In his home studio in Alameda, composer Brian Baumbusch creates and records music that a friend says is like a diamond because each composition’s structure is so strong it can’t crumble, even when listened to 10 times or more.
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“I write music that’s not difficult on the ear, music that’s pleasing on the surface and internally, inconspicuously complex,” Baumbusch says of his recent album, “Polytempo Music” (othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/polytempo-music). “The average person can listen to the music, and it’s stimulating and beautiful. You don’t have to understand it’s harmonic lineage to want to hear it again and again.”
Baumbusch, like his music, has a complex, poly-influenced lineage (brianbaumbusch.com/bio). He grew up in a Washington, D.C., suburb in a family whose members include an architect, tax lawyer, fine art painter, polymaths and musicians. His parents were supportive of science, technology and the arts and took their three sons to operas and symphonies but also emphasized academics.
Baumbusch says that, playing in the family’s Presbyterian church bell choir, he discovered at a young age that music came easily to him.
“I always had music running in my mind — any ear worm on the radio,” he says. “I took piano, then merged to a drum set, then trumpet, violin, viola, clarinet and finally landed on guitar when I was 12. I was also into sports, was captain of the basketball team and played football. After I injured my shoulder my freshman year, I shifted my attention to music.”
Baumbusch attended and finished high school at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Interlochen, Michigan, earned an undergraduate degree in music composition from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, completed his master’s degree at Oakland’s Mills College and received a doctorate in musical arts from UC Santa Cruz.
His eclectic interests have drawn him in multiple directions: from the extended tracks of REM, Pearl Jam, Sublime and the Grateful Dead to Claude Debussy’s piano music, minimalist and electronic music, Balinese gamelan and other non-Western music. Asymmetrical rhythms, poly-tempos, time-expanded harmonic phases, variable tunings and other features in his work mingle to leave an impression of listening to multiple sound worlds simultaneously.
“When I was 15, I heard the album ‘Buena Vista Social Club.’ That broke open the musical world for me. There’s rhythmic complexity, different structure than Western-based music. It was rebellion in me that made me realize what I’d been taught left out microtonality, alternative tuning theory, anti-academic music from around the world.”
He says a particular interest in the perception of time that began when he was a kid also captivates him and that he could sense exactly when pasta cooking on the stovetop was about to boil over or how long he had been outdoors without timers or clocks.
“I found there is catharsis in music when I tapped into bending time. I make music that shapes time. It’s music you can extend, hear over and over and never exhaust the interest and complexity.”
Another avenue of thought, audience experience and interaction with music, led Baumbusch to consider the visual element of listening.
He taught himself software coding, put on a virtual reality headset, linked into the open-source game development program Unity and explored the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, pairing different instrumental lines with individual colors and movements. Baumbusch says the screen-based software he developed lets a “player” wearing a headset move within his new album and customize the listening experience.
“If you look at a cellist in an orchestra, it aids your ear in hearing that line within a dense texture. Bringing complex music’s visual side into the recorded sphere, I’m helping (listeners) discern all the threads in a way they might not without the visual.”
The interactive spatial opportunity invites the endless revisiting Baumbusch desires for his music. Instead of a fixed situation, a musical work can sonically change as people decide proximity to certain instruments, which instruments are played and other elements. The 12 instruments on “Polytempo Music,” each with their line swirling and morphing in individual colors, can be isolated or recombined. The tracks were recorded separately by members of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and later synchronized by Baumbusch.
“You can’t change the timeline or notes, but you can listen to just the oboe the whole time if you want,” he says. “I’d say you’re the orchestrator. You have creative license for what to emphasize.”
He likes the term “liquid architecture” that’s associated with American animator and inventor John Whitney, referring to music as a malleable shape that moves through time.
“We want to visualize music through dance, graphic scores and other means. Finding this medium where I could move sound around in space — it connected for me.”
For audiences he says the interactive technology demonstrates the full power of music.
“We can revisit a piece of music that connected to emotional peaks and troughs,” he says. “It allows you to take ownership of that and how you want to shape your experience in the future.
“Music that’s fixed to a time period is more limited, like if there’s a singer in the foreground and lyrics that are specific. With other music, there are a lot of types that can not only be a single message but become an experience that can go with you and resonate throughout your life.”
Baumbusch says he has launched a new label, Holography Records, that offers other artists a chance to learn and record their music using the audiovisual technology. Asked if there are musical genres that might be difficult or even impossible to use effectively with the technology, Baumbusch says he is still experimenting.
He mentions a recent demo he made with traditional Iranian music that does have a singer and a band but notes that the compositional architecture is complex and every musical element has unique features that can be manipulated to endlessly create new sound worlds.
“I’m working to figure out what music works because this is becoming my business model — making music you can interact with and move around. Music like Taylor Swift’s, with a lead singer and other things that subjugate around that voice: Would it benefit? I’m not sure, but that’s the learning part of this new record label, so who knows?”
For more information, visit brianbaumbusch.com online.
Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.
