Soul of a New Machine

A familiar scene: The band, usually a bunch of dorks, plays soulful music, but that’s not what you’re watching. It’s those background singers, which, as David Berman once sang, “All come in threes.” Ava Luna, a group from Coney Island, inverts, chops and innovates on this trope. Rolling seven members deep with a triad of female backup crooners, Carlos Hernandez leads the band through maze-like compositions that touch on soul, minimalism, disco, electronic music and TV On the Radio-tinged rock.

Now I’m sitting down with Hernandez and the group’s bassist Ethan Bassford at the Williamsburg Bar Macri Park for a happy-hour discussion of high school origins, pigeonhole soul and how the band’s work flirts with the devil while being honed in a Coney Island church basement.

More accessible than pomo genre tourists like Dirty Projectors and more modern than classicists like Sharon Jones, Ava Luna uses the collective input of its many members to arrive at soulful compositions that are just as tight as they are scatterbrained. The band started over three years ago, but took its current form at the beginning of 2010 with the release of the Services EP on a boutique Baltimore label called environmental aesthetics.

“At a certain point, several of us decided to have a project with three backup singers,” Hernandez, a native new Yorker, says. “i wrote a bunch of songs based on that idea. That was right around the time when college ended and a bunch of friends from high school were coming back to New York. actually, we all went to high school together, basically. It was easy to find people. It just went from there.”

Whereas most high school bands specialize in inadvertent rage against The machine covers and punk songs about discovering masturbation, Hernandez took a smarter route and formed his project after all its members went off to school and matured. Now, the popular kids and nerds are rocking parties in tandem. Play “clips” to sample Ava Luna’s aesthetics. Hernandez’s multi-octave quiver is augmented by antique backup harmonies, circular, clicky drums and a strong handclap stomp that resembles both disco and early ’90s En Vogue singles.

“We get a lot of people mentioning the whole soul thing as a big part of what’s going on,” explains Bassford. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of people that are doing that a lot more carefully right now. someone like sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. That’s almost like an exhibit in a museum or something—like a bottle at a pilgrim’s house. It’s cool, but we’re trying to do a twist on it.”

As such, Ava Luna walks a refreshingly different path than most of its contemporaries. Its music is lo-fi by necessity, yet there’s no hiding behind tape hiss or deliberate attempts at being fashionable. Take “Past The Barbary,” another cut from Services. Yes, there’s a vague stomp that could fit in the Dave longstreth/ Byrne/sitek axis, but the mix begins to uniquely bleed when the chorus hits. Those steady backing vocals swirl with tight drums, pulsating organs and scattershot guitar into a beautiful sticky mess. it remains a deep meditation on motown-flavored soul music, but the song’s tempo changes, rhythmic stabs and left-hand turn songwriting are delightfully counterintuitive to the familiarity of string swells and lyrics about wanting to grow older.

“It just sort of came from a point in my life when, if you listen to way old music, it’s completely scattered,” says Hernandez. “There’s no stylistic center, really. it’s just sort of the work of people who kind of exist in a bubble. in college and high school, i didn’t know much about contemporary music at all. With this bunch of songs, it’s an effort to pin down something about us that we can agree on and get excited about.”

Moving forward, ava luna is all about tightening its live show in order to create even deadlier dance floors. There will be an official, in-store full-length record eventually, but Hernandez and company seem content to continue experimenting with small, self-contained releases. They don’t need to save up money for studio time, either. The band has its own secret headquarters in a church basement in coney island.

“it’s nearly impossible to get to,” remarks Hernandez with a laugh. “it’s a small room, but it sounds awesome.”

>> Ava Luna

Aug. 25, Zebulon, 258 Wythe Ave. (betw. N. 3rd St. & Metropolitan Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-218-6934; 9, $TBA.