Interview: Buke and Gass
Meet You At The Show : So how did Buke and Gass start?
Aron Sanchez: Well we met like ten years ago, we had this band called Hominide, and it broke up in ’03 and then we weren’t into making music for a couple years…We started talking about doing something in ’07 and it slowly turned into us writing songs together and it turned into this.
MYATS: Your latest release is called Riposte. Is it suppose to be referring to the French word Riposte?
AS: Well it means like retort. Yeah, we did the artwork first and it’s like a hand with scissors and it kind of looked like a fencer so we started looking for fencing terms and Riposte is like a quick come back.
MYATS: A general opinion about your music is that it’s absolutely unique; do you have influences that are maybe non-musical that would explain your sound’s uniqueness?
AS: Definitely. Lots of movies…
Arone Dyer: And well, everything. I mean everything in life influences what music I make. I read “Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I really don’t think that it influenced me musically but maybe somewhere it did.
AS: I guess the most direct musical influence is the fact that we built stuff. We built our instruments so it directly influences what we are doing.
MYATS: Before Buke and Gass, were you both building your own instruments or did one of you show the other how to do this?
AD: Well he (Aron) helped me with mine, and gave me really good instructions on how to built the buke I’m playing now.
AS: Yeah but you’re really handy as well. You made the toe-bourine which is like the foot tambourine… And we’re always thinking about how to make ourselves better.
MYATS: How did you end up making your own instruments? Was it to recreate a sound you had in mind, or to experiment with new sounds?
AS: Well it’s a little bit of both. There is definitely an idea but you have to build something in order to know how it’s going to sound. It’s a lot of back and forth.
AD: Yeah, I don’t think that I had a sound in mind. Like I don’t have a sound in mind when I sing or write lyrics, I just want it to be something that I would like to listen to.
AS: It’s an evolution because in the beginning our instruments sounded very different then they do now. The music has dictated how the instruments need to sound. Like, we’ll write something and be like: “Oh, it needs more of this tone or this type of thing.” So yeah, it just evolves.
MYATS: Do you think it’s ever going to stop, that you’re going to hit a sound your fully satisfied with?
AS: (instantly) No!
AD: Yeah, that’s life too!
AS: I mean, if we were completely satisfied with what we were doing…
AD: …which we’re not…
AS: It would never happen. We’re never fully satisfied.
MYATS: Since you have so many homemade instruments, while you’re on tour, how do sound technicians adapt to your instruments?
AD: Some people don’t understand Aron’s set up because he looks like he is playing only one instrument but he is playing two instruments that are separate. Like completely separated.
AS: And one half goes to one amplifier and the other half goes to the other amplifier, and sometimes people don’t get it.
AD: Or like the drum! The kick drum and how there is a snare and a tambourine in it and some sound engineers are like : “Can you turn the snare off?” and they try to figure out how to get rid of the snare.
MYATS: Your sound has so many layers and is so complex; don’t you ever want to have more people on stage with you to help you out?
AD: No, that would be a pain in the ass!
AS: Yeah I mean, it’s great, but then we would be more people. I love playing with other people but then we would be a big band. It’s kind of the point, at this stage it’s kind of the concept.
MYATS: A music critic pointed out that your sound and your layering had something similar to tUnE-yArDs, how did touring with her come about?
AD: Well, we liked her music… so we wrote to her… and then got ignored.
AS: We never heard back from her and then a couple months ago our agent was like: “Hey you want to do a tour with tUnE-yArDs?” And we have mutual friends like Dirty Projectors, so the word probably got around that we’re cool or something. (laughs)
– Interview conducted by Camille Gervais
