Taleen Kalenderian blends Armenian music with modern punk countercultures

The sprawling city of Los Angeles is home to an unrivaled music scene. Each of the concert venues that dot the city, small or large, possesses a distinct atmosphere and dedicated following. In L.A., everyone’s preference has a home. Within this environment, Taleen Kalenderian, alongside her genre-bending punk band Taleen Kali, was able to create something completely new. More importantly, she reclaimed the music that has always represented her roots as an Armenian artist.

Kalenderian comes from a diverse home — her father is Lebanese-Armenian and her mother is Ethiopian-Armenian — which manifestly led to diverse music around the house. Outside of her immediate family, she credits her uncles from both sides of her family, who were skillful musicians, for influencing her love of music. 

“My Diko Daidai (Dikran Avakian) is my guitar hero. He taught me to play a few things when I got my first guitar in high school. My great uncle from my father’s side Sahag Keri (Sahag Bukruian) used to jam with me on his accordion while I played piano. He sadly passed on this year…he was the coolest,” she details. “My brother, Shahan Kalenderian, is also a wildly gifted drummer and pianist. We jammed all the time when we were kids. We have a few younger cousins who shred too.”

Prior to immersing herself in L.A.’s music scene, Kalenderian took classical piano lessons as a child and into her late teens. The music she learned in these classes never felt authentic to her or representative of her experiences as an Armenian-American. However, the music of her culture and the respective Armenian diasporas her parents are from is a different story.

“When I went to Armenia for the first time, I was 18, and I remember how much I cried hearing the choir singing in the Echmiadzin church. Then, I got obsessed with Ethiopian jazz when we got to visit Ethiopia. It’s some of the most beautiful, intelligent, intuitive music I’ve ever heard,” she explained. “Arabic music was always being played at weddings, and I remember it made us all rush to the dance floor, so it always gets a visceral reaction from me. When I hear breakbeats in shoegaze and [psychedelic] music, I’m always like, this sounds like Arabic music to me first, [Western] second.” 

Taleen Kali (Photo courtesy of Kris Balocca)

Picking up on the Armenian and Middle Eastern influences in the music that soundtracked her youth was a common occurrence for Kalenderian. As a teenager, she noticed the psychedelic rock music she listened to adopted the “evil eye” as a trope. The evil eye symbol is prevalent in many cultures and goes by various names — char atchk in Armenian, nazar in Arabic, máti in Greek, cheshm nazar in Persian. By way of Armenia’s pre-Christian past, the reinvigoration of the diaspora and other factors, it has become a fixture in Armenian culture — whether fully embraced or not — and is wielded to ward off evil intentions and energy.

Kalenderian grew up surrounded by the symbol of the evil eye; her mother and grandmother hung them around the house, so when she first began playing live shows, she wore items with eyes on them to feel protected. While the music she listened to often used this familiar symbol in a positive light, Kalenderian couldn’t help but notice that it sometimes felt exoticized.

“I wanted to redefine that in my own music. Same with metal and post-punk. The Cure is one of my favorite bands, and some of their albums use a lot of Arabic influenced melodies,” she said. “I remember always thinking, ‘Hey, this is what I grew up on!’ when I was a kid, so it was a similar sense of both feeling represented in modern music and also wanting to reclaim it as my own.” 

When her first band, TÜLIPS, split in 2016, Kalenderian had a handful of songs she had written that had either only been played live or never recorded. This includes “Evil Eye II,” a sequel to “Evil Eye” from the TÜLIPS album Doom & Bloom and an eventual Taleen Kali song. With enough songs to release an extended play, she decided to recruit a few members to form an all-girl band for a new solo project.

When building her solo project, Kalenderian enlisted the help of her friend and TÜLIPS bassist, Miles Marsico, to record a few demo songs. She said it felt “inevitable” that they would play together again, and ultimately, Marsico joined the band.

“We recorded the first Taleen Kali EP, Soul Songs, in 2017 and released it in 2018,” said Kalenderian. “When we brought our friend, Royce Hsu, on for lead guitar that year, the core of Taleen Kali became solidified, and the three of us have been together ever since with a roster of amazing local, touring and session drummers.” 

Produced by Kristin Kontrol (Dum Dum Girls), mixed by Brad Laner (Medicine) and recorded at Hollywood’s legendary Sunset Sound Studios, Soul Songs is the perfect marriage of Kalenderian’s guiding beliefs rooted in the riot grrrl movement, which refers to the underground feminist punk movement of the 1990s, and a more sophisticated punk sound. Infused with the influence of noise pop (such as the music of Sonic Youth) and new wave (think Blondie), the EP was praised by and featured in various high-profile music media outlets including Stereogum and Pitchfork. 

There is no rhyme or reason to Kalenderian’s approach of fusing these diverse genres into her sound. 

“Once a song is written, I just listen for the sounds I like to hear and how they work together for the song,” she said. “We go through a lot of amps and pedals in the studio until we hear what we want.”

Following the EP, Kalenderian wrote the titular song “Flower of Life” for their first album, which she describes as a song about coming back to life and making it through the other side. The album itself carries a theme of a “death drive,” reflecting an ever-looping cycle of life and transformation.

“I first saw the flower of life symbol on a gong when I was taking a sound healing practitioner’s training in 2017, and it had a hypnotic repetitive droney quality to it, so I made it the concept of the album,” Kalenderian explained. “Half of the album was written 2018-2019. The other half was written in 2020-2021 in isolation before I showed the demos to my band. It finally came together in the studio in the winter of 2022. Since it was written in such an odd way, there are two distinct moods to the album, so we put all the dreamy punk songs on side A and all the moody post-punk songs on side B.”

Groups like Taleen Kali aren’t just bands; they also serve as community organizers and cultural producers. Kalenderian has run a publication called DUM DUM Zine since she began performing in bands. “Zines” often refer to non-commercial publications that are typically handmade or online.  

Labeled a “cult favorite” by the Los Angeles Times, DUM DUM Zine publishes a yearly print issue that is online with physical copies available for purchase online and in many local L.A. bookstores, as well as in New York, Chicago and Portland. The zine also publishes regularly on their website, which includes content such as text message interviews, flash fiction, photo essays and even serialized radio plays. 

“A few years ago, we expanded into a boutique label called Dum Dum Records and launched the annual Dum Dum Fest,” she shared. This initiative aims to “unite the disparate scenes of the dark L.A. underground,” bringing together shoegaze, post-punk and dark electronic music artists to convene in one venue and foster community. “It’s a lot of work, but I believe that community building is crucial to thriving art ecosystems.” 

The 2024 Dum Dum Fest, held in June, featured seven bands, two stages, vendors, zines, photo booths and more. This year’s event not only highlighted emerging talent but also strengthened the sense of community among attendees, creating a supportive and inclusive environment for all. 

Taleen Kali will be on tour supporting Ringo Deathstarr this summer. The band’s latest single, “Ava Adore,” a Smashing Pumpkins cover, was recently released on June 4, 2024. They plan on releasing a five song EP of covers early next year. 

“I want fellow artists and Armenians to find these bodies of work and feel inspired and empowered to create something of their own. As far as Armenian artists go, I grew up listening to bands like System of a Down and Apex Theory, which were amazing, but I didn’t have any examples or exposure to Armenian women doing music except for — obviously — our queen Cher. Hopefully, the Taleen Kali catalog can be there to help fill that gap for others like me,” Kalenderian said. “My main job is to continue making the art and hope that it makes an impact on our cultures’ representation and visibility. I can only hope to witness it being reflected back to us someday.” 

Melody Seraydarian

Melody Seraydarian

Melody Seraydarian is a journalist and undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing a degree in Media Studies with a concentration in media, law and policy. Her column, "Hye Key," covers politics, culture and everything in between from a Gen-Z perspective. She is from Los Angeles, California and is an active member of her local Armenian community.

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