Steve Brisk and Paul Findley are music geeks. There's no getting around it. As I sit in their living room off West Alameda Street, a Tascam 16-track nestled next to a Triton synthesizer/sampler/keyboard, cozied at right angles to a few other bits of equipment and a computer, it's clear these two fellas, who make up the band Audiobuddha, are the types who could noodle over seven seconds of music for 14 hours, tweaking it to perfection via MIDI sequencing, finding just the right levels, just the right timing for a certain drum loop.
If all that sounds like a foreign language to you, don't worry about it. All you need to know is Brisk and
Findley's meticulous fiddling is the
way a lot of music is made these days; that
is, with a shockingly minimum amount of equipment, more cerebral mix and match than mic'd up drums.
Audiobuddha produces a thoughtful brew of synthetic music. Not synthetic like a cheap polyester dress, but synthetic like a sweet silk/cotton blend. It's Moby melded with Kraftwerk, perhaps, or Mozart mixing with Pink Floyd. Dramatic, symphonic synth lines
swirl gently next to Findley's processed guitar; crunchy chords harmonize with arpeggiated melodies, creating an intense, sweeping wave of music that crests, ebbs, and crests again.
Where does such a synthesis come from? For one thing, its human sources are studies in paradox. Findley grew up a death metal head who also had an affinity for classical music. "It's the most perfect form of music," Findley says of the latter. "Most of the entire roots of all modern music can be traced back to that." Brisk was "a total prog rocker," eschewing Phil Collins' pop Genesis for Peter Gabriel's more experimental version of the band. Yet he was drawn to the cerebral metal of Black Sabbath. And, as many of these stories begin, once he heard Kraftwerk, everything changed. "I lived in a town of 2,000 people," Brisk says. "I was the only one with a vinyl copy of
Autobahn
."
You'd think the amalgamation of such a pair of thoughtful music brains would fuse in odd ways, and you'd be right. Audiobuddha's music is wonky yet soulful, kind of like Al Gore. And, also like Al Gore, it is heavily intertwined with technology. Brisk and Findley both have full-time jobs, but they still spend at least 10 hours a week laying down tracks, piecing together bits of guitar work Findley comes up with on his own, mixing and remixing 'til the finished product comes out as a sort of updated Phil Spector wall-of-sound, thick and layered like My Bloody Valentine or the Cocteau Twins, both of whom are favorites of Audiobuddha.
The thing is, all this is done in a tiny corner of a smallish Santa Fe apartment, emblematic of the bedroom production that, thanks to increasingly affordable yet high-level technology, is making things faster, easier and cheaper for musicians. Frisk's 16-track recorder, a beautiful piece of equipment, cost him about $400 used on eBay. The stunner is that, despite all the blips and bloops, the final result of the Tascam's output still maintains a soulful heart, that mythic analog warmth that everyone pines after. So, even after all the processing and electronics, Audiobuddha still sounds like a living, breathing entity, not just a sterile bit of nothingness. It's an interesting blend of high-tech and low-tech, a hybrid of digital and analog, and it amounts to nothing less than a bedroom-recording revolution: You now can indulge in infinite possibilities without lugging 75 pounds of equipment to an expensive studio.
Instead, Findley lays down a bit of guitar, a metal lick discernible here and there, and the two begin to build a song around it. Brisk adds some synth, maybe beefs up the guitar line with various effects and processing until it sounds like a musically inclined robot. They add layers and tracks-12, 15, 18-compress and expand, match up beats and re-record until something beautiful comes out, all by sitting at a desk with a few pieces of equipment. It's funny how things have changed: Nowadays, the DIY work ethic-once so tied to getting your hands dirty and laboring over cumbersome, old-school hunks of metal and circuitry-now involves computers and bits and bytes. "We really believe in the do-it-yourself approach," Brisk says, but that doesn't mean they can't also "really like a finished and polished sound."
Because their output is so tech-heavy, Findley and Brisk don't plan on performing live until about October. They're hoping to get into the High Mayhem Festival; if that doesn't work, the duo is shooting for something low-key, like Back Road Pizza. Mainly, however, the pair likes to shoot their stuff out into cyberspace (check
). They have representation in LA and are shifting toward both remixing and film soundtrack work. And, of course, listen for them pouring out of a bedroom near you.
