The first thing you’ll notice upon listening to Buke and Gase’s latest album, “General Dome” (Brassland), is how noisy and raucous it is. While pure decibel power is nothing new for a rock band, rarely is it so effectively generated by just two people. Using instruments of their own creation, from which they also take their name (a buke is a modified ukulele, a gase a guitar-bass hybrid), Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez create the same caterwaul as bands twice their size. ARTINFO recently spoke with the duo’s bassist-guitarist, Sanchez, about the new album, ditching Brooklyn for upstate New York, and why the group started making their own instruments in the first place.
How do you view “General Dome” in relation to your other releases?
This record is really about us discovering what we’re trying to do, and working within the limitations we’ve set up for ourselves, and figuring out what kind of project this still is. We went into this with a little more direction, trying to solve the problems and issues we were having with previous work. And trying to be a little more concise, keeping the songs in the same one world instead of moving around so much.
Has the album changed how you two view yourselves as a band?
We’ve become more focused, a lot more focused than when we started the record. Everything you do is a learning process for the next step. I think in general we just wanted to, not that the material was going to be more accessible, but easier to get into. That’s what we were trying to do. And things got a little more serious and dark as a result.
Do you feel your work was too hard to latch onto before?
Maybe. We had this slight flailing process before, that’s where most of the best material comes from – we just improvise for hours and record it all in a collage process. I think we wanted to make it a little easier for the listener. And it was a challenge for us to push it in a direction of more traditional song structure.
Was traditional song structure not important before? Why is it now?
Mostly it’s another challenge for us. We’re interested in both. We do really love pop song structure, it’s really fun. And it’s also very difficult to do well. It was like, “OK, let’s try to be a little less abstract.”
The band used to be based out of Brooklyn, but you both ended up relocating to Hudson, New York. Was this before or during the recording process?
It was before. I was already living in Hudson, and Arone moved up to make the record basically. We were going to take a period of time to make the record up there – seemed easier, cheaper, we’d have more time, that kind of thing. It was a completely different experience. In Brooklyn we had this little tiny space that we were working in. In Hudson we rented these two large rooms of this gallery building. We just moved all our recording gear into there and kind of shacked up in there for about five months. It was luxurious for us. It was also the first time we could actually play and rehearse in an open room without headphones. We actually never heard ourselves in a room really. All those things were large factors.
Can you imagine going back to how you used to record now?
No. It was an altering experience. We learned a lot recording live. We’re still making a lot of mistakes, but we’ve been improving upon them through the process.
Was there a point where you decided you needed a change of scenery?
It was more just a situational thing. It wasn’t, “Oh no, we can’t afford to live in the city anymore.” Though it is much, much easier here as a band. We don’t have all the access to all the people we normally would and all the shows that we could see, but now we’re at a point where we’re either touring a lot or we’re trying to write new music, and being outside of the city makes that a lot easier.
A big part of the band’s story has always been that you’ve made your own instruments. How did that come about?
It’s really just to solve a musical problem, because we’re only two people and we’re trying to make a lot of different sounds. And we’re trying to perform those sounds live. In my case, I pushed a guitar so that it could play bass and guitar parts, and in order to do that, I had to make it, because you can’t really buy that kind of thing. And Arone’s instrument, basically it’s a smaller guitar, but it’s very full ranged. We kind of designed pick-ups that would make it sound bigger than it is. And then we had to come up with some kind of percussion thing that would work and modify drums stuff. It’s an ongoing process.
So there’s a lot of trial and error?
Totally. Lot of trial and error. And we have a lot more ideas we want to try. The next iteration of songs is going to be very different technology-wise. This is what happens when we’re on tour – we brainstorm and figure out things to do, but we can’t try them yet because we’re still playing.
Does that keep things fresh?
It’s very exciting. The exciting part is that the instruments kind of dictate where the music is going. They tell us how they want to work, tell us how the music is. It puts us off balance in a way.
Do you ever worry you tinker too much because of that?
Maybe, yeah [laughs]. It can get obsessive at times and you have to back off a little bit.
Do you have to rein yourself in a little bit?
I probably should, but I don’t think about it. If you ask Arone, she’ll probably tell you a very defiant yes.