Grex is an experimental/art rock band based out of Oakland, California. In biological terms, a “grex” is an entity composed of several smaller organisms. Grex (the band) explores the meeting point between surreal songcraft and the dark outer reaches of free jazz and industrial hip-hop.
The group has been called an “otherworldly experience” (Eugene Weekly) and “true genre warping music” (KFJC), recalling at turns the ecstatic energy of Milford Graves, the electronic squall of Death Grips, and the lilting indie rock of Water from Your Eyes and Mitski. Grex has performed alongside the likes of Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Tony Levin, and members of Irreversible Entanglements, Tune-Yards, and Dirty Projectors.
Auntie + Tebs is Grex’s first album in six years. Grex’s previous record, Everything You Said Was Wrong, was supposed to be its last. Then, isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the band reconvened to develop a new set of songs – loud, incendiary stories fueled by avant-garde aesthetics and the rhetoric of radical politics.
The title Auntie + Tebs refers to two people: Miriam Defensor Santiago (“Auntie”), a Filipino politician and lawyer who spent her life fighting graft and corruption, and Louis Moholo-Moholo (“Tebs”), a South African drummer and anti-Apartheid activist. This is a record that carries forward their spirit of revolutionary struggle, aspiration, and imagination.
Grex is Karl Evangelista (guitar, voice, misc.), Rei Scampavia (keyboards, voice, misc.), and Robert Lopez (drums), with D. Chavez (bass), Bobby Bradford (cornet), Zoh Amba (saxophone), and Misha Khalikulov (cello).
Ruminating in the underworld and baring the darker art of the past, Dead Halos is the solo project of Todd Warner.
