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These days us Austinites know all too well that an Adrian Quesada production credit is ostensibly a golden ticket to brilliance. And although Adrian’s predominant territory is Tex-Mex soul, the style that courses through his formulas wouldn’t be what they are without California’s historic Latin psych scene. That’s a no-brainer for native Los Angeleno Rudy De Anda, who formalized his ’60s psych-rock tastes in the scenic stretches of Long Beach, despite major sources of inspiration from London’s The Kinks and NYC’s The Velvet Underground.
However, in drawing from the psych products of those grayer, more industrialized musical hubs, De Anda’s turn-of-the-decade relocation to Chicago makes a lot more sense. And while it didn’t take long for Rudy to find his footing in the Windy City, that cross-country migration put a lot of distance, physically and emotionally, between himself and his lifelong home state friends. But it was that vulnerability allowed De Anda to brush off the surface-level sun and sand aesthetic typically ascribed to his Cali output in favor of confessional cultivation.
For his latest LP, De Anda recorded outside of California for the first time – but not in Chicago. Instead Rudy recruited his Cali bandmates to join him in Adrian Quesada’s Electric Deluxe recording studio right here in Austin. The new setting, plus a decision to track straight to tape, finds De Anda and the band approaching the process more seriously than ever before, and soon we’ll hear the fruits of that labor flourish on Closet Botanist.
Closet Botanist drops April 28th, introducing us to ten lush sonic shrubs, all audibly (though unobtrusively) influenced by Quesada’s production input. These bilingual herbs will feel right at home in your record collection, and give you a bit of insight into Rudy De Anda’s journey over the past two years, as heard on Closet Botanist‘s next installment, “Tu Mirada”. Inspired by the Brazilian baroque pop and psych folk of Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’ 1972 landmark Clube da Esquina, “Tu Mirada” (the first track Rudy penned post-Chicago) is a great look for De Anda’s new grooves, bookended by a sunrise-slow introduction and an instrumental jam section that climaxes into mind-melting reversed soundscape.
