Spotlight: Taking a Ride to South by Southwest With Best Move
BEST MOVE’S KRIS ANAYA — can’t help but be nervous for the band’s appearance at South by Southwest, but not for the reasons you’d expect. “I’m not looking forward to the drive,” Anaya says. Held in Austin, Texas, the music and film festival is quite a drive for the California-based indie trio. Best Move attended the festival in video form last year.
“I’m trying to do research about historical events while on the way there so we can stop,” he explains. To Anaya, a long drive is more palatable with an objective.
“This one time I went to Park City, Utah to go to this contemporary music festival with my bandmate Joe [Davancens],” he describes. “We were driving home and were like, ‘Oh, we should look at historical sites.’ We were taking the wagon trail. We stopped at Salt Lake City and then we stopped in Tahoe. We were reading Wiki stuff about history.”
Best Move’s ride as a band has been a relatively short one, having only formed in 2020. It began as a casual songwriting exercise by Anaya, who recruited multi-instrumentalist Davancens to help flesh out the compositions in the studio. The project was intended to remain casual, but as luck would have it, a mutual friend invited the owner of Park the Van Records to sit in on one of Anaya and Davancens’s sessions.
“A friend of ours named Corey Phillips knows Chris Watson from Park the Van,” Anaya says. “He said, ‘Hey, I might bring my friend Chris’; I didn’t know he owned a label. We all hung out and had a good time. He really loved the music.”
Watson offered to release Anaya and Davancens’s new music onto the Park the Van label. Joined by drummer Fernando Olivia, the band released their first single, “Forgotten Bloom,” in Feb. 2021. The single was followed by the EPs Mirror Image Twins and Joe wants to go to the beach.
Best Move’s music sharply blends elements of folk, jazz, and indie pop rock into vibrant soundscapes that are sometimes groovy, sometimes psychedelic, but always warm and interesting. While songwriters like Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson were influences, Anaya said one of the band’s biggest sources of inspiration was film music.
“I’m particularly inspired by how music transcends through movies and television and the feeling you get from it,” he describes. “Sometimes a movie will be like, ‘We’re going to showcase this piece of music in the scene,’ and they’re going to use all these beautiful shots. You’re like, ‘Wow, this is really awesome and artistic.’”
Bringing the music on the road has been a priority as the pandemic eases. The band played its first shows during a short tour supporting Nick Fritas in May 2021. “I wish it was longer. We had so much fun,” Anaya says. “I’ll always be grateful to Nick for saying, ‘Yeah, you guys can come.’ And we got paid, which is crazy.”
A distinct feature of Best Move’s releases have been their elegantly painted album artwork, which were the handiwork of artist Jesse Fernandes. “She does this amazing artwork,” Anaya describes. “It’s always really abstract and the colors are extremely bright — it’s just amazing. I try to have her put some conceptualization between the music and the art, and she comes up with it herself.”
Fernandes and her art are the focus of the music video for the band’s 2021 single “Invisible Sigh,” which sees the artists paint an interpretation of the track over a time lapse.
2022 will see the release of the band’s first full-length LP, which has seen delays due to the vinyl shortage. “The label was like, ‘Hey, do you want to put out the record or do you want to wait?’ and I was like, ‘We should wait,’” Anaya says. “We’re such a baby band — we can’t tour. If we were a bigger band I’d be like, ‘Well, let’s just put it out.’ So we waited, and then the vinyl thing happened, so we had to wait for that. It’s because of Adele. Just kidding. I don’t know if that’s true.”
Even with big plans in store for Best Move, Anaya’s focus is still on SXSW. He says he’s open to suggestions on what he should visit along the way. “I’m still in the research phase. I don’t know much about the area,” Anaya says.
Best Move will perform on March 16 at 8:10 p.m. on the Las Perlas Stage
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