Get a Colorectal Exam! (in National News) Mourning Ken Haramoto's Death in Japantown (in Bay Area News) Indonesia in Crisis (in Business) Atlas(t) (in A&E) Emil Amok: Notes from the Suburbs (in Opinion)

Ee: Another Asian Gangster Band?

Tobin Mori talks about Showbiz and Indie Rock

DISCLAIMER: In an odd attempt to humor the musicians of Ee, AsianWeek has played out the bandmembers’ request to give them new bodies. Bassist Che Chou asked for the body of Gedde Watanabe (who played “Long Duck Dong” in the movie 16 Candles), drummer Peter Nguyen has become a giant panda (sorry, but we couldn’t find a photo of a pregnant one), and guitarist and vocalist Tobin Mori has joined forces with Chow Yun Fat (as the guy in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

Breaking up is hard to do. Tobin Mori, guitarist/vocalist of the San Francisco indie-rock band Ee, knows. He broke up with two girls — a girlfriend and his Bammie-nominated indie-rock band Korea Girl — around the same time about two years ago, which led to his shaving his head and legs and driving out into the desert, near Las Vegas, to purify himself. But it didn’t work out quite the way he planned. “I got there and I was there for 15 minutes and thought, ‘God, this is so lame’ and I just drove back,” Mori says. “I was planning on staying out in the desert: I brought a tent and everything; it was part of my quest for nothingness.”

One of the few payoffs to this mild-mannered nervous breakdown is an upcoming Ee CD called Ramadan, which takes its name from a Mori song, and his time of deprivation and purification. Another is the buzz cut. “Shaving my head was a good experience, because people act all afraid of you,” laughs the 31-year-old Japanese American musician, who grew up in Saratoga and now lives in San Francisco, with a full head of hair. “You go into stores and people just don’t help you as nicely as they normally would. You got to give it a nice clean buzz like you just got out of boot camp, because then people think you’re kind of weird, like a mass murderer or maybe a member of some crazy Buddhist cult.”

That’s the closest thing to nutty behavior for this level-headed computer programmer-by-day and post-punk-rock’n’roller-by-night. As I speak to him on the phone, he’s playing hooky from a 14-hour-a-day schedule of programming at Art Machine, a business-to-business Web application service provider. Nearby, Ee’s guest keyboardist and label owner Sooyoung Park, otherwise known in indie-rock circles for his band Seam, is on a parallel track, programming into the night and weekend.

Not only do Mori and Park spend their days in tandem, they’ve been making music regularly together, with former Korea Girl bassist Che Chow and drummer Peter Nguyen. After starting Ee in 1999 and going through one incarnation that included a female cellist, Mori has settled with a lineup he can live with and is playing live more often. “Maybe I’m just awakening from my hibernation because I feel much more motivated,” Mori says. “It’s kind of like playing tennis when you have someone good to play against. It’s a lot easier, and they’re interested in having fun too.”

The product of all those practice sessions is a lo-fi, Slowdive-inspired folk rock, ethereal yet off-kilter and filigreed with delicate, trance-like guitar and slow, meditative rhythms — with Nguyen bringing in an element of rockin’ energy because “he’s a spastic, 24-year-old kickboxing kid, which is great,” says Mori. The guitarist took it as a compliment when a friend of a friend said he wanted to kill himself after seeing them play at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco several weeks ago. “I think he meant that there’s certain parts of our set that can sound really sad, or the music sounds depressing with a Mazzy Star feel,” Mori says and then thinks again. “I hope that’s what he meant. I hope he didn’t think it was terrible!”

Next up is a March 11 show with Orange Space and Deerhoof at the Asian American Film Festival program, “Directions in Sound: Notes From the Asian American Underground” at Café Du Nord, and a March 14 performance with Track Star and Aden at the Bottom of the Hill, as well as a film festival screening of Subrosa, a short by Helen Lee on a Korean adoptees search for her mother, which Mori, Park and Chow scored. “It’s funny because we basically all sat in a room and watched the videotape a hundred times over and just tried to make sounds,” says Mori in his self-effacing manner. “A lot of musicians just noodle with their instruments with the television off — and it’s basically like that — except you have other guys around and you just hope something springs out and matches what you’re watching.”

Add in the band’s similar look — shaved heads for Park, Chow and Nguyen and dark-framed glasses all around — and you have the makings of another Devo, or Man or Astroman, with a few orange jumpsuits or Caltrans outfits, says Mori with a chuckle. Is he afraid of being pegged a techy Asian nerd band — considering even Mori pegs former gamersinc.com editor Chow and one-time Sega publicist Nguyen as “gamers,” who are as likely to wait in line at the Metreon for Sony Playstation 2 as they are to queue up for a concert? Afraid of fulfilling that old stereotype, “they all look alike?”

“Yeah, people mock us about it,” says Mori. “It’s funny because when I’m on stage, I don’t really think about it, but I know if I saw a band that had three Asian guys in it, I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s an Asian gangster band.’ But then it’s funny, because you get off stage and you hear people saying, ‘You guys all look like brothers.’ But I guess I’m just what I am, and it’s ownership by default. It’s as if someone left their cat with you, and you never really adopted it, but it becomes yours.”