Zig Zags are a Los Angeles-based punk and metal band. They're rhinos, and they'll be at Lo-Fi tonight coming at us live. Guitarist Jed Maheu, bassist Patrick McCarthy, and drummer Bobby Martin slam it down heavy. Their music makes you want to jackhammer the side of an inflatable kiddie-pool with a variable-speed sawzall and scream, “I AM THE ELECTRIC STEAKNIFE-VULTURE.” Zig Zags’ self-titled debut album, recorded and produced by Ty Segall, was released this past June on In The Red. They spoke for a quick second.

What music scares you? Maybe some satanic shit. Describe your fear.

Bobby Martin: NIN’s “Closer" and the Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9.” They're super creepy sounding. Sitting in your bedroom in the dark, with headphones on makes things sound really scary, like you’re trapped in a music box and can’t get out.

Jed Maheu: The artwork for Tool where there’s like a hologram of a dude sucking his own dick. That really freaked me out as to why someone would use that on an album.

* Zig Zags play tonight at Lo-Fi with Ex-Cult, Unnatural Helpers, and Brain Drain. $10.

What else scares you?

JM: Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg is scary. It just builds and builds. I don’t wanna spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it, but yeah, small people in general kinda freak me out.

How was recording with Ty Segall? Break it down a little bit.

JM: Ty’s recording set up was unique, to say the least. He’s not in the same house anymore, but for our album we recorded in this tiny tiny back garage that he had converted into a studio in the most bare-bones way. There was no ventilation, just strips of old carpet all over the ceiling and walls. It was so hot that the most we could stand was a few takes at a time before we had to bail. But Ty is crazy and would be in there in pants and long sleeve shirt drinking hot coffee and he never left the room.

Because of scheduling with Ty on tour and us touring, we had to record over like six months but ended up only doing five days total. We’d met Ty at shows and he asked if we wanted to record at his spot for fun. We had wanted to start making an album after all these singles, but didn’t have any money, but Ty just did it for free. The first weekend we did most of the songs we had written at the time, like four or five. Everything for those was done in two days. Then we had a talk with Ty and he was like, “I’m going on tour for a month, but when I get back I want you to have four more songs.” So we did that and wrote some of our best songs really fast. “Brainded Warrior,” “Magic,” “Soul Sound,” and “Voices of the Paranoid” within a month.

How did Ty dial up the sound, the power?

JM: The recording setup was pretty much the same deal. Like I said, the room was tiny so the bass and guitar amps faced each other and the drums were in the middle. If you soloed a channel like the snare, it had more bass than snare sometimes. Because of the bleed between the instruments, we did everything live with only overdubbing vocals. Ty would use some old SM57s on most of the instruments and some other weird mics. For the guitar, he didn’t have a mic stand, so he put the mic on a stack of books. We recorded straight into a Tascam 388 and nearly every song was done on the first take and then we’d quickly do vocals live with all of us on one mic kinda jumping in and out of each other’s way for our parts.

But his setup was so weird the only way to listen to a mix at the end of the day was for him to do it on headphones, then dump into this old '90s digital recorder that had a CD burner, then play it on his old stereo in the living room. We ended up having Chris Woodhouse mix the album, since he had access to this insane studio with tons of gear. Ty’s mix sounds cool, just way more lo-fi since he didn’t have any gear to work with. Chris was able to make it way tougher with compressors and stuff.

I think one description of us was when one dude said we sound like bedroom metal. That said, we have a lot of influences and like things to sound heavy and dynamic. We play pretty hard and fast. The sound is in your face. When the three of us play it’s definitely a chemical reaction.

Have you been in touch with Iggy Pop since you did your song with him? What was that like?

JM: We haven’t heard from him since then, but it was super rad to do that. Iggy was the coolest to work with. When we were asked to do the single for Light In The Attic, I had always wanted to cover the Betty Davis’s song “If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up" as a heavy stoner jam. It just has that vibe. We ended up mixing that song ourselves. When we got the vocal tracks back, Iggy’s double was way off and sounded insane, so Patrick had to fix it. Don’t tell Iggy that we made him sound better.

Jed, you're from eastern Washington. What town? What do you miss about it? What sort of shit would you get into there?

JM: I’m from Tri-Cities. Richland, if anyone knows where that is. Then I moved to Seattle. I guess I miss the fishing but I can fish any-fucking-where so I don’t really miss anything and I don’t wanna go back. We just did the most stupid, boring, small-town, get-into-trouble kinda shit that everybody does. In the summer we would drive around in the back of a pickup truck and throw eggs at people walking down the street or shoot paint ball guns at other cars. Then when winter rolled around we would hide in the bushes and throw snowballs at passing cars. One time we went to this golf course and hit a ton of balls into the freeway. So yeah, basically we tried to cause car accidents through most of high school.

Gimme a quick tour recap. What’s been poppin' out there?

JM: We were driving down the I-5 to San Diego jamming some tapes when all of a sudden we saw this white Honda Accent flipping in mid air two lanes to the right of us. It happened so fast but by the time it hit the ground it also did a 180 and crashed into the wall. It was total NASCAR shit. Scary as fuck. We’ve seen a ton of bad wrecks on this tour. Not cool when you’re in a van with four of your buddies.