tUnE-yArDs: "Gangsta"

tUnE-yArDs plays the kind of music that must have originated deep in the back woods of mastermind Merrill Garbus' family home in Vermont. The New England musician loops drum beats, vocals, samples, and ukulele into a soundscape that she then covers with bass, saxes, and snappy, African-inspired vocals. In the open air of the woods, she must have discovered the way to open up her songs, to the point that anything could come next, a different movement or time signature or set of sounds, saxes bleating like alarms or a new drum beat.

When she wasn't making music while living in Vermont, Garbus was studying puppeteering, she told Ink 19. That imaginary play time affected the development of her sound: "The songs I'm interested in creating are worlds, sonic worlds, with texture that you can feel, smells (as you suggest), things you can see." She left the puppets in Vermont and mostly lives on the road, but she brought the world with her.

Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs

tUnE-yArDs, which is intentionally stylized to be annoying, draws you in with the sonic chaos, but you stay for the show. Garbus is fascinating to watch as she starts a song with a beat, then another, then some harmonized pop vocals, maybe a dash of ukulele, and we're off to the races. She manipulates the start and stop, creating movements in her songs that come together beautifully after four minutes. Add to that Garbus' bright and/or hipster costumes, face paint, facial expressions under the face paint, and puppet theater-honed sense of stage drama, and you've got yourself a Lolla winner. She is going to absolutely kill it on Saturday at 5 p.m. on the Sony stage.

I watched the live video half a dozen times before discovering the music video, which looks like it was shot in pieces on the road, often at night, in bathrooms and train cars and hotel lobbies. It's fun to see the chaotic joy that I imagine Garbus sees when she hears her own songs. The worlds she's building are fascinating, to say the least.

Here's the music video for Gangsta:

tUnE-yArDs has two albums out, 2009's BiRd-BrAiNs (Marriage Records/4AD) and 2011's w h o k i l l (4AD).