GENEVA JACUZZI + RIKI

TEXT & BILD: GreyZone Concerts

Few artists embody the contradictions and possibilities of Los Angeles like Geneva Jacuzzi. Apioneer oflow fidelity, bedroom recorded avant-pop,her work spans not only music,butperformance art,livetheater, set design,costuming, makeup,and setdecoration-theauteur theory realized as ongoing art practice.She issimultaneously championed byundergroundvenues, DIYspacesandartgalleries,as well as prestigious institutions likeTheMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles(MOCA), The Broad Museum, and The Getty.Across two decades of activity, Jacuzzi has toured her surrealist strain of theatrical synth-popand staged dada exploratory installationsin more than forty countriesacross the world.GenevaJacuzzi’sdebut album is 2010's cult phenomenonLamaze, itselfan assemblageof 4-track and 8-track recordings and"demos,"spanning from 2004 to 2009.Birthed from the lastvestiges of pre-internet Los Angeles, she kept company with goths, freaks, weirdos, bohemians,and unknowns, allcrystallized into one greatest hits package.Her music is realized insimulacrum with the stage and moving image; onLamaze, each song is a visage, whether themime ("Do I Sad?"),or the neanderthal teleported to a far away land ("Future Past"). Theseideas were actualized in both the short film "Dark Ages" with director Jennifer Juniper Stratford,and in the ongoing odyssey of live performances over the following decade.To see a Geneva Jacuzzi show is to create a suspension of disbelief in your own reality: a hitparade of pre-recorded melodies, live vocals and raw personality; part Italian Futurism, FrenchSurrealism and Dada, all leading to mysterious parts unknown. On the road, she released aseries of coveted tour only CD releases (Secret Demos 1+2), with her second officialalbumTechnophiliafollowing in 2016.Technophilia's sleek production built on the foundationsof her earlier work, strengthening the resolve of redefining synth-pop and darkwave, from thedirty disco of "Casket" to the Balearic highs of "Cannibal Babies."Following the first wide release (and reissue) ofLamaze, Geneva started work on her thirdalbum,Triple Fire.Analchemical reactionof pop sugar, chaos energy, swaggering synthbass,Haçienda drum machinery, and sultry vocal spellcasting,the album is her mostcollaborative to date.Taking the director's chair, she created a new vision for the future ofmankind–an eclectic spectrum of moods to the continuum of human emotions: “Funny, sexy,sad, scary, witty, hopeful, menacing. Eventually it deconstructs, turns into a party, and thenends sweet and soft. Like a horror film, watched in reverse."Wildcard electronic pop and cleverpost-apocalyptic camp, the album crystallizes her mastery of new wave melody and discoaerobics, alternately freaky, glamorous, nihilistic, and romantic. A woman of a thousand masks,and the Queen of the Underground, Geneva Jacuzzi stands poised to continue shape-shiftingher kaleidoscopic spectacle far into the 21st century.