4 to Watch: Persephone's Bees

Photo: Piper Ferguson

[Above: Persephone's Bees, from left to right: Angelina Moysov, Paul Bertolino, Tom Ayers, and Bart Davenport.]

Hometown: San Francisco, Calif.
Members: Angelina Moysov, Paul Bertolino, Tom Ayers, Bart Davenport
Fun fact: The band’s “City of Love” was featured on the soundtrack to last year’s Bewitched remake.
Why they’re worth watching: P’s Bees were a breakout band at this year’s SXSW, and KCRW’s Nic Harcourt has tirelessly championed them.
For fans of: The Cardigans, Serge Gainsbourg, The Go-Go’s

The exotic, retro sound of Persephone’s Bees’ major-label debut, Notes From The Underworld, may have something to do with the reverence singer and songwriter Angelina Moysov adopted toward Western pop music as a wide-eyed teen in the tiny mountain town of Pyatigorsk, Russia. Long before she moved to San Francisco and met guitarist Tom Ayres in the mid ’90s, the classically trained keyboardist was struggling for every hard-won note.

There were only two methods of finding Western tunes in Russia at the time, she says: “You bought them on the black market, or—if someone went abroad and bought a Deep Purple or a Led Zeppelin record—then they made tons of copies and gave ’em to their friends. Then we made tons of copies and gave ’em to our friends. And not everyone was exposed to certain music, so if you had it you felt super-cool and special.”

For fun, Moysov and her pals would orchestrate contraband listening parties at each other’s houses. The whole process, she says, “had this kinda revolutionary feel, like ‘Wow! This has come from the West, and now we know about this music—It comes from the West, and that means freedom!’”

She and Ayres—now a couple—had no trouble seeing eye-to-eye creatively. And he’s still struck by how many sounds she digested in her remote village. “I’ll be listening to the radio, a Suzi Quatro song will come on and she’ll be singing along to it,” Ayres marvels. “And she’ll casually tell me ‘Yeah, I grew up with a poster of Suzi Quatro in my bedroom.’” Moysov’s most exotic find was a well-worn Deep Purple shirt. “[But] when I finally came to America and went to Haight Street, I thought, ‘they have everything here—that’s kinda boring.’ The fun of it all was finding it, getting your hands on it!”