Austin Sound

We wouldn’t ever expect Bill Baird to take a moments rest, even after releasing two great albums this year with Sunset’s Bright Blue Dream and The Glowing City, and we’re excited to hear that his next endeavor will be an album of covers coming out next January. With a nod to Whitman, Baird is dubbing the LP Songs the Sound of Myself, As Written By Others, and it’s a rather fantastic and eclectic offering. Not only does he cover some of his eccentric influences (Robert Wyatt, Bill Fay), but also some songs by his local friends like Mark David Ashworth, Sam Sanford, and Jared Van Fleet from Sparrow House. The album will be limited to 100 handmade copies released on the small NYC label Tired Trails and packaged with poems, photos and other Baird artworks, but the songs will also be available as a digital download. Check out the full tracklist for the album below!

Austin’s shaggy-haired savant Bill Baird loves to unload his lo-fi video visions upon the world as much as he does his music, and to accompany the release of this spring’s Bright Blue Dream, which preceded the recent Glowing City, he has been preparing an entire video set. He hasn’t quite finished them, though according to a recent blog post, thinks that is for the better: “Ironically, all the delay has been good… the videos didn’t affect initial reactions to the album. Funny, off-the-cuff
videos for dark songs might’ve caused some serious cognitive dissonance. This time lapse allows
the videos to be seen as not extending directly from the songs, but more a way to blow off some
creative steam, have fun, and experiment in a new medium.”

The Glowing City, the new album from Bill Baird’s Sunset, is an ambitious sprawling tribute to psychedelic, prog, folk, and post-rock. Attributed to seven musicians plus another eighteen (twenty-one or more if you count Townes the Dog, the guy who recorded street traffic, and whomever played in the Tejano band on the radio next door to the studio), The Glowing City is filled with lush instrumentation and voices that appear from unlit corners. There’s a sense that maybe complete chaos is right around the bend when all these folks are allowed to get together.

At eighteen tracks and almost 80 minutes long, The Glowing City is a difficult album to digest in one or two listens. Like the best parts of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and/or Obscured By Clouds with a dash of Sgt Pepper, Bowie, and Love, this album yields new gifts every listen as the nuances and influences are picked up and peeled away.

To get the “inside scoop,” as we professional reporters say, on the new Sunset album The Glowing City (which is due July 15th on Autobus Records) I emailed Bill Baird asking him if he wouldn’t mind talking about it with me. He agreed, and suggested we do the interview on Google Chat. Unsure of which emoticons most accurately reflected the professional aura of seriousness I maintain when conducting all my interviews, I was at first hesitant, but reluctantly assented. So late one night, after we had each returned home from work (and made a stop by the refrigerator), Bill Baird and I met in “cyberspace” to talk about the two latest Sunset albums, Baird’s lyrical influences, thunderstorms and more. What resulted was, naturally, something of a disaster.

Dreams are nothing like albums. Between the time we put head to pillow and the time we wake up to start whatever monotony the day has in store, we completely submit our consciousness to the will of our imagination. Dreams are highly introspective, at least in my experience. Both people close to me and people that I thought I’d forgotten long ago run amuck in my subconscious; what little “plot” I can discern from them is usually related to the things that are stressful in my life. And what’s more, you don’t have a choice! You’re asleep, and whatever dreams you get are the ones you’re stuck with. Ever tried to coerce your subconscious into a sex-dream? Doesn’t work, does it?

But albums, on the other hand, albums are almost none of these things, especially from the listening perspective (which, unless you’re Bill Baird, means you and me). Listening to an album is looking in on the consciously created artistic work of another, and it’s by your choice alone. But then there’s Bright Blue Dream. When an album drags you in with haunted vocals and harsh rhythms, keeps you at its mercy through 14-minute guitar explorations, and then releases you after an hour or so like a mid-afternoon nap, then you can’t help but feeling like maybe, just maybe, you were dreaming.

The long awaited release from Bill Baird’s {{{Sunset}}} now has a release date, cover, and a pre-order button. The album is called Bright Blue Dream and is due on March 25th on AutoBus Records. For those who can’t wait that long, {{{Sunset}}} is now taking preorders on their Myspace page or in AutoBus’s store.

In his first release post-Sound Team, Bill Baird has joined up with the artist conglomerate label Autobus to produce Pink Clouds, a limited edition 100 copy run cassette tape. Baird is also working on a new CD, currently entitled Bright Blue Dream, which should see release on Autobus in March.

To celebrate Pink Clouds, Baird will be heading west on a short tour, kicking off tonight at Beerland. Baird will be taking to the road with a full six piece band, and the shows will purportedly feature accompanying video that he has orchestrated into a full sensorial experience. Gulf of Mexico will also be playing at Beerland, making their debut with former Sound Team drummer, Jordan Johns.

7/10/07
We almost missed the latest lo-fi production from Bill Baird for his song, “Sandy Says Zombies,” but luckily Gorilla vs. Bear caught it. We can’t pretend to have a handle on the wonderful strangeness that is Bill Baird’s mind, but the song and video seem to be a statement against mindless corporate consumerism and preserving individuality in the face of modernity’s shallow shadow. That’s our take anyway, but judge for yourself below.

Bill Baird, bassist for Sound Team, recently dropped two solo albums on us with Silence and {{{Sunset}}}, the latter of which he has adopted as his perfoming moniker. This track, called “Mister Treadmill,” comes from an earlier two-album set that Baird released entitled Light Blue/Neon Blue and that is now unfortunately out of print.

Baird wanted to share this one with us, and there are more mp3s available on his website. You can also find there a radio session recorded in December. Baird will be playing again in Austin on March 7th at Beerland for the Gulf of Mexico CD Release show, and will be part of a heck of a show during SXSW with all of the Tonewheel Collective guys on March 13th at Progress Coffee.

These two self-released albums from Sound Team bassist Bill Baird were supposedly meant to go together, though how so is not exactly clear. But then trying to make the instrumental Silence! and the acoustic oriented {{{Sunset}}} mesh is a fairly trivial endeavor, and one that it would appear Baird promotes in his characteristically playful/enigmatic manner. Baird seems to allow nothing to be taken too seriously, yet simultaneously infuses everything he does with an abstracted and even aloof sincerity and seriousness that it’s difficult to gage which aspect is actually undermining the other. This is the brilliance and frustration of his two latest releases as well. As if capturing that split outlook, both albums show moments of extraordinary beauty, subtlety and songwriting while also continually pushing the songs (and listener) with experimental turns, occasionally naïve lyrics and an aesthetic that seems to never want to leave well-enough alone.