The Volt per Octaves’ Electric Family Feel

On Thursday, October 24, the Santa Barbara analog synth husband/wife/daughter trio the Volt per Octaves will play a special show at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club (1221 State St.), featuring the richly musical Money Mark of Beastie Boys fame as a guest musician. Expect all manner of sounds spacey and funky. Trout Club and Dolores Coy open at 8 p.m.

A rare gem of a Santa Barbaran act, the Volt per Octaves stand out for their devotion to analog synths. Forsaking laptop keypads for modular ivories and dropping out drum machines for acoustic drums, they bring a kind of live dynamism rare in our day of DAW-built electronica. Founding members Nick Montoya and Anna Rhoney met in high school in 1997 and gave birth to their daughter, Eva Montoya, in 1998; she started playing in the band around the age of 6. “It just seemed natural,” Nick said about how the family became a band.

In forming their sound, “we thought it would be more fun to bring these old machines out and make electronic music in a live setting, so that the audience could kind of humanize electronic music in their head,” Nick said. “It’s not just computers and machines; it’s musicians actually using their fingers, changing chords, changing the timbre of sound in real time.”