The Year Zero is Alive and Well and Living on Earth
By Chris Ziegler

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

The Year Zero started as a Long Beach living room band but guitarist/songwriter Rodney Sellars was sort of an artist-in-exile. As a kid, he had put a fantasy world in his head—balloons and sailing ships and cut-out deco girls and bubble cities and retro-organic psych sci-fi like Fantastic Planet, textured by Verne and Melies and Herbert and Lynch’s Dune—and he used Year Zero as anthropological expedition. He’d make drawings and paintings and do his songwriting by fly-by—his ruins and deserts and racers and radar girls revised into slow pop songs about strange love and loneliness, swimming in a heavy atmosphere shared by J.G. Ballard and Jesus and Mary Chain and a true-life psychological case-history called “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” about a nuclear scientist who was emperor of a thousand worlds every time he went to sleep. If you didn’t know the story, you’d think the Year Zero were only beautiful—singer Lili De La Mora has a voice like Alison Statton or Hope Sandoval, so vulnerable as to provoke paralysis—but they bring back relics, too.

“It doesn’t seem like I’m making lyrics up,” says Rodney, “so much as they’re just there and I’m finding them.”

Last year’s full-length Oceania, I Will Return—Rodney and Lili are reverent fans of the Eurythmics-soundtracked 1984—could be the the Year Zero’s soundtrack to a film they haven’t made yet; though Rodney has written a screenplay, he finds it difficult to tie a narrative around his landscapes.

“Sometimes,” he says, “when dreams are sketchiest and unclear, it’s cooler—when you draw it out, you lose the mystery.”
But a cassette four-track fits unclear dreams well—he likes that his little deck has actual levers and knobs and spools of tape spinning around, says Rodney, even though the sound gets a little furry after the third or fourth bounce—and the Year Zero floated out of that living-room haze with the kind of regal dignity clipper ship captains pursued their whole careers. The softest minutes of Lush or Cranes or Sonic Boom/Spectrum or even the Pixies (“The Thing,” or any of their UFO songs) are as loud as the Year Zero likes to get, a gentle hush and hum that flaps and collapses to fit Lili’s voice.

“There’s so much tension in the world,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to soothe people, to sing songs to share our observations—to observe from a more calm place.”

And they adjust live now from the original Rodney/Lili/drum machine robo-trio (quieter than the espresso machines at the coffee shop) to a Prospector-friendly “super band” (laughs Rodney) with Chris Clawson on drums, Alex Villanueva on keys (also appearing with Lili alone as the 11 HZ Robot, who make all their music on two tweaked Game Boys!) and Jennifer Galdan on bass. At their loudest, they just call what they do loud rock, and they laugh about the bluntness of the term. But the Year Zero play psychedelia absent chemical contamination. It’s just bliss and reverberation—the old analog fantasies of Sime and Starewicz, made to engage with young imagination.

“I try to write stories,” says Rodney. “I try to bring it into reality to share with people—this vast imaginative space in my head, and all these songs and this artwork just trickles out. And regular life gets mixed up in the songs, too. But it’s kind of like this internal place in my head—”

“Internal?” I had asked, taking notes.

“Oh, no,” said Rodney. “‘Eternal.’”

HOORAY FOR HUMANS PRESENTS THE YEAR ZERO WITH POTAR, GHOSTSHIP AND THE 11HZ ROBOT KOO’S ART CENTER | 540 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | KOOS.ORG | SAT 8PM | $5 | ALL AGES | ALSO SHOWING NEW WORKS BY BRYAN SCHNELLE | SAT 5PM | FREE