Six albums of girls-gone-bad and civilian unrest fantasies supplied Black Rebel Motorcycle Club with more than enough material to fill their three-show stint at the Echoplex this past week. On Friday (night two), perfectly back-lit by a rolling blue mist, bassist Robert Been greeted the audience and asked if they were "looking good." He couldn't see them, and the words came off as a simple "How are you?," delivered young-Brando-biker-style.

"Everything's fucked up as usual," Been spat back, in case anyone was wondering.

Timothy Norris

Look out! Look out! Look out!: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club @ The Echoplex

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It's this kind of uplifting talk, and the leather jacket, that keeps the band's image going. Happy songs don't really stand out--these are Dark, Troubled Souls we're dealing with. Even the gentle, more ethereal tunes oscillated between comparing love to razor blades and extolling rebellious social politics.

​There's a new tweeter in town and she's mad as hell. In the last week, @ScrewYouSXSW, the self-proclaimed pissed off wife of a SXSW attendee, has been tweeting about happenings she's been learning about from her husband via text. A number of people at SXSW think this enigmatic person is of the male persuasion and here at the conference. But like many things at SXSW, perhaps the truth behind it all is better left in the dark. We were able to do a quick Q&A session with @ScrewYouSXSW. Here's what she had to say.

1. L.A. Weekly: It's obvious you're someone here at SXSW. Can you disclose your identity?

@ScrewYouSXSW: If I were at SXSW the Twitter account wouldn't be necessary. I am in fact at home, and my home isn't Austin or anywhere in Texas for that matter.

So, Rolling Stone magazine declared "Freak Folk" over a couple of months ago. They might have been onto something, because Joanna Newsom is now on some kind of "19th-century-courtesan meets Janis Joplin's Pearl in a Betsy Smith bordello" trip and our boy Devendra Banhart trimmed his notorious facial hair into a Zappa '66 thing, released soulful little ditty "Baby" as a single (Freak Soul?), and just put out a video featuring MGMT and the Wu-Tang's GZA where he and his buddies get rolled up into a cosmic suppository and party deep inside a cosmic rectum.

Devendra in Uranus!: Still from the "Baby" video (mixed media, 2010)

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Wanna see? Of course you do. After the jump.

Markus Klinko & Indrani for Hello Kitty!

​Attention Lizard People!

Your mistress/puppet, the Lady Gaga, has just announced her US tour and she'll be bringing her brainwashing spectacle to the Staples Center on August 11.

As Beatcrave reports:

Lady Gaga has described her Monsters Ball tour, currently wreaking havoc across Europe, as "the first-ever pop-electro opera." According to a press release, Gaga plans to make the upcoming is new, leg of the tour "even more eye-popping" than the first.

Also, we hear she recently released her remake of Thelma and Louise, apparently inspired by Tarantino. MTV maybe "banned it" (whatever that means in the age of Chatroulette), or maybe not, but whatevs. You can check it out, though, after the jump.

​UPDATE! The helpful folks at Dublab will be streaming tonight's hot ticket show, Gonjasufi + Gaslamp Killer @ The Echoplex, live on their website.

Click here tonight between 9pm and 1am for the Warp Records-sponsored event.

We really can't recommend A Sufi and a Killer enough--it's blissful and weird and lo-fi and Gaslamp continues showing why he's still one of the LA talents to watch and keep on watching.

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The sagelike post hip-hopper, Gonjasufi is caught at the nexus of two realities, and tonight at his record release party at the Echoplex, worlds will collide.

While Gonjasufi's debut album, A Sufi and a Killer, lurches and sways with the avant-hip hop production tricks of beat gurus, The Gaslamp Killer, Flying Lotus, and Mainframe, his voice wavers and sounds ancient or from a world we've forgotten. The Mojave desert based singer's voice crackles and fades away like transmissions from a broken speaker of a salvaged radio.

The unmistakable barely-on-the-beat, lagging kick-and-snare antics of Flying Lotus' production materializes on "Ancestors," and Gaslamp Killer's manic beat manipulations are ever-present on A Sufi and a Killer. Tonight, Main Frame and The Gaslamp Killer will throw down some live performances at the Echoplex, while Gonjasufi spins records and opens up another sonic world.

After the jump, a cross-section of Gonjasufi media from Warp Records.

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​Little known fact: In the Red Records--founded in 1991 and responsible for great releases from Vivian Girls, Jay Reatard, Black Lips, Strange Boys and Blank Dogs, etc.--is run by one man out of a garage in little old Eagle Rock.

Owner Larry Hardy occasionally gets help, but the guy has a singular vision and, for the most part, can't see it meshing with multiple personalities. Plus, the location of the label's HQ couldn't be more fitting: In the Red subsists on a steady diet of garage-rock, garage-punk, garage-blues and garage-pop.

Falling somewhere within that dingy, deadpan spectrum is young L.A. six-piece Wounded Lion, who will be releasing an eponymous full-length out on Hardy's label on April 27. This MP3 of "Belt of Orion" comes as an exclusive to West Coast Sound.

Dennis Romero

​Despite the technological and musical innovations forged by the progressive-house generation of DJs that ruled the '90s, clubland's focus has shifted in recent years to dark-wave sounds emanating from Berlin, the neon sound-clash of New York and L.A.'s neon punks, and the pop crossover successes of Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas.

It's not exactly the glory days for a 40-year-old DJ like Sasha.

A lot of things have happened in clubland since the druggy peak time of New York club Twilo in the late 1990s. Chief among them: electronic dance music has gone from a countercultural clique to a full-on mainstream force--E-music's toolbox has been taken over by the modern, major-label studio producer.

But on Saturday the faithful were in full force, and you could find nary a more future-forward sound than what was pulsing from the laptop and decks of the Avalon Hollywood stage, where Sasha went on about 1:20 a.m. and enveloped the packed, 1,400-capacity room in a halcyon tide of turquoise swells.