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the different styles of music-making we all possess.”
Burakoff developed his style alongside Nauman, a childhood friend from
Arlington, Massachusetts. Theirs has always been a creative relationship,
and before they started jamming, they would build Lego “death chambers,”
as Nauman remembers, and shoot their own TV shows. As teenagers, they
discovered crust punk and alternative rock, and pairing Nauman’s electric
guitar with Burakoff’s synths and electronic beats, they penned songs good
enough to win them first prize at their high school battle of the bands.
“It was kind of what we’re doing now, only what a 17-year-old would
make,” Nauman says.
After graduation, Burakoff went to Hampshire College, in Amherst, and
Nauman headed to Wesleyan University, the Connecticut school where
MGMT and Santigold got their starts. While there, Nauman met Lyon, an
aspiring multi-instrumentalist two years his senior. The two weren’t exactly
friends, but they remembered each other a couple of years later, when
Nauman’s Wesleyan band, Balloon, shared a bill with Snowblink, the group
Lyon had joined after graduating in 2005 and moving to San Francisco.
This time, they struck up a friendship, and one day, after he’d returned to
California, Lyon received a fateful call.
“The moment I thought things might work out with Nick was when he
called me when I was living in San Francisco,” Lyon says. “He still lived
on the East Coast, and he wanted to see if I liked it there. It was a very
sincere, straight-shooting move that showed a lot of heart and a lot of
gumption. I thought, ‘You know, I really missed out on this Nick dude.’”
Nauman wound up moving to San Francisco in November 2007, and he
and Lyon began writing songs. While Lyon had been doing the acoustic
singer-songwriter thing, he was also developing an interest Muslimgauze
and Broadcast—experimental electronic groups he’d learned about while
working at Aquarius Records.
“It’s the best record store in America, in my opinion, in terms of diversity,”
Lyon says. “The guys that run it have really voracious interest in different
sounds and things like that. I pretty much moved back to New York because
I thought it would be easier to be in a band that sounded like Broadcast.”
By the time Lyon relocated to Brooklyn, in August 2008, Nauman had
already been back a couple of months. The guitarist had reconnected
with Burakoff, who had also landed in New York City, and Lyon dug what
the duo was composing.
“It was a happy coincidence Mike and I had been collaborating with Nick
within four months of each other,” Lyon says.
of ‘08. Nick’s sign in the musical zodiac is unquestionably guitar, and
Mike is truly gifted with electronics. I’m a bit slipperier, or at least was
at the time, so I used that flexibility to give the band what I thought it
needed: more percussive crust, deeper harmonies, and maybe a little bit
more a of a dance sensibility on stage.”
The twin-sampler set-up left Nauman, the man responsible for bringing the
group together, with arguably Keepaway’s hardest job. As the lone conventional
musician, he’s had to figure out ways to complement the found
sounds chopped up and stitched together by his mad-scientist band mates.
“The guitar is such a powerful instrument in most contexts, and I think
one of the most serious dynamics of our band is trying to balance power
between the three of us, personality-wise and music-wise,” Nauman says.
On “Baby Style,” released in June on Lefse Records, Keepaway manages
a restrained eclecticism. The EP has emerged a bona fide blogger
fave, and even Pitchfork deemed “Yellow Wings” a 9. The band recently
recorded a song with Sunny Levine, the man behind records by everyone
from the Happy Mondays to Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and it hopes to
work with the Los Angeles producer on its full-length debut.
“We certainly didn’t expect the EP, which was such a briefly executed
first go-round by a supremely young, probably unripe band, to go as far
as it has,” Nauman says. “So our more modest goals for the full length
are to make music that reflects our growth in band togetherness, and
our lofty ones are to slam the crap out of critical expectations and make
Lady Gaga seem like the stuff your grandma listens to when she makes
cottage cheese salads.”
Burakoff, the real tech-head in the bunch, expresses his aims in the language
of wave propagation.
“I think ‘Baby Style’ was getting everything out on the table and using
the puzzle pieces we already had from prior arrangements, and kind of
a cool interference pattern got formed by that,” he says. “But now we’re
realizing the areas where that interference pattern is more beautiful and
more succinct and stronger and exploring those, knowing how the music
sounds live, and how it sounds on vinyl, recorded.”
“We’re more willing to take a distinct emotional stab,” Burakoff adds. “I
think it’s less experimental at this point and more practiced.”
Artist Equipment Check!!!
Contributing to the new songs meant playing drums and sampler, instruments
he’d dabbled in over the years.
“I had already done some drumming in several of my previous bands, but
it was always much more auxiliary than what I do with Keepaway,” Lyon
says. “In this case it was just sort of clear that it was the most central
strength I had to offer what Mike and Nick had developed in the summer
Akai APC40
“We use the Akai APC40 to trigger clips
out of Live these days. It lays out clips
visually on a grid so we can spend less
time looking at our laptop.”
the deli_30 fall 2010