Viva K
"Viva K"

Ween Callas: Vocals
Ravi Dhar: Guitar
Skoda: Bass, guitar
Evan Haros: Sitar, electronics

Viva K’s debut album resulted from a winter-long marathon recording session at “the Ranch” – the band’s old Craftsman house, tucked away in the secluded hills of Silverlake, in East Los Angeles -- living off of wine funded with unemployment checks. As they recorded all of their jams, material started piling up. Studio wiz Skoda began mixing and editing their prolific output and the result was an album’s worth of songs that combined the drone element of raga with the simple aggressiveness of punk. Eli Janney of legendary alternative rock band Girls Against Boys was enlisted to mix Viva K’s album. Boasting an impressive array of recording, mixing and producing credits (Jet, Secret Machines, Ryan Adams, Jesse Malin, Enon, among others), Eli further sharpened Viva K’s album with a rousing, energetic, punk-tinged sensibility, reminiscent of his work with Girls Against Boys. The final results are twelve songs that urge the listener to live consciously in the present (“No Better Time”, “Just One More”), remind us we’re constantly creating our own reality (“Porch Raga”, “Light Light Light”) and extol the virtues of positive thought (“Love Everybody”, “We Are Safe”) while maintaining an anti-war, anti-mind control stance (“Does it Matter”, “Who You Are”).

The birth of Viva K came in the wake of the death of a Beatle. On the first anniversary of the death of George Harrison, the four musicians who would eventually form Viva K were hanging out on a typical drinking night at the hipster nightclub Spaceland, venerable hub of the Eastside Los Angeles alternative music and social scene. Introduced through mutual friends, the four discovered their mutual passion and admiration for George Harrison, his music and his role as the first musician to successfully fuse Eastern influences into modern rock.

Not long after the quartet’s first social encounter, Evan wandered into a Hollywood pawnshop and purchased a used sitar rumored to have once belonged to the late Brian Jones. The four eventual members of Viva K soon discovered that each owned Indian instruments, and concluded that they were fated to play music together. “We started having these spaced-out raga jams every Friday night up at the Ranch,” explains Evan. Each of the four members brought his or her own disparate musical background to bear in their jam sessions. “At first the music was really transcendental. Ween would chant and play tabla, I’d play sitar or fool around with a sampler, while Skoda would hold down the low end with bass. Then, one night, Ravi busted out his Les Paul, and everything changed. The guitar added this punk element that started turning the music into songs.”
Although the four members of Viva K hail from diverse musical backgrounds, they all share roots in the Old World: all are Second Generation American kids, whose families came, variously, from India, Greece, Lebanon and the Ukraine. And, all four members share a passion for peace and social justice. Reflecting this, the band’s music contains an anthemic, energetic message of light in an attempt to counterbalance the tense political state of the world. It is out of this philosophy that the band was formed. “The name Viva K is a reference to Vivekananda, the first philosopher from India to bring Eastern thought to the West,” explains Ween. “Like George Harrison, he was a pioneer in fusing elements of East and West.”

The band enjoyed early live success, and have developed a passionate following in Los Angeles, with critics praising the band as “one of the scene’s most exciting and unusual new bands” and “a fantastical, bohemian outfit of digital dreams” (Los Angeles Weekly). Live, the band have drawn comparisons to Siouxie and the Banshees, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, PJ Harvey and Primal Scream, and singer Ween is often cited as the female Perry Farrell. With their unusual set-up of sitar, guitar, bass, synth and laptop, Viva K have been known to incite altered states in their audiences, leading some critics to wax that “Viva K’s enchanting and addicting vibe is the most legal, mind-expanding drug you’ll ever experience” (Los Angeles Weekly). And, even before Viva K unveiled their live show, they had already garnered early radio support from influential Los Angeles college radio stations KCRW and KXLU, as well as from cool Los Angeles commercial station Indie 103.1.

In late 2004, the band signed to Stinky Records. Since then, Viva K have performed at Los Angeles’ Sunset Junction Festival, the CMJ Music Festival and the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, and they’ve played successful residencies, to packed houses, at Los Angeles hipster clubs Spaceland and The Echo.

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