Buke & Gase is a duo from Brooklyn known for playing made up instruments like the buke (a six string baritone ukulele tuned up to not be baritone anymore) and, you guessed it, the gase (a guitar-bass, notably not a bass guitar). It gets better, so try to keep up: their names are Arone and Aron. Another Aaron, Aaron Dessner of The National, saw them performing in a basement in 2008 with their Frankenstein instruments and immediately signed them to his label. They are beloved by NPR, across multiple radio shows, and played one of the earliest Tiny Desk Concerts. Between 2013 and 2017, they were radio silent and presumed defunct, but were actually just in upstate New York writing loop software for their arcade button invention Arx. Their sound is rooted in a simple question: how much noise can two people make?
The answer is a lot. The album represented on this playlist, and the one I’m most familiar with, is General Dome (2013). Their post-Arx records are rooted in collaboration with artists like Sō Percussion and Bryce Dessner, but the earlier stuff is pure Arone and Aron, functionally an echo chamber of the strangest rock music you’ve ever heard. Their Bandcamp bio says that they “improvise and edit down the results until only the grooviest parts remain.” It would seem there are many groovy parts. If you close your eyes while you listen to this performance of “Houdini Crush,” you’d think there are at least five people playing:
I’m fascinated by this duo because I liked them immediately, despite being unlike anything I had ever heard before. I was probably fourteen years old, sullen and perpetually angsty, squarely in a soft indie phase, insufferably snobbish about my music taste—General Dome spun my head all the way around. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the hooks singable, but they are catchy and intriguing, like textured fabric is to the hands. I kept returning to “Houdini Crush” and “Hard Times,” songs with lyrics more fun to say than to understand:
Beyond the regular rectangular
Forced in burgeoning come closing in
But still a serious experience
You stay out all night
I made this playlist this time last year. General Dome seems to function in my life like any of my obsessions, reappearing with great gusto for a few weeks and then receding again. I’ll have it on heavy rotation for the rest of January.
Helena Deland’s “Truth Nugget” has been a major influence on me since I first heard it in late 2020. It often lands at the top of inspiration playlists for the future sound of Bike Lane; I want to make something like “Truth Nugget,” an indie song gilded with the sharp edge of guitar processing, electronic drums, and weird sounds. The song is about distance in an intimate relationship, the impossibility of ever closing it.
Watch me do my makeup and hair
While you make up hypotheses out of thin air
I am another solid mystery when it comes to you
Michael, I'm the puzzle in the other room
I love Helena Deland’s honest perspective on Someone New (2020). She writes about feeling old and irrelevant in the music industry, about never being able to get it right as a woman—too young, too sexual, too eager, too mature, too deep. Her voice is soft and small, speaking its little truths. It’s arresting, the way she seems to look right at you. “Truth Nugget” especially feels almost confidential:
Festively clothed, we'll shed layers and expose
The naked landscapes of our minds
We'll crack open our minds
I’ll take a minute here for Mitski, who has just exited retirement. She had intended for her iconic 2019 Central Park show, the final stop on her tour of Be the Cowboy (2018), to be her last one ever. Fame, especially the ways that it creates an illusion of entitlement and intimacy on the part of the fan, was weighing on her. She was ready to disappear into Nashville, of all places, and to have been a musician, past tense.
She is returning to us, thank God, with Laurel Hell (2022) instead. I feel so personally lucky, as a Mitski fan who has yet to see Mitski live, that she did not really retire. And yet, if she had receded into the ether of normal everyday people, I would have deeply respected that she wanted to quit before she destroyed herself and her relationship with music. I suppose we all have to make a similar choice at some point, when we find out that the thing we love most is consuming us, that we’re becoming worse for the ways that we love it. Mitski went through hell and back again to give us this album—I can’t wait.
"I was probably fourteen years old, sullen and perpetually angsty, squarely in a soft indie phase, insufferably snobbish about my music taste—"
That sentence is completely--and sadly--relatable I was a jerk to way too many people whose only crime was liking some band I thought only belonged to me.
Buke and Gase are new to me. What a cool, otherworldly sound!