Laura Barton 

Avi Buffalo: the return of Californian indie

Laura Barton: What happens when you experiment with arty German film-makers, hole up in Laurel Canyon and live in a Long Beach house full of disorganised punks? If you’re Avi Zahner-Isenberg, you write the album of your life
  
  

Avi Buffalo
Avi Zahner-Isenberg: ‘I didn’t want to lose my sense of self.’ Photograph: PR

In the spring of 2010, Avi Buffalo, a bright young band from Long Beach, California, released their self-titled debut album – a collection of precocious, socially awkward, brilliant songs that suggested not only a marvellous pop instinct but also great wit and much promise. Instead of constant touring and a rapid followup, though, the four years since that debut have been filled with a surprising silence.

Today Avi Zahner-Isenberg – the small-boned, 23-year-old guitar wunderkind who is the heart of the band – sits tightly beside the window in his manager’s east London flat, discussing the long-awaited followup, At Best Cuckold. He is a more restrained presence than I had anticipated, with a tendency to greet questions with a neat “Mm-hmm, yeah, totally,” and a few crisp nods for good measure.

This reserve is recognisable in the songs on Cuckold, too; while its terrain feels familiar – warm, Californian, exceptional, impeccable guitars – it seems less pop-driven than its predecessor, the songs never quite blooming into those big, abundant choruses. Call it maturity, or introspection, it works extremely well for a second record. But it does make you wonder just what it was that so chastened Zahner-Isenberg.

“I stopped touring pretty early on,” he explains now. “Because I knew after seeing a lot of people in bands, as soon as they get a little bit of success then it’s just touring, touring, touring and then they start cranking out OK records. I didn’t want to lose my sense of self or happiness, I didn’t want to lose my sense of musicianship. If you’re not feeling good about what you’re doing, don’t do it.”

He went home and recalls “being out of it, just really, unspeakably tired”. He slept, he ate; for the first time in a long while he took care of himself. And then he thought about what he wanted to do.

Zahner-Isenberg was just 19 when Avi Buffalo released their first record, so it seems appropriate that the past four years have largely been spent in the pursuit of an education of sorts.

“I went to school for a little bit – just city college,” he says. “I went there for two months before I dropped out. I did a Latin music class and a recording class. And the Latin music class was really amazing except it was at seven in the morning, and I wasn’t used to getting up that early. And the recording class was great but I had already been recording for a bunch of years by myself, so I realised that I was slightly better off being more on my own. But that was what I needed to do to get back in touch with the fun of music.”

While his brief stint at college had galvanised him, dropping out seemed an equally positive step. “I just knew I wanted to focus on a new record and I knew it would take me a while,” he explains. “I needed to get into it. I needed to write a lot of songs and pick the best songs out of it, and also just get better at recording.”

Zahner-Isenberg lights up when talking about the technicalities and intricacies of recording; he mentions several times his original ambition to be an LA-based session musician, and you can see how the studio delights him. “I like that you can take your time with it and you can just get totally lost in it,” he says.

With the fun of music rediscovered, within a couple of months he had produced enough on his own to fill three or four long, experimental albums. “I was just recording a ton of stuff that was pretty much completely inaccessible but a good sketchpad, and a way for me to experiment with instruments and sound collage – a lot of synthesisers and loopers, drum machines and guitars, and imagine maybe later on I could put that into a song.”

Simultaneously, Zahner-Isenberg was navigating young adulthood — “living out in the world” is how he puts it, juggling social life, relationships, work and home, working out where best and how to live.

He recalls the varying influences of that time, the effect of friendships and location, the frustration of living in a houseshare in Long Beach “that was really disorganised, a shambles, and I was like: ‘How am I supposed to work on my shit here?’”. A friend invited him to live with her in Laurel Canyon, a place big enough to house his music equipment and removed enough to let him concentrate on songwriting, and the songs that were unleashed. The “amazing friend, who was studying literature,” told him he should be writing songs every day, “going somewhere and writing a shitload”, he explains. “She kind of commissioned some of these songs.”

It’s an approach he still takes today. “It feels good to tell yourself to write a lot,” he says. “It’s being productive, getting stuff done. I feel like if you write a lot, it doesn’t matter what you use or not use – all that work will still go into a different song that you’ll write.”

It feels heartening that after the exhaustion and disarray that followed the first record, it was music that restored Zahner-Isenberg. “Writing music, making music has always been an escape, the whole way through,” he says. “That’s why I got into it, it’s very therapeutic and cathartic. It helps me to get in touch with myself, to write songs.”

But he also takes a more long-term approach these days. “I think more about longevity now,” he says. “How to maintain personal musical stamina. That’s important. How I can keep pushing myself. I’d like to make a lot of music: my own, other people’s. I really want to work on composition and scoring, do session work and collaborate with songwriters and pop artists – I feel that collaboration is one of the most beautiful things in music, and the more the better.”

He tells me about some of his recent collaborations: scoring a German art film, working with Kevin Litrow of 60 Watt Kid, the friendship with a choral singer friend in Minneapolis to whom he sends his music “in its rawest form”, and a project in which he recorded two friends dancing on a hardwood floor with four microphones in a rectangle around their feet. “It was a really cool, gratifying project,” he says, “we performed it at an art museum in LA.”

Today he is back in the same “super-disorganised punk house” in Long Beach. “A lot of friends live there,” he says. “One guy who’s a sound engineer and a guitarist – he’s always mixing albums for people in his room. And my room-mate, Jeremy, is a really good guitarist – he’s really creative. And Tiffany who lives across the hall, she sings in bands. There’s a lot of people to jam with all the time. It’s exciting and stimulating, always waking up to music happening.”

I ask if it’s sometimes overwhelming – all these collaborations and projects, all this stimulation and music right outside his door. “Yeah, totally,” he nods. I wonder where he goes when it all gets too much. “I like to drive down the coast to Laguna Beach, late at night sometimes,” he says. “It’s where all the rich CEOs and ex-acid people live – Timothy Leary and Dr Seuss lived there in the 60s. There’s something left there. And there’s this cave that I’ll sleep in there.”

He thinks for a moment. “Oftentimes, if the place you’re living in feels disorganised and crazy, the best way to focus is to turn that chaotic energy into something creative,” he says. “You can always find escape. And music is always a good place to go.”

  • At Best Cuckold is out now on Sub Pop. Avi Buffalo tour the UK from 3-10 October, avibuffalomusic.com.
 

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