The prolific photographer has shot shows from Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters and countless others (including many a concert for Phoenix New Times). He's also directed music videos for Exodus and Alice In Chains and even the Greg Puciato documentary, "Fuck Content."
But not enough of us have heard Louvau, and he and the rest of his bandmates in There Is No Us would very much like to change that factoid.
"People say, 'Wait, you're in a band?' And I've said, 'Yeah, I've been playing music for a long time," Louvau says. "I just didn't want to shove it down your throat."
For Louvau, making music and documenting it goes hand-in-hand. He took his first photography class the year he formed his first band (both as a senior at Glendale's Ironwood High School). It was attending shows that launched him into photography proper.
"Whatever band came on stage, there would be a group of five to seven photographers that would come in," Louvau says. "I thought, 'These guys didn't have to sit outside all day and they're not leaving with a T-shirt that 1,000 other people have; they'll have a unique memory in time that’ll last forever."
Louvau said that eventually making music became more compelling, and that he "basically quit taking photos from the time I graduated until the time my first real band broke up" circa 2001.
"For some reason when I was young, I thought that you couldn't do two creative things at once," Louvau says. "I had this mentality that you had to give 120% to one thing to have a chance to be successful with it."
After years of hustling away shooting bands, Louvau discovered that, through those many creative endeavors, he could in fact have it all.
"I found myself doing all of these things at the same time, and they all fed into each other," he says. "Every day you have to have new tricks up your sleeve. There's got to be reasons for people to pay attention to anything you're doing."
It helps, of course, to have the right collaborators. The partnership between Louvau and guitarist Andy Gerold is an essential matchup dating back to those formative high school years.
"I was in a band with my brother when Jim and I first met," Gerold says. "They were friends first, and once me and Jim started hanging out, we realized we had a lot in common, especially musically."
The two initially bonded, Gerold says, over Nine Inch Nails.
"We had so much appreciation for that band," he says. "And not just the music, but the aesthetic and their vibe and the intensity."
And, of course, The Cure.
"We got to the point where he'd have me guess what he was going to play [on guitar]," Louvau says. "One time he goes, 'I'm going to play you one note and see if you can get it.' He played the first note of The Cure's 'Lovesong.' At that moment, I knew we should be doing something together."
"I've been around talented people for years, and he's still probably the most talented person I know," Louvau says. "He absolutely is the musical engine of this operation." Louvau also has ample love for the rest of the band's lineup: guitarist Jared Bakin and bassist Eddie Lopez. (Drummer Elias Mallin is an unofficial member of the band and plays with them when he can.)
But his work with Gerold is clearly special. Louvau says that he appreciates that, despite his overt technical prowess, Gerold remains open artistically.
"He's never married to an idea — he'll literally change anything," Louvau says. "I can hum a riff or a melody or a rhythm and he can immediately pick up on it and change it."
For his part, Gerold appreciates Louvau's undying dedication and support.
"[Jim] was one of those people who always believed in the music that I wrote," he says. "He's the one that wants to meet people and be social and you absolutely have to have someone like that. Otherwise, I’d be playing music for my cat."
Their potent relationship also helped each man make big life decisions that would bring them closer to their end goal: making music with There Is No Us. For Louvau, it was the courage to embrace music more readily as the band formed circa 2015.
"I guess at this point, as much as I love photography and directing videos, when I get off stage and we've just had this awesome experience, I go, 'This is me in my truest form,'" Louvau says. "The other stuff is icing on the cake.
That process of "letting go" helped Louvau better accept the praise that he’s needed to make this big shift in his creative and personal life.
"We basically grew up in a circle of friends that there was never any patting yourself on the back," he says. "There was never talking about yourself. That was such a way to stay grounded at all times."
But as he’s heard from peers and heroes, Louvau has this singular talent. Case in point: He joined Filter’s Richard Patrick at a NIN show, where he met a longstanding hero.
"We’re backstage ... and Trent Reznor looks at me and he goes, 'Great work, man.' I wasn't entirely sure what he was talking about yet," Louvau says. "He goes, 'I heard the music that you and Rich are working on, and it's very good.' I told a tech that story and he said, 'That guy doesn't compliment anybody. If that guy said something nice to me, I’d literally throw up.'" (Louvau and Patrick are working on music for their band, A Place to Kill.)
For his own part, Gerold took a slightly different path to There Is No Us.
"When we were younger trying to do our own band [with Louvau], things didn't pan out," Gerold says. "And I said, 'Well, I just want to be a hired gun.' I didn't care about being creative and writing my own songs; I just don't want to work at McDonald's."
Gerold spent years as a touring musician for Ashes Divide, Marilyn Manson and even a production of "Rock of Ages." But he somehow found himself wanting.
"I got to do a lot of cool stuff as far as touring," Gerold says. "But ... is this really what I wanted? I need to be doing my own thing because I want to have a say in how that goes."
"Earlier we were trying to write, I guess, pop-rock songs," Gerold says. "I mean, we were industrial to an extent; we had electronics and all that stuff. But in reality, we had catchy melodies. It was really just a metal band. We were heavy and everything was screamy."
Louvau, too, noted their long-running flirtation with industrial music.
"Even when we started our band as a kid, it was called Victims in Ecstasy," Louvau says. "We toured with Pigface and Gravity Kills and Godhead, these super industrial bands when we were definitely more of like a rock band. We won some New Times music awards [at a] showcase for best industrial band when we were not really an industrial band at all."
But for their latest project, a full-length called "Feed the Monkeys" that's set to drop by year's end from Cleopatra Records (one-time home of genre legends like Nosferatu and Rosetta Stone), the band decided to swing for the fences.
"For many years, the word industrial ... was almost a bad word," Louvau says. "I remember right when we started writing songs for this record, I looked at Andy and I said, 'I want to go down in flames with you, writing music that we're excited about. I want it to be something that's electronic and aggressive and something that makes people feel a certain way.'"
And lo and behold, they've had some success by embracing their truer loves.
"I had absolutely zero intention on our single 'Fame Whore' ever going to radio," Louvau says, "to hear it on KUPD and Sirius when we never had any intention ever to write songs for the radio."
Gerold thinks that part of the feedback they've earned from the record's output — which includes a recently released cover of Rage Against the Machine’s "Killing in the Name" — is that it isn't industrial music but something else entirely.
"That's why I call it industrial punk rock because it's like [Louvau's] not really singing in those parts but it has a vibe and an attitude," Gerold says. "And punk rock was the same way, where they could play their heavy songs and yell or talk over it or have a vibe over it."
Gerold also thinks that their focus on the lyrics is especially crucial, admitting that sometimes those aren't a priority across heavier musical heroes.
"When I was a kid, the lyrics were way less important," Gerold says. "I wanted it to be fast and heavy, with screaming guitar solos. With this last batch of songs, all of us sat in a room and we're hashing out lyrical ideas."
"Robert Smith [has] amazing lyrics but they were simple so that you could really understand what he was talking about in each song," Gerold says. "I tell Jim when we write, 'What does it actually mean?' I want the song to have a clear meaning so that the listener can pick up on that meaning and relate to it or not."
Louvau, meanwhile, thinks the draw is in how they distill the intensity of their live shows.
"Our bread and butter is the piss and vinegar that we present live," Louvau says. "And there could be people who've never seen the band before that are singing along to the songs by the time they're over."
Their live show truly is essential. Some bands don't require any spectacle, and There Is No Us is clearly not one of those outfits.
"You literally have to be Radiohead to be a band that can stand there and do nothing," Louvau says. "I go on top of the monitors and speakers and touch the ceiling in the club while I'm acting like I’m fucking the speaker. I want to keep it punk rock; if it's not that, then I'm out."
At the end of the day, both men agreed that perhaps the secret to their success thus far is a steady commitment to being unbelievably earnest at all times.
"The record's called Feed the Monkeys for a reason," Louvau says. "You've got to feed the monkeys before you can really do anything else for yourself."
He explains, "The monkeys can be the people, the suits, the booking agents or radio. All of these people want something that they can work with. And as long those people gravitate toward it, all the better. Just don't think for two seconds we're writing songs for those people; we're writing for ourselves."
Gerold readily agreed, noting that there's something all great bands must accomplish if they want to be real and still relatable.
"There's a quote from someone in NOFX and he was talking about how Green Day sold out," Gerold says. "He said, 'They never sold out. They didn't change the way they were writing music.’ They just kept writing that same music, and then people were like, 'Oh, this is good.’"
And accessibility is all well and nice, but ultimately only two people matter. And from that comes the band's sense of passion and authenticity.
"Jim and I always say that if it's cool to us, then it's cool," Gerold says. "Not that it's cool to everyone else; I'm saying it's literally just cool to me and him. Once you get to that point, let's see if anyone else likes it."
"There's an equation: If you have 5,000 diehard fans, you could make a living as an artist, because those people buy everything," he says. "If that's where you end up, and you're making a living as an artist, that's where you want to be. The peaks and valleys are always going to be there. You can have a record or single that does really well and the next record doesn't do anything."
That's why Louvau and Gerold, and the rest of the band, are focusing on not just on "Feed the Monkeys" but what comes next. It's the start of a much, much grander journey, in a way.
"I feel like this is just the beginning of this style that we've started branching out to," Gerold says. "So hopefully the next batch of songs will be even better."
The hope is to play more with this latest batch of tunes, with some possible touring in the near future. That's when they'll know if all this work has truly paid off. They remain, however, optimistic given their record.
"We would go back and play some of these places the second or third time," Louvau says. "These people know the words to songs that don't exist in their streaming service library yet."
Louvau remains committed in full to There Is No Us as the band grows with this latest "era." However, he still wants to keep up his multifaceted schedule for as long as possible.
"I have to keep all three things going because there's gaps where there's nothing going on musically," he says. "My creative energy, it has to be nurtured. If I don't have that, then why am I existing?"
Because whether it's film, video, or music, Louvau knows what he wants to get out of these artistic endeavors. If it's not 100 percent real, there's no point to ever being seen or heard.
"Everything I'm doing has an artistic approach to it," says Louvau. "If it starts to feel not authentic, and that's the band, the photos, or the videos...if it doesn't do that, I can go work at McDonald's and feel the same way."
There Is No Us: In support of Prayers, with Darksiderz and Pictureplane. 7 p.m. doors, 7:30 p.m. show, on Aug. 10. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. 2nd Ave. Tickets are $35 plus fees at crescentphx.com.
