beat manipulator Jason Hann calling from his Venice Beach home. “It just got to be too much to explain in interviews — people thought we were talking about something negative like the end of the world, which we were not — so we started going with EOTO, which people pronounced as ‘E-O-Toe.’ Then some Japanese fans came up to us and said EOTO means ‘good sound’ in Japanese, so we keep it as that.”

Michael Travis is the other half of the electrojam twosome, started as a side project of the phenomenally successful jamband, String Cheese Incident. “At first it was just something to do,” said Hann. “About five years ago, when I would fly out to Colorado for [SCI] practices, I’d stay at Travis’ house. We’d finish practice about 7 in the evening and there wasn’t that much to do, so we just started jamming — we’d set up at his place and jam until 4 or 5 in the morning.

EOTO Photo by Ankur Malhotra

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“We started out playing fusion with me on drums and Travis on bass playing tapping style like Stanley Jordan. That was fun. Then he added this Roland-Boss looping pedal and that made it more interesting. We kept adding new elements, finding new ways to keep it interesting and started messing around with more electronics. It really came out of endless hours of entertaining ourselves.”

Eventually Hann brought in his computer loaded with Ableton, a looping program, and Travis assembled a rack of electronic devices. EOTO played its first live show at Sonic Bloom an electro-fest in Colorado. The crowd dug it. Live electronica was on the rise with jamband fans becoming house music fans. When String Cheese stopped touring, the electro-dub-step duo became their main gig. The rest is history.

Last weekend they played in one of the rave domes at Earthdance; this week they launch a 33-day, 32-city national tour (they play two nights in Pittsburgh, Penn.) with night three — Thursday, Oct. 1 — at the Red Fox Tavern. Every show will be improvised on the spot. Each will be recorded and, in SCI/jamband fashion, fans will trade them on the ’Net, spreading EOTO like a virus. People will dance. At least that’s the plan. Likeminded DJ/producer David Starfire joins them at the Red Fox.

The Fela-inspired Afrofunk big band Afromassive is back in action Friday at the Jambalaya. Founded by guitarist Greg Camphuis and bassist Aaron Bortz, the band’s gigs have been infrequent since Bortz started touring with Bay Area Afrofunksters Albino! (due here Oct. 28), with various members coming and going. Still, says Camphuis, “The whole project has always had a lot of momentum. We have an album in the can; this show is like a fundraiser to get us over the hump and finish it.” Original Afromassive drummer Rob Peterson is up from Santa Barbara, and as a bonus Albino! frontman Michael Bello will sit in on sax. Brazilian drum line The Janky Mallets open with a blast of samba.

Also drawing inspiration from Africa — Toubab Krewe, a band from Asheville, N.C., that merges jamrock with North African-style guitar and rhythms reminiscent of Tinariwen. They’ve had a big summer recording material for a new album and playing Bonnaroo and Rothbury, where T.K. percussionists sat in with The Dead. They return to Humboldt Brews Saturday on a West Coast swing, meeting up with another Asheville band, Josh Phillips Folk Festival, which is not really a folk thing — guitarist/vocalist Phillips shifts between reggae, funk, pop and jamrock seemingly effortlessly.

Elsewhere on Saturday, Portland’s Brothers of the Baladi play music with a Middle Eastern flavor at Arcata Theatre Lounge providing a soundtrack for bellydancing by Shoshanna‘s Ya Habibi Dance Company. The show is in conjunction with the all-day Saturday and Sunday Redwood Coast Belly Dance Festival taking place at the Arcata Community Center.

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