A peek behind the curtain at So Many Wizards
Kevin Bronson on
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It’s Monday afternoon, and 26-year-old Nima Kazerouni is in a workshop in Gardena gutting vintage television sets and rigging them with LCD screens. In a manner of speaking, it’s a “rehearsal” for So Many Wizards’ upcoming shows.
“It’s my new idea for a live show,” says Kazerouni, explaining that his “bassist” and “guitarist” for upcoming stints will be videos of musicians playing those parts projected onto TV screens stacked onstage. (He’ll have a live drummer.) “I think the aesthetic of the ’60s and ’70s and the television is the perfect centerpiece to my music. … It’s 2009, and we have technology. I’m just presenting it in a really nostalgic way.”
- ||| Download: “I’m Just Like You.”
Indeed, the songs on last year’s “Tree EP” have more in common with the folk and pop music of the Cold and Vietnam War eras. You don’t even need to hear the George Peppard speech at the start of “Fly a Kite” to catch the wayback feel that few current artists (although Richard Swift comes to mind) achieve.
Much of the music — as well as Ryan Maples’ new video for “Fly a Kite” (above) — was made on a rooftop in Redondo Beach. No kidding. “I created a little world for 
myself up there … someplace where I could feel the make-believe in the songs,” Kazerouni says. “It’s a full-functioning room.”
Kazerouni’s father was a musician in London in the ’60s and ’70s and taught his son to play guitar and piano. Nima was exposed to Italian pop very early, and came to love the likes of French pop and Syd Barrett. He also studied cinema at UCLA … and now his stage show becomes a multimedia spectacle.
Says Kazerouni, “It’s going to change every show, but it’ll be different. … It’s kinda, ‘Here you go, you haven’t seen this before.'”
||| Live: So Many Wizards play Thursday at the Silverlake Lounge.
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[…] The last time I heard from So Many Wizards, mastermind Nima Kazerouni was rigging vintage television sets with LCD screens in preparation for live shows. Those shows, in 2009, as well as his “Tree” EP, established Kazerouni as a pop eclecticist of distinction, the kind of guy who maybe thought the Magnetic Fields play it too safe. So Many Wizards’ new EP, “Love Songs for When You Leave Me,” produced by the Morning Benders’ Christopher Chu, offers seven lovingly warped dashes of vintage-sounding pop that, you imagine, he might have made after his sweetheart dumped him in Aisle 3 of a secondhand musical instrument store. So Many Wizards (including bassist Warren Woodward and drummer Erik Felix) recently announced that Sacramento-based Waaga Records would be releasing the new EP early this summer. The EP is available in a hand-made book too, and … well, you just have to see that to believe it. […]