Austin, TX experimental musician Roger Sellers, AKA Bayonne, is somewhat of an outlier in the local scene. In a city filled with pearl snaps, guitar licks, and love songs (not that there’s anything wrong with those things!), Bayonne creates cavernous ambient soundscapes. Don’t be mistaken though, this isn’t the meditative music of Brian Eno. From his throne in the ambient clouds, Eno would probably throw a thunderbolt down at Sellers for his disregard of the first commandment of Ambient music: “It should be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
The new Bayonne record, Primitives, is from far ignorable and more than interesting. Sellers’ puffs dense clouds of sound with his spacey falsetto, looped piano melodies, synthesizer textures, a wide range of arpeggiated tones, sonorous acoustic percussion, and plenty of pop sensibility. It sounds like the love child of Phil Collins and Phillip Glass. As horrifying as that creature would probably look, that kid would make some beautiful music.
–Ryan Wen
