Now You Know Psychic Dancehall

Dorian Wartime and Sylvia Innocent met in 2006 and “immediately fell insanely in love,” says Wartime. The couple settled into an apartment in San Diego a few years later and began making dark love-fi songs that are being released on Art Fag Recordings (the San Diego vinyl label that launched outfits such as Dum Dum Girls, Crocodiles, and Best Coast) under the name Psychic Dancehall. Behind the obvious pseudonyms are faces you will recognize from another well-received Art Fag act and the reformed line-up of a classic late-’70s British punk group (that’s all I can tell you for now).

Their debut two-song seven-inch was released on May 21 and was limited to 500 copies not up for reissue. They’ll be releasing their Dreamers LP on September 27 followed by a tour of Wetherspoon pubs in northern England, recording sessions in Costa Rica and Hawaii, and “perhaps a live sex show at the Redwing Bar,” Wartime writes via email.

“It never entered our collective mind until Art Fag asked to release an album,” Wartime writes. “With that being said, we are both very proud of what came to be. We moved in together above an art-collective theater where a lot of avant-garde plays and spoken-word pieces were happening. It was the rainiest month ever for San Diego, so we spent all of our time indoors. A lot of the time was spent with the actresses and singers from the theater. Some of them even helped on the recordings. The biggest influence was definitely the theater we lived above because it gave us nightly inspiration.”

“Obviously we wouldn’t have put so much thought into the fabrication of it all had we not known it would be pressed,” writes Innocent. “It’s our homage to the time and place in which we recorded it. Bars like the Redwing and Eagle spring to mind. As for your manifesto comment, I feel that as an artist, whether you acknowledge it or not, fabricating the aesthetics that flow through your mind and proving to yourself that you are as crazy as your dreams are is the one true sign that you are living and not simply letting life live for you.”

Got a wicked pissah new band? Let us know by sending the interweb thing to barnaby_monk@sandiegoreader.com. We’ll check you/them out for our next installment of “Now You Know.”