Nora Keyes is a woman of many bands and, if you’re even slightly acquainted with Los Angeles’ DIY scene, you probably have seen her on stage. Maybe it was with The Centimeters, who were active between the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and will reconvene on November 29 for Spaceland’s 30 year reunion bash at the Regent. Or, maybe you’ve seen her with ‘00s glam outfit Fancy Space People, who also recently reunited for select shows. More recently, there is Tinglez, Keyes’ Italo disco side project with and Bebe McPherson and Eric Nordhauser, and her primary musical focus, Elf Freedom, the improvisational psychedelic band whose 2024 album, Solstice earned raves from Bandcamp and a number of genre-specific publications and was recently released on vinyl via Greek record label Twisted Flowers.
Recorded on the summer solstice of 2023, the album began as a jam session that evolved later with overdubs and became a collection of songs that you likely won’t hear live. “If someone asked us to play that album, we would probably do a variation of the chord progressions, but it would be a whole other improvised thing,” says Keyes.
Keyes is also a visual artist— she was recently part of the Beautiful Mutants show at MutMuz Gallery— and the two disciplines have intertwined throughout her career. You can see her art on the cover of Solstice, as well as Visions of Utopia, the Elf Freedom album released earlier this year. She studied at ArtCenter. “At the time, they would give you so much homework that seemed humanly impossible to accomplish,” she says. “Having that kind of rigorous training did make me feel like, if something is really difficult, you could probably do it.”
Both Keyes’ visual art and music practices have their roots in Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she once worked as a security guard. “I would have to stand in galleries for many hours, which I think helped me get a really deep read on paintings,” she says. Around the same time, Keyes would go to Fuzzyland, a club night in the 1990s that was influential on the local indie rock scene. While at work, she would write songs.
“They were really stupid. I don’t even want to tell you how stupid they were,” she says of the songs. Regardless, a friend suggested that she join a local band called The Parkas, which eventually happened and led to The Centimeters, a side-project that became the primary focus for Keyes and Greg Gomberg after tapes of a four-track recording gained popularity in the Silver Lake scene. “This was before social media, when you give someone your tape and it’s special and rare,” says Keyes. “People ended up knowing that tape and offered to help us start the band.”
Recently, she delved back into the band’s catalog after finding the records on eBay for $5 a pop. “Greg was really good at writing,” she says, drawing a connection to another songwriter she admires. “I’m a huge Syd Barrett fan, I feel like [Gomberg] is one of the few people who felt like touched a place lyrically that was simultaneously absurd and profound.”
In late 1990s Los Angeles, The Centimeters were impeccably cool, with a dadaist streak that made them difficult to categorize. They were, at times pretty dark (check out the song “I Want a Dead One”), but not actually a goth band. There was a punk vibe to the band, even if Keyes was taking voice lessons and growing more interested in classical techniques, as well as a theatrical quality to the performance. I can still recall seeing The Centimeters play at the end of the ‘90s and thinking, “This is really weird. I’m into it.”
Post-Centimeters, Keyes released a solo album, Songs to Cry By for the Golden Age of Nothing, and toured in Australia and Europe. Back in the U.S., she collaborated with Don Bolles, best known as the drummer for The Germs, on a new band, Fancy Space People, which lasted roughly between the mid ‘00s and mid ‘10s. Although they’re very different projects, Fancy Space People is connected to the story of Elf Freedom. “With Fancy, the word Elf comes from a couple of things,” Keyes explains. “Don and I both have kind of high voices and we would listen back to our jams or songwriting sessions… it sounded like Elves. And everyone in the band at that time were small, elfish looking people too. So we used to call them Fancy Space Elves.”
As Fancy Space People neared its end, Keyes began jamming with Bee Appleseed. “I felt like the music that was coming out with just the two of us sounded like these ballads to free the elves,” she says.
With Elf Freedom, though, Keyes was inspired by her soundbaths and studies on the meditation and a connection to nature, which led to a different sound and process for the band. “I also wanted the music of Elf Freedom to have this quality and that, I felt, was a quality of being one with nature,” she says, in addition to a sentiment that, “inside every self is an elf that needs to be set free to their natural habitat.”
At the start of Elf Freedom, Keyes was in a place in her life where she was very interested in improvisation. “For years as a songwriter, I thought that kind of songwriting was a fluke, when something came out all at once,” she says. “But, then, in my journey from improvisation and doing sound healing work, I started to feel like, no, that’s a muscle that I can develop. Instead of working to make my songs sound really tight in a band, I can put a band together that’s really tight psychically.”
With Elf Freedom, improvisation is also a part of the live performance. “I have tried writing sets where I’m like, this is the ambient intro, this is Arabian disco part,” says Keyes. “Sometimes, we follow that, but a lot of times, we just go with whatever.” There’s some prior discussion when they perform live scores, which they’ve done at Philosophical Research Society for screenings of films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Metropolis. “There is some talk about how to leave breath,” she says. “In those pieces, we have to pull out and add dynamics. There is some talk about those aspects of a piece, but really not much more.”
The goal, she says, is that the musicians in Elf Freedom are present so that the listener can remain present and, she says, it seems to work. “A lot of the feedback that I get from audience members is that they’ll tell me that they feel inspired after the show,” says Keyes. “I believe that when you work that way, when you’re with a group of people that is actively creating together, it activates that the side of the brain inspires people.”
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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