Killer Kaya

From the primal opening tom-tom beat and interstellar freakouts of Killer Kaya’s ecstatic, mind-bending psychedelic opus, Tunnel at the End of the Light, the band strikes sparks. The album is a heady, eclectic affair unlike anything else in the modern psych-rock canon. Austin, TX based Killer Kaya synthesizes a diverse sonic palette that draws as much from latin jazz, dub, tropicalia, prog & stoner rock as it does the late-’60s sounds of Big Brother, Santana and Jefferson Airplane. Killer Kaya—who have already shared bills with Shuggie Otis, The Kills, Cat Power, Teenage Fanclub, Levitation Room, Sugar Candy Mountain, Spindrift & The Strawberry Alarm Clock—further carve out their niche when the vocals enter, unveiling the hypnotically droning, operatic and instantly identifiable howl of classically trained lead singer Apoorva Chiplunkar, whose vocal style Shindig! magazine recently compared to Kate Bush & Klaus Nomi. Her voice is an ethereal, haunting force of nature, primed to open up the sky above some ancient Andean pyramid like a shaman calling down the ghosts of ancestors thousands of generations removed, not to mention their space-suit-donning future descendants. Killer Kaya's members include: Vocalist Apoorva Chiplunkar, founding guitarist / keyboardist Zach Rengert, drummer Ethan Yeager, guitarist George Fox and bassist Pete Legasey, the latter formerly of Beatnik Bandits.