Total Shutdown

• Genre: Noise Rock
• Hometown: San Francisco
• Total Shutdown Website

About

Total Shutdown formed in San Francisco in 2001, amid that city's burgeoning noise scene. Cramming hard-core, Naked City-style jazz-metal and pure mania into minute-long bursts of anti-everything insanity, Total Shutdown became one of the leading acts in the Bay Area on the strength of their absolutely unhinged live shows and a 7-inch (Broadcast Performances, split with Boxleitner) that made it onto Byron Coley's Top Ten Singles of 2001 list. The band then released a single-sided 12-inch, Reflections, which featured T.S. songs in one groove and songs from the Beatles' Please Please Me album hidden on a second groove. So when playing the album, you got either Total Shutdown or the Beatles, depending on where you dropped the needle. Tigerbeat6 jumped aboard and released their eponymous debut in 2003. After appearing on Troubleman Unlimited's Mix-Tape and a split double 5-inch (whatever that is) with XBXRX, Thurston Moore released Total Shutdown Live in 2006 on his Ecstatic Yod imprint.

- Mike McGuirk