Andy Liszt takes  a winding, loopy path to answering an admittedly abstruse inquiry into the philosophical intent of his music. That’s fine. His rambling approach fits neatly within confines of the not-so-neat piles of feedback and swirls of delay he and his bandmates conjure up as LSD and the Search for God.

Besides, the San Francisco-based psychedelic shoegaze crew has never felt rushed when it comes to putting out music. Their well-received debut—a 2007 self-titled EP—was followed by nearly a decade of silence. Liszt attributes the extended intermission to the typical distractions of living life, as well as his work in English space rock outfit The Telescopes, whom he and fellow LSD guitarist Chris Fifield joined shortly after releasing their first five-song set.

Nonetheless, the group has an enthusiastic cult following. They’ve earned it through their energetic, loud and highly trippy live performances.

Things have been picking up for LSD and the Search for God lately. The band released its second EP in in January 2016. Titled Heaven is a Place, the follow-up finds Liszt and Co. in top form—pushing washed-out psychedelic swells over the breathy, wistful and barely discernible melodies of Liszt and co-vocalist Sophia Campbell. They are going back into the studio at the beginning of September. According to Liszt, the plan is to put out new music sometime early next year.

“We’re not going to dawdle,” says Liszt, who brings his band to The Ritz this weekend for a show with Cola, kindred shoegaze spirits from San Jose.

Speaking of spirits, Liszt doesn’t shy away from his band’s lysergic and lofty name—and all that it might imply. “It is a spiritual thing for us,” he says of the music he and his bandmates make in LSD and the Search for God. “We believe in what we’re doing, and we believe in the music.”

Liszt also believes in his adopted home of San Francisco, which is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

“I love the Bay Area—the land is beautiful and it’s an amazing part of the world,” he says. “I still romanticize the area, in the same way that I did when I moved here.”

Looking back at the psychonauts of the ’60s who made San Francisco their home—and to the Beats before them—and on to today, with artists like John Dwyer and his long-running Oh Sees project, Liszt says he finds a lot to draw on in the city by the bay. “There is so much of the spirit of the psychedelic movement in San Francisco.”

When Liszt finally gets around to putting his band’s guiding philosophy into words, he channels a little bit of Timothy Leary’s famous speech—delivered at the Human Be-In, held in Golden Gate Park. There, in January 1967, Leary forecasted the Summer of Love and coined one of the most quotable phrases to come out of the psychedelic movement.

“Like every great religion of the past,” Leary proclaimed, “we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present—turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Liszt says he hopes his music can help bring the listener into the ephemerality and immediacy of the now so that they “aren’t thinking about the past or future, and are right there in the moment. Ultimately that’s where life exists—in the now. If there is any way our music can offer that, even for a moment, it’s probably a good thing.”

LSD and the Search for God
Jul 15, 8pm, $10
The Ritz, San Jose

 For those who only know local indie rock outfit Cola by their initial offering of songs—a small collection of ramshackle, Velvet Underground-tinged numbers released online—the band’s debut EP, Great Taste, is likely to sound like an entirely different project.

But then, those who are surprised by Great Taste’s wall of swirling guitars, rumbling drums and long-decaying squalls of psychedelic feedback probably didn’t spend their adolescence trading mixtapes with Cliff Rawson—or follow him to the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz guitar and jazz composition, or on to his days in punk and post hardcore bands in New York City.

In truth, as much as Cola’s frontman and principal songwriter was influenced by the bare-bones and bone-dry arrangements of The Velvets and The Stones, he also spent his formative years mesmerized by the fuzzy, sonic storms of shoegaze giants My Bloody Valentine, the angular assault of post punk pioneers Fugazi and the spiraling guitar lines of so many emo and math rock noodlers. So, while Cola’s last set served as an homage to his heroes from New York’s bad old days, Rawson says Great Taste is much more within his wheelhouse.

“It certainly draws on the styles I’ve worked with in the past in other bands,” he says.

Great Taste’s six tracks—two of which are ambient compositions by noise guitar maestro Matt Davis—fly by. The EP’s brief running time is a bit disorienting, considering how dense each song feels. On that score credit goes to the pop songwriting prowess of Rawson and his co-conspirator, lead guitarist Aaron Anaya, who contributes plenty of tasty licks to the EP.

Then again, Rawson says the album wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for the space where he tracked it: a towering hall of wood and concrete in downtown San Jose, which he prefers not to name.

While he and Anaya bonded over their mutual appreciation of resonant reverb, he says the acoustic properties of the room where Great Taste was recorded sealed the deal.

When the drums and full force of the band first hit, about 30 seconds into EP-opener “Seven Flowers,” the room is palpable—and understanding the scale of the space where Rawson and Co. recorded only enhances the listening experience. It’s like hearing “When The Levee Breaks” for the first time after learning that Bonzo tracked his iconic drum part at the bottom of a massive stairwell of the centuries-old Headley Grange in Hampshire, England.

“When you hit a snare drum, it’s just fucking Valhalla!” Rawson exclaims. “That sound is kind of what dictated the direction into the more shoegazey style.” That, and having the freedom to experiment with sounds, which came with access to the space and his own recording gear. “It was just a huge luxury,” he says.

Rawson’s years of training and hardscrabble experience also paid dividends on the EP. He played drums on Great Taste—the first time he’s been behind a kit on tape in years. “Song ideas would come to fruition without some of the hiccups that would come up when I was working with electronic drums or no drums or other drummers,” he says.

He also reckons he has hit a sweet spot between the analytical training he received at Berklee and the practical, journeyman’s know-how he picked up playing in rock bands.

“You get an education, but that can paralyze you,” he says, recalling how mathematical music felt when he first left school. “It takes a long time playing in bands and not making any money—you have to pay your dues.”

Cola celebrates Great Taste this Friday at a joint record release show with fellow San Jose indie rockers Mother’s Worry at The Ritz. The EP will be available on a collectible cassette, a CD with handmade art and as a digital download.

Cola
Mar 24, 8pm, $10
The Ritz, San Jose

San Jose-based emcee Cola—not to be confused with the San Jose-based indie rock outfit, Cola— is preparing to release a new mixtape, titled House Shoes. No firm date has been given for the release, but his publicist says it should drop in mid-December. That’s the album’s art work up above.

Check out the video for “Californication” below. The Red Hot Chili Peppers-sampling track finds Cola, neé Anthony Mastrocola, wrestling with the darker angels of his nature and past decisions and finding a silver lining in the gloomy clouds that hang overhead.

It’s doubtful that any of us ’80s babies realized it at the time, but we soaked up a lot more than words like “shoryuken” and meme-worthy phrases, like “all your base are belong to us,” while we sat cross-legged on the floor, frantically tapping our plastic Nintendo and Sega controllers.

It would seem that our tiny, developing brains—hyped up on sugar-laden cereal—were absorbing the soundtracks to our favorite video game titles. And now, fully grown men and women all over the country are picking up guitars, keyboards, drum kits, and, in some cases, Game Boys, to pay homage to these iconic melodies from the Reagan and Bush I years.

The Rockage 5.0 festival, slated to take place March 11-13 at venues all over San Jose, corrals a cohort of musical groups that specialize in either reproducing the music of Zelda, Mega Man, Super Mario Bros. and the like—or else take cues from those crunchy, 8-bit synth sounds.

There are 17 bands performing over the course of three days at The Ritz, Café Stritch, SoFA Market, AFK Gamer Lounge and the lobby of Metro’s downtown headquarters. That’s a lot of music in a very short period of time—it’s enough to vex even the most seasoned music festivalgoer. But instead of throwing your Wiimote at the nearest screen, or punching your neighbor in the arm, like you used to do when your younger brother beat you at NBA Jam, take a deep breath. We’re here to help you prioritize.

Here are six bands you’ll definitely want to check out at this year’s Rockage.

Bit Brigade
This quartet is so serious about replicating the experience of their favorite video game titles that they’re actually a quintet. Which is to say, that in addition to drums, bass and two guitarists, Bit Brigade also have a full time game-player in their lineup. Noah McCarthy blasts through levels of Metroid and Mega-Man while the band “meticulously replicates every musical cue, cutscene and boss battle in perfect synchronization.”

COLA
In addition to all the chiptune groups at this year’s Rockage, there are also a few straightforward rock & roll groups. And few San Jose bands do straightforward rock & roll like Cola.

Fartbarf
With a name like Fartbarf, it’s pretty apparent what you’re gonna get. Except not. Rather than being a group of greasy-faced adolescents who ran out of good ideas for what to name their band, Fartbarf is a trio of Cro-Magnon mask-wearing analog modular synth enthusiasts who sound a lot like a drunker (a much, much drunker) Tobacco—with live drumming and an obsession for chiptune flourishes.

Vector Hold
The genre known as chiptune, is also commonly called 8-bit music and sometimes “Nintendocore.” But for Vector Hold—a.k.a. Pete Rice, bassist for local stoner metal trio, Forgotten Gods, it’s all about the 16-bit sounds of the Sega Genesis … and the buzzy, lo-fi synths of John Carpenter films.

Hawk Jones
Given their traditional rock instrumentation—guitar, bass and drums—and their tendency to lapse into spacy, feedback-and-delay squalls, it would at first seem that Hawk Jones, like Cola, are outliers in a festival stacked to the brim with bands who take so much inspiration from the world of early console game soundtracks. But when you consider the Tera Melos-esque angularity of their rhythms and guitar lines, it makes sense. The limitations of 8- and 16-bit chips is precisely what gave the music that crystalline feel. These local boys simply replicate that ping-ponging sharpness with strings, membranophones and the chips inside their effects pedals.

Nick Reinhart
This guitarist and bandleader also produces music that recalls the wild and spastic sounds of Tera Melos—probably because he co-founded the group. The Sacramento band’s frontman gets far noisier and stranger than he ever did with Tera Melos. His cracked-out attempts at free jazz run parallel to the tunes of fellow Sacto psychos, Hella. And, like Hawk Jones, the music he creates may not have a direct connection to video games, though he certainly makes a valiant effort at sonically representing the explosive, synaptic bursts so many of us experienced as children—zonked on Lucky Charms, staring at the cathode ray tube and rubbing our thumbs raw on those tiny, red A and B buttons and black D-pad.

Rockage 5.0 plays on Mar 11-13, Various Times, $30 at Multiple Venues, San Jose.

This Friday marks the third installment of Scene!—the monthly local-music showcase hosted by Cliff Rawson of San Jose-based indie garage rockers, Cola. In the run-up to the show, Rawson’s band, and Jean Jackets, who are sharing the Oct. 23 bill, have each released music videos. Also playing at Scene! #3, Mother’s Worry and headlining act, Dinners. All attendees are invited to wear a Halloween costume, just like the folks in the Cola clip for their song, “Perry Mason. Check out both clips below:

“Perry Mason,” by Cola:

“Won’t Take You Back,” by Jean Jackets:

Like so many creatives living in downtown San Jose, Ismael “Millhows” Villanueva had his epiphany at Cinebar. However, unlike like so many of his less-fortunate peers, the local musician was able to hold on to his inspiration—successfully preventing it from slipping away on a river of ice-cold Olympia and Jamo shots.

Millhows, as he prefers to be called, was DJ-ing at the Cine for a stretch—playing mostly soul, classic rock and garage records—when it hit him.

“I got inspired,” he recalls. As one-half of the garage-rock duo Dirty Pillows, who are currently on an indefinite hiatus, Millhows was no stranger to lo-fi licks. But in that moment, spinning records in the back of the bar, he began to make connections between the music of The Stooges and The Rolling Stones and those many soul, doo-wop and early rock & roll groups who had inspired the likes of Iggy and Jagger.

“It’s not a far walk to get from Otis Redding to Free or the MC5,” Millhows muses. “There’s a very thin line.”

Millhows is clearly having a blast dancing all over that line on his new project, The Jean Jackets, whose debut album, Money, The Hunt & Applause, is currently available for streaming on SoundCloud. His band plays Caravan Lounge on Saturday, along with Cola and Mother’s Worry.

“It’s basically a garage band album,” Millhows says of Money. Indeed, the record is no frills and lo-fi, and does sound as if it could have been recorded in a garage. However, upon repeated listens, it’s hard not to imagine the The Jean Jackets laying down the tracks to Money next to a baby blue ’56 Chevy Bel Air.

“Valentines Day” features wordless, crooning backup vocals, reminiscent of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison while “Morning Light” kicks off with a descending, chromatic surf guitar trill—sounding a bit like a sloppy cover of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou.” And plenty of tracks on the album feature the stutter-step pianos, deliberate arpeggios and snapping guitar punctuation immortalized by ’50s hits, such as “Stand By Me,” “Blue Moon” and “Earth Angel.”

Millhows says any similarity between The Jean Jackets’ music and these quintessential songs from early days of rock & roll are due to his admiration for classic pop tunes.

“I feel like my generation, and the generation under me is not embracing the ‘pop song’ as much,” he explains. “A lot of the music I love are great pop songs. More than anything, I wanted to exercise my pop songwriting chops.”

The Jean Jackets play The Caravan Lounge on Friday, Sept. 5, at 9pm.

Walking around the recent SubZERO Festival at the beginning of last month, Cliff Rawson was suddenly struck with a sensation he doesn’t often feel in San Jose. “I felt like I was walking around San Francisco or Brooklyn,” he says. “There were a lot of people there. It felt really good.”

The reason it felt so good is that Rawson wants San Jose to have a scene on par with its neighbors to the north and other comparably sized metropolitan areas around the country. He really wants it.

Unfortunately, Rawson says, many of the best musicians and artists in the South Bay are “looking to leave at their first opportunity” for places like L.A., San Francisco or New York.

“There’s no reason that should have to happen,” he says. “San Jose is a big town. We have great bands here. And now, with San Francisco being so expensive and Oakland getting that way too … there’s starting to be a good core scene in San Jose—people who are not leaving.”

He names local indie rock acts, such as Rex Goliath, Dinners, Joan & The Rivers and more, as examples of highly talented, home-brewed acts, who should be drawing larger crowds in San Jose, but aren’t.

“People are discouraged,” Rawson says. “Even the really good bands. They tell me, ‘I can get my people to come to Stritch for free, but I can’t get them to pay $10 at The Ritz.’”

Rawson, who has lived in some of New York’s toughest neighborhoods in order to avoid high rent while still remaining close to high culture, isn’t afraid of a challenge. This character trait, combined with his love of rock & roll music and experience with promoting makes him an ideal foot soldier in the fight to make San Jose relevant.

And he is responding to that very call. Working with his promotional partner, Laura Patterson, Rawson aims to unify what he sees as a fragmented community with carefully curated shows designed to bring together a wide swath of San Jose’s music and art-loving denizens. If he is successful, he says the result will be a stronger San Jose scene that provides proper support to local musicians and artists.

He has already organized one well-attended local showcase at SLG Art Boutiki—which he simply called “Show!”—and is hosting a second this Friday at The Ritz, which he will call “Scene!”

His plan is that both “Show!” and “Scene!” will be ongoing events held on a regular basis at both venues. Rawson says that “Show!” drew about 150 people to the Art Boutiki and he is hopeful that “Scene!” will bring even more, with it’s lineup of local acts, including his band, Cola, Joan & The Rivers, Them Slack Jawed Sons of Bitches, as well as local rapper, Anthony Mastrocola (who also goes by the name Cola on stage).

After many years on the East Coast, Rawson moved to San Jose in 2012 to take his current position with Ballet San Jose, where he now serves as director of educational outreach and is a full-time pianist.

Though he has a formal musical education, outside of work Rawson uses his talents to play alternative, indie and punk music. His recently formed band, Cola, sounds very much like New York in the ’70s. Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground are the most readily discernable influences, but he says The Stones, The Clash and Tom Petty are also key inspirations.

Rawson recalls first moving to San Jose and hanging out at Willow Den. It was there that he realized how important these groups were to him, as they were the majority of what he chose to play on the dive bar’s jukebox.

“I’m kind of going for something that’s between The Velvets and Stones,” Rawson says—“something that’s right on the edge of punk rock.”

He wrote many of the Cola songs on his own before putting together the band, which includes Evan Bautista, a drummer who has worked with Dr. Dre; Matt Davis on bass; and Peter Colclasure on keyboards.

Between his day job, his band, and his passion project—promoting local shows—Rawson keeps a schedule that doesn’t leave him much down time, but he’s fine with that.

“I do this thing because I love it,” he says. “I’m very positive and excited about doing all this kind of work in San Jose. Any city of our size should have a bigger scene.”

Scene! will be held July 10 at  8pm at The Ritz.

“It’s 2015. We gotta stay away from the negative shit,” the San Jose-based emcee and producer Cola says on a recent evening, as he plays with the bottle cap of the soda he is drinking.

The emerging rapper is referring to the recent Chris Brown shooting at local South Side club Fiesta, but he could just as easily be discussing his own philosophy as an artist. He says he’s dealt with too much negativity in his past; now his focus is solely on empowerment, positivity and self-love.

Just listen to “Reflections,” a highlight from the mixtape he dropped in October, No Such Thing. The release has been his most successful to date, earning nods from local heavyweights and placements on both Snoop Dogg’s GGN web show and the Dogfather’s chart Underground Heat. He plans to release two new music videos in the coming months.

A San Jose native, Cola grew up as Anthony Mastrocola on the city’s west side and attended Archbishop Mitty High School on a baseball scholarship. While he moved around a lot growing up—he jokes he’s become real efficient with packing—he never changed schools. He says he would often challenge his teachers and goof off in class, but managed to dodge any serious consequences thanks to his general likeability.

His stage name doesn’t come from an unhealthy love for carbonated drinks. It’s actually a contraction of his last name and was first used by his high school football coach. Since then, he says, “I’m literally Cola to everybody.”

50 Cent, Eminem and the Neptunes were the first names in his CD collection, but when his cousin introduced him to rock in middle school, his focus shifted to Nirvana, Sublime and Slayer. Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix remain lasting influences. Nirvana’s iconic smiley face is tattooed on his forearm.

His rock influence is still present in his work. The music video for “Mosh Pit” follows Cola as he is kidnapped by bikini-clad, masked women. The raucous song carries forth atop a high-energy beat, which samples Green Day’s infamous guitar riff from “Brain Stew.” Such nostalgic flips are a through-line on No Such Thing, which also features samples from Dirty Vegas’ hit “Days Go By,” Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” and Sister Nancy’s dancehall classic “Bam Bam.”

After his deep excursion into rock, Cola veered back to hip-hop his freshman year in high school when he was introduced to Hieroglyphics and Living Legends. As much as he enjoyed 50 Cent, he gravitated to these underground legends because he found them more relatable. The Bay Area’s hyphy movement, best known for its late poster boy Mac Dre, also had a large impact.

While his musical focus was initially on rapping and recording as much as possible, Cola admits that his approach is now more refined. “I’m trying to perfect my songwriting,” he says, and nowhere is he more proud of his renewed process than on album cut “Tomorrow,” featuring Rey Resurreccion.

In his first verse, he weighs the pros and cons of settling down, compared with following a hard life to an untimely demise like a number of notable rock stars. After Rey’s verse, Cola’s visions of future success collide with his current stagnation and frustration, leading him to struggle with the notion that “supposedly I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

“It was my breakthrough as far as writing a conceptual song with a bridge and variations. My first verse was the realest, most natural one I’ve ever written,” he adds.

Local heavy hitter Dirtbag Dan recently stepped in as a mentor after hearing No Such Thing while on tour. Such support can still feel a bit surreal for the 24-year-old. He now has his own studio but had to move clothes out of his friend’s closet to record his verses in the not-so-distant past.

“It’s amazing because a year ago, we were standing around in parking lots outside of [Silicon Valley] De-Bug because we had nowhere to go. We couldn’t go to anyone’s house because everyone’s situation was fucked up. There was a lot of waiting around,” he says.

The positivity in his recent output stems from contemporaries like Bay Area hip-hop collective HBK Gang (home to Iamsu! and Sage the Gemini). He’s also indebted to Lil B the Based God, whose positive “based” philosophy has found mainstream recognition, most notably in Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-nominated hit “i.”

Cola’s rampant optimism is a recent transition for someone who admits he once suffered from depression and self-consciousness. At its worst, those feelings led to thoughts and attempts of suicide.

Back then, he recalls earnestly wishing he could’ve been born as one of his better-liked classmates. These days, however, he is clearly much more comfortable in his own skin. It’s a feeling he wants to help others discover.

“As soon as you can stop worrying about failure, and as soon as you can erase the fears of not being good enough,” he says, “then you’re free to do anything.