If the Cramps, Devo and the B-52’s got it on in the Big Easy and bore a baby resembling Roky Erickson, that strange child would grow up to be Quintron and Miss Pussycat. The duo is one part puppet show, and all rock ’n’ roll, genre-straddling party music seething in the Everclear that New Orleans likes to soak its cherries in.
It’s a matrimonial blend — yes, they’re married — of his musical mad science and her underground lounge style, refined over years into an auditory Spanish fly called “Swamp-tech.” To create it, he’s used field recordings of frogs and other nature sounds mixed with a Hammond B3, maracas and various homemade instrument contraptions. To illustrate and project it, she creates and deploys entire casts of puppets, like she did for the video for their electro-hardcore banger, “Face Down in the Gutter.”
Together, with their dance beats, staging and sartorial taste, they mind-expand an audience’s conception of what entertainment can be.
A new Quintron-only instrumental album, “Erotomania: Quintron at the Chamberlin,” is due this month on Orlando’s own Mind Meld label.
The Chamberlin is not a venue. It’s a vintage keyboard — “invented in Wisconsin by Harry Chamberlin in 1949,” an album cheat sheet notes — and a predecessor to a mainstay of prog-rock: the Mellotron, a keyboard-triggered bank of tape loops with an eerie, violin-ish warp.
Chamberlin’s home-entertainment instrument was both pioneering and a product of another time. “Rumor has it that the musicians whom Harry Chamberlin hired for these backing rhythm tapes were members of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra,” says the “Erotomania” explainer.
Never let it be said there isn’t a good story, or history, when Quintron & Miss Pussycat are in the house. The first “Erotomania” track posted to Bandcamp, “Bohemian Caverns,” acts on a uniquely Quintronian urge: to embed Welk’s prim, pre-rock stylings into a steamy retro seduction track — like someone uncovering Eisenhower America’s suppressed desires.
When not on tour Quintron and Miss Pussycat can be found at their home venue, the Spellcaster Lodge in New Orleans. So whatever happens here, forward mail and paternity claims there.
Quintron and Miss Pussycat, with Three Brained Robot, The GutterTones, TBA, perform 8pm Sunday November 17 at Voltaire in West Palm Beach. GET ADVANCE TICKETS HERE!
quintronandmisspussycat.bandcamp.com ~ Tim Moffatt
VIDEO BELOW FROM BRUISE CRUISE 2011
