HOTT MT

And then I made a race with the devil to go see HOTT MT and Wayne Coyne, only to discover that Wayne’s Justin Timberlake jones meant he wouldn’t be attending. This would be my last band of the entire week of SXSW 2013—was it going to be a downer?

Well, I was ready to pass out at this point, and the HOTT MT looked as tired as I felt—when you scan through the photos on my iphone, you’ll see more than a few where their eyes betray the utter fatigue that must have been pulling at their bones like lead weights.

But despite the lack of their Okie mentor, and even though it was like 1:55 a.m., and even though they looked tired as fuck, these kids refused to say die! No one was going to walk away thinking about Wayne Coyne, if they could help it. They tore into their songs, rocking hard on the fast ones, pulling out the emotional stops on the slow ones (which were grander, and fewer, than what I’d seen before). They had the crowd eating out of their hands, calling out their names, carrying them around…

And then right at the mark where 1:59 becomes 2 a.m., the music stopped, and the band was over. And SXSW was over. I still had a DJ gig the next day, a wrap-up show to attend, etc., but the unofficial official SXSW 5 day extravaganza was finally over for 2013! It was over.
- LA Record

Yes, not only was I covering the L.A. RECORD show at Spiderhouse on the Friday of SXSW, but I was also DJing it. All the work and none of the fun. On the upside, that made it impossible to miss HOTT MT today (in fact, I negotiated getting them onto the bill in the first place, which hints at how objective this whole article really is), who sounded quite a different experience than what I’d reported on from the cramped quarters of Cheer Up Charlie’s.


Maybe it was the invigorating ferns surrounding them, I dunno, but the HOTT MT gang relaxed a little more on Friday than they had on Wednesday, and they sounded more like the pure synth-savvy germ-free adolescents they really are. Don’t let the wild look in sometimes-bassist Bahd Bad’s eyes fool you, nor the blue locks and almost-jaguar print jacket on principal guitarist Spooky Tavi. These guys know restraint as well as dynamics, and can deliver an atmospheric, lyrically-rich tune without screaming or banging into things.


And they can all play multiple instruments, and they all have their own style. But even when she’s kind of half-wrapped up in a jacket/cape thing that she can’t decide whether to wear or not, your eyes are always drawn right back to front-woman Queen Ashi Dala.


Despite the regal title, Dala seems really down to earth and fun. And there’s some kid-like fun in her vocals, but also a little heroin deadpan. You know what I mean? It’s that place mastered by talk-savvy singers as diverse as young Lou Reed/Doug Yule, Ian Dury, the Violent Femmes guy, and whoever the chick from Mary’s Danish was, who despite their differing vocal timbres all tread the surprisingly solid walkway between shy teenaged confusion and sage street-wise wisdom.

In Dala’s case, I could almost compare it to Sean Solomon from Moses Campbell, if he were just a tad more feminine. I haven’t seen HOTT MT enough live to tell, but Dala might have been trying to save her voice a little on Friday, blurting the words quick and then letting them decay fast during the verses—I get the feeling she would have preferred a little echo to round things out and match her bandmates’ bright gooey sheen. But any terseness in her vocal delivery was more than compensated for by her expressiveness and wild interpretive arm gestures. During her between-song banter, she explained a little bit about the songs and the band’s name itself: it’s actually an acronym of “Hour of the Time, Majesty Twelve,” not “HOTT Mother Truckers” or whatever other interpretation you might have thought possible from those “ghetto hott” two T’s.

Dala was part of the band’s creation and foundation, but her performance today was felt more like an “and starring” role, like the capstone that holds a thing all together. We’re lucky to have someone like her in our little scene. She’s like the character you’d add to a TV show to spruce things up–not like that bastard Poochie from Itchy and Scratchy, but legit, like Flim Flam from The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo.
- LA Record

And they were followed by HOTT MT. In the days to follow I’d learn a lot more about this L.A. band, but for now I just found them really exuberant and refreshing, perhaps in part because of the visual serenity of the bassist’s blue hair.


Singer Ashleigh Allard had a lot more energy and punch than what we’d seen earlier, a little happy shuffle to her demeanor, and it reminded me of the fun parts of the 80s that everyone forgets to include in their synth bands. I’m talking Kim Wilde, Lena Lovich, even Cyndi Lauper! And I don’t mean that the band was humorous or light, but there was a tiny touch of She’s So Unusual to their keyboards and the bounce of their tunes. They had a great energetic style that even consumed what I think were covers—since then I’ve seen them play three times, and I still am not sure if they’re covering Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” or merely wrote a song that captures the spirit of the thing for their own band, which at its base is supposed to be a post-punk collective—even the band’s misspelled party-sounding name is really an acronym for “Hour Of The Time, Majesty Twelve.”
- LA Record

Honestly, these HOTT MT kids were plain weird, trying to be too weird or having a genuine taste for weirdness? I can’t tell but they performed at the Echoplex on Thursday night in front of a very enthusiastic crowd. Since their cross country trip (a 22-hour drive!) to stalk Wayne Coyne, give him their last record and persuade him to record a song with them, they have put their name on the Pitchfork-Spin-Rolling-Stone map, so this was obviously a bold but very good move! Coyne tweeted ‘Some weirdos showed up on my porch … They drove all the way from LA to bring me a birthday gift!!’ but far from freaking out – something inconceivable for the Flaming Lips’ frontman – he collaborated on their track ‘Never Hate Again’ and even appeared during the band’s last appearance at SXSW last March. Also, HOTT MT are featured on the leading track of The Flaming Lips' last album, 'The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends', meaning that everything seems to work their way, Lips-wise.

HOTT MT was playing the Red Bull Sound Select, a series curated by Filter magazine, and they gave us one of their strange performances. Ashi Dala, the female singer appeared wrapped in a sleeping bag, which she threw away on the crowd at the first song. Rainbow messy hair, daft punk t-shirt, thrift-shop funky clothes and funky beats, they were very colorful and made music heavy on synth, electronic, noise and distortion with the theatrical presence of their purple-hair singer, who was screaming, doing lots of arm gestures or even rolling her back on the ground. I understood why Coyne found them interesting, they looked out-of-space-weirdos enough and certainly eccentric and experimental enough.

Their set was entertaining and surprising, going slowly then fast, sprinkled with happy bouncy-dance-y beats, giving a sort of exotic vibe in the mix – hey, they describe their music as Thai Gaze, whatever this means – and a lot of talking and finger pointing from the frontgirl who looked like a cross between a cute cartoon character and Karen O. She had a whole adventure on stage, although I am not sure I followed every detail of it. Gothic Tropic’s Cecilia Della Peruti joined her on stage for a duo on a song, but next time,… bring up Wayne! I know that a 22-hour drive is kind of long, but the power of Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve (this is actually what their acronym means!) seem to be unlimited in this area. - Rock NYC

Some corporate sponsored events are held and put on entirely free to the public. The major sponsors do this as a token of good will to the hip public they’re trying to reach, hoping to engender positive associations for their brand and/or product line in exchange for the free entertainment. For Red Bull Sound Select Presents: Los Angeles, the massive energy drink company chose a different approach, helping to fund the event, but offering a low $3 entry fee before 10 p.m. The sponsor sweetened the pot by offering all proceeds to go to the local opening bands on the bill. Tonight’s event was appropriately headlined by the ever-evolving garage rock band Wavves with support from Incan Abraham, Hands and Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve (known most commonly as HOTT MT).


HOTT MT was up first, and all heretofore stories about the band are completely accurate: they are intentionally bizarre but also fun. Lead singer Ashi Dala came out clad in a full-body fish costume which less than two songs later was discarded into the crowd. From there, the band wove a tapestry of reverberated psychedelia with each progressive number. Dala paused at various points to cutely challenge the crowd to dance and enjoy themselves more. She speaks with a syncopated and almost incomprehensible drawl, but does so with a bubbly sense of unaffected enthusiasm. It’s no wonder the band was a great fit for working with Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips (after famously showing up at his home to request the collaboration).
- mxdwn.com

When we heard that Red Bull started a monthly concert series to promote local music—and that tickets were only three dollars if we showed up before 9:30 p.m., and that all the proceeds went directly to the bands—we pretty much had to check it out.

On April 23, 2013, we did just that, joining more than 400 local music lovers who crammed into the Echoplex to watch the third installment of Red Bull Sound Select Presents: Los Angeles.
The lineup for the evening was curated by Filter Magazine, and featured an eclectic array of up-and-coming bands whose sounds varied from the psychedelic pop beats of opening bands Incan Abraham and HOTT MT, to the emotion-laced vocals of Hands, and the punky, surf-rock anthems that Wavves brought to the stage at the end of the night.

Prior to the show, we got to head backstage and chat with Ashi Dala, lead singer of HOTT MT, which stands for Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve, where, of course, we asked her to tell us where they got their band name (hint: it all started with an episode of X-Files). She also spilled about their recent collaboration to make a cover of the Stone Roses' self-titled album, and told us some wild stories about attempting to break into Dr. Dre's property.

You guys will be back here in July for a residency at The Echo, right?
Yes! Looking forward to it.

Have you ever done a residency before?
No, we're still fairly new. We just started playing shows about a year ago, so it's been a build-up to finally have our own residency. It's very exciting because we're in charge of putting the shows together, curating the events, and for us it's a lot more than just having bands play—it's about absolutely everything that goes into the evening. I think we're going to have sets, videos, and even some new releases. We're thinking about coming out with a 4 song EP and releasing one song each night.

Are you working on an EP right now?
We have a release coming up May 21 with Manimal, and that is our first album since our debut. It's seven songs, so it's a little bit more than an EP, but it's not quite a full-length.

We've also heard rumors about HOTT MT collaborating with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips to do a cover of a Stone Roses album. Is there any truth to that?
It's completely true! We were in Oklahoma City over a couple weeks in January of this year working on the collaboration with Wayne, along with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, and the New Fumes. I don't think the Flaming Lips are going to be a part of it necessarily, but they are definitely producing it. That Stone Roses album is really close to all of our hearts. The cover idea came about when we were in an elevator with Wayne and started singing it. Then thing with Wayne is that he gets ideas, and then he just does them. He goes, "I love this album, you guys love this album—why aren't we making a cover of this album?" So, we're making it happen and it should be coming out in a couple of months.

Were there particular songs you were a part of?
We love all the songs, but some are more special to us than others. We started by doing "I Wanna be Adored," and Wayne actually sang with me on that. We doubled vocals. Then we did "Sugar Spun Sister," which is my personal favorite on the album, and we also worked on "Waterfall" with Depth & Current—another local band. It's a really interesting song the way that we recorded it, with my vocals that are really light alongside the lead singer of Depth & Current who's got this really manly voice.

You originally made headlines because you drove all the way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma to introduce yourselves to Wayne Coyne. That seemed to work out pretty well for you guys . . . any plans to drive out to other musicians' homes and forge collaborations?
It's funny you asked that. When we got back from Oklahoma the first time, we thought, OK that worked great, so let's find out who else has birthdays and hit up one person a month and see what happens. We ended up figuring out where Dr. Dre lived, and it was just a huge mess! It was unbelievable. We tried to get through the main gate and we were stopped by the guard. He saw straight through us. Then we found this back gate with remote access, so, we hopped the fence there, got caught again and kicked out.

Adam (a.k.a. Bahd Bad), our sound man, was working for a DJ at the time who was pretty big with KIIS FM, so he called them up to get phone numbers of people who might know Dr. Dre. So, we were all standing outside, calling these people, pretending like we've met them...it didn't work. (Laughs) At that point, we did want to continue collaborations, but we also wanted to make our own music and start playing in LA. That's what we did, and I feel like I grew a lot more doing that.

We googled Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve and came up with some wei - Foam Magazine

In what may be considered an epic chapter in the annals of stalkerdom, or a fable that could only involve the Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne made some new friends last week. On the morning of his 51st birthday, Coyne answered the door at his Oklahoma City home to find three strangers bearing a gift: Nick Logie of the Los Angeles alt-rock quintet Telegram, his girlfriend Ashleigh Allard, and their friend Adam Ashe holding an extravagantly packaged copy of an album Logie and Allard had just finished recording.

Coyne tweeted a photo of the trio along with the note, "Some weirdos showed up on my porch ... They drove all the way from LA to bring me a birthday gift!!!"

The trio had driven 22 straight hours from California on their seemingly quixotic mission, but rather than be turned away, Coyne welcomed them. Says Logie, "He said, 'You guys look like weirdos! Come inside, just please don't kill me.' " Logie, Allard and Ashe ended up staying four nights at the Flaming Lips leader's compound, sleeping on floors and couches, recording a song with him ("I'll Never Hate Again," with Coyne contributing vocals and lyrics), and making a music video.

Coyne's address is not-so-secret, of course, because he was famously captured in a Google Street Maps photo in a bathtub in his front yard. He gets visitors but does not encourage them. "A lot of people show up at my place with a painting or CD to give me because it was my birthday," Coyne tells SPIN. "I thought it might have been someone local, but not someone who would've driven all the way from L.A. [So] I thought we'd do something."

"Something just clicked," Logie says. "He invited us in, showed us around his amazing compound. It was kind of a blurry weekend. There was a party, we recorded a song and the next day made a video. The whole thing was surreal. We're still processing it."

The music that the trio delivered to Coyne certainly fits the Lips' aesthetic. It's from a side project Logie and Allard launched called HOTT MT (Hour of the Time, Majesty Twelve) — psych-pop that the young musicians call "Thai-gaze." And the tune they made with the Lips frontman? "It's a great, great track. Of course it will be a hit because I'm on it ... I'm only joking," Coyne says. "They were really cool and their time with me was productive and because the song came out of a great story ... [the idea that] these guys were either going to kill me or record with me." - SPIN.com

Psych poppers HOTT MT are playing the Echoplex in L.A. on October 29, in case you missed their 2012 release ‘I Made This’, have a listen here. Earlier in the year the ‘Thai gaze’ trio managed to convince The Flaming Lips Wayne Coyne to work with them after showing up on his doorstep with a copy of their record, the resulting collab video is below (thanks Mitchell). - Sounds Better With Reverb

Is it your dream to work with the likes of The Flaming Lips? Well, if you’re anything like Los Angeles band HOTT MT, that reverie could very well become reality — if you’re blessed with the right attributes.

Ever since The Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne first expressed his desire to release one song per month in 2011 (a goal that hasn’t quite been made manifest), the band has descended into a deep, dark realm of wonderful musical weirdness populated with music-packed human skulls and flashing Strobo Light Trip Toys.

A main theme, however, that has run throughout the jamboree of oddness is collaboration. Coyne and the Lips have worked with a slew of artists over the last year, including Neon Indian, Bon Iver, Ke$ha, Erykah Badu, and, most recently a tenacious up-and-coming act called HOTT MT (Hour of the Time, Majesty Twelve).

The band — which comprises Nick Logie of the band Telegram, his girlfriend Ashleigh Allard and their friend Adam Ashe — decided to visit Wayne Coyne at his home in Oklahoma City on his 51st birthday to gift him with their new record.

Coyne’s house is famously easy to find — especially after a picture of the singer taking a bath in his front yard surfaced on Google Street View.

At the time, HOTT MT didn’t even know that The Lips were on a collaboration spree. “We had just finished our record and we felt like we had nothing to lose, so we stopped thinking and just did it,” Allard says, referring to their album, “I Made This.”

“We were Flaming Lips fans and we just figured because of the nature of the Flaming Lips being spontaneous — doing that 24-hour song and eccentric things — maybe they would appreciate something as eccentric as a 22-hour drive to visit the frontman,” Logie says. So the band drove the whole way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City to meet Coyne.

Without even listening to their entire record, Coyne invited the band into his home to work on tunes, letting them crash in his studio (and use his shower — once) for a couple of days to record a song/music video with him. Pretty crazy, right?

So how did they win the Lips frontman over? Well, we think it was a combination of the following three factors:

1). A Dark Side

Wayne Coyne and The Lips — although famously open folk — are hardly all sweetness and light. We’re talking about dudes who hawked human skulls packed with tunes here. HOTT MT, apparently, possessed just the right levels of guilelessness and creepiness to keep the singer interested.

Upon meeting the trio, Coyne tweeted a snap of the band, as well as the statement: “Some weirdos showed up on my porch … They drove all the way from LA to bring me a birthday gift !!!” He then invited them in on the condition that they didn’t kill him.

Although HOTT MT didn’t actually go all horrorshow on Coyne, they did tap into their dark side when it came to collaborating on a track. “The song kind of explores the idea of us going to Wayne Coyne’s house to kill him, which was kind of a story we created with him,” Logie says. “It kind of evolved from that into this statement of, ‘We’ll never hate again because you collaborated with us and we moved beyond this instinct.’”

The result of said lifesaving truce? The above video and song, which are wonderful in their macabre-ness.

2). Spontaneity

The Lips rarely put out formalized press releases about their off-the-wall endeavors. Coyne and Co. simply come up with an idea, tell a reporter or tweet it out, and suddenly all the blogosphere is buzzing about 6-hour-long songs and gummi genitals. The Lips are a living, breathing art project of a band, so it’s important that if you’re brave enough to work with them, you be prepared to… well… not be prepared.

“I think it was kind of our spontaneous nature that he appreciated,” Logie says. “Our ballsiness and insanity. The fact that we drove out there and didn’t really know what was going to happen. We really didn’t have a plan where we were going to stay that night or anything like that. I think he enjoyed that, because it maybe reminded him of the way the Lips started — just sort of a punk rock band on acid, in a sense.”

3). Work Ethic

The Flaming Lips have been going strong and weird for decades now, with no signs of slowing down. So when you’re a younger, newer band, that whole “I’m tired” jam ain’t gonna fly. HOTT MT certainly didn’t slack in Coyne’s studio.

In addition to recording their own jam with Coyne, the band also contributed to tracks he was working on with Ke$ha and Erykah Badu, slaving up until the last minute of their stay.

“He was texting Ke$ha on his birthday and was really busy and was like, ‘Well, I’ll put these kids to work and see what they can do,’” Allard says. “And he was impressed with our work ethic and that we were actually good. He was very surprised.”

Bonus: HOTT MT now has a collaborative history almost as diverse as the man himself’s. - MTV

Trio showed up on the Flaming Lips leader's doorstep unannounced and got a clip out of it

The members of Los Angeles psych-pop trio HOTT MT record under bizarre aliases, refer to their sound as "Thai gaze," and seem to be inspired by the "teachings" of famous conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper. (Their handle is an acronym for Hour of the Time Majesty Twelve) That's already enough crazy to make a band memorable, but Ashi Dala, Spooky Tavi and Bad Bahd had weirder aspirations still, so in January, they packed up their instruments and drove to Oklahoma City, timing their trip so that they'd arrive at Wayne Coyne's doorstep on the morning of the lead Flaming Lip's 51st birthday. They brought him a copy of their newly finished album I Made This and requested a collaboration.

And as Tavi, a.k.a. Nick Logie, told SPIN in January, Coyne responded thusly: "You guys look like weirdos! Come inside, just please don't kill me." Soon after, HOTT MT wound up contributing to the Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends song "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)" along with Ke$ha and Biz Markie, and also recorded their own track at the Coyne complex featuring vocals from Acid Gandalf himself. Below, behold the video for "I'll Never Hate Again," in which it appears the threesome does indeed intend to kill their idol. The clip was directed by go-to Lips film guy George Salisbury and shot at Coyne's new OKC gallery the Womb. A 7-inch single is due out July 31 on L.A. label Origami, limited to 500 copies and on pink vinyl of course. - Spin Magazine