Tucked away on the beachside strip of Surf Avenue stands Peggy O’Neill’s. It’s a pretty average South Brooklyn bar, its main traffic coming from those needing a break from the Coney Island boardwalk or grabbing a beer after a Cyclone’s game but it has a certain local flare; with outdoor seating, cheap well drinks, 20 ounce pints of locally brewed Coney Island Lager, and a stage that seems to inevitably invite bad tribute bands and buzzed patrons to let their freak flags fly taking part in karaoke. So after setting up his amp and plugging in his guitar, Adam Kastin was surprised to see a close friend running toward the stage, his face covered in blood. Adam couldn’t have exactly known what was happening at the time or why the people crowded around the octagonal bar would feel the immediate urge to fight once his band took stage, but he must have had some sort of clue.
A fairly democratic brawl had broken out, a pissed off audience was riled to beat the shit out of the performers for making music they didn’t understand, and Adam and band-mate Brandon Wulle would spend most of their night waiting at Coney Island Hospital, the worst injury another band had gotten being a shattered skull. Naturally, the sore crew recouped by getting liquored up all night before attending Sunday morning mass at a local Bay Ridge Catholic church. “It felt good,” Brandon and Adam agreed.
For the past two years, Adam and Brandon have been making music under the moniker Colour Buk, creating a sort of music the two could only define as “classic,” or “raunchy”. Natives of Levittown, Long Island they feel disconnected from the area’s music scene filled with “Pay to Play” venues and what they described as “overprivileged kids playing…regressive forms of emo”, “mostly trying to cash in on the success of [L.I.’s] Brand New.” Between the two twenty-somethings, they use a shortwave radio, multi-presence delay, signal generators, tapes, vibrators and guitars – among other things – to create what feels like a wall of hell. Seeing them in the basement of Silent Barn this past August, the few bodies that occupied the small basement seemed to stretch as the music pervaded obnoxiously, yet the two parties making the noise seemed calm and composed. Colour Buk is a dirty wave, a gaseous combination of dionysian energy and fart jokes that leaves you deaf and drained. And for most “noise” enthusiasts, this is quite exciting. It isn’t designed to piss people off, “I’m neighborly,” Brandon admits.
Yet out of the few times the band has performed live, they have amassed blind hatred out of those persons probably expecting a tribute band to perform. At a gig at the Delancey in Manhattan, the two were heckled throughout their performance by a girl fronted rock’n roll band until their equipment was unplugged. On his way to the bathroom after their set, an older Irish man approached Adam and told him that if he ever “did that to a guitar again” that the old man would kill him. But in their short existence, Colour Buk has already tapped into the periphery of noise big shots such as Pete Nolan of the Magik Markers & Spectre Folk (just to name a few), Megan Remy of US Girls and even avant-garde luminaries The Residents. It seems some people are getting it, and Colour Buk has to realize this. After a recent show, they were asked by a member of the audience if they like Red Crayola, to which the two could only reply, “No, we like Carol King.” Subversion of their audience’s expectations – whether intentionally or not – seems to be a common thread for Colour Buk, who scream “DIY sucks”, “The Fall Sucks” in their infrequent use of vocals. But whether genius or just plain fucking with people’s heads, the two plan to play out more, to release new material – including a 7” tentatively titled “Once a Woman, Never Again”, and mostly just to do as they please – as Brandon says, “shitting the shoot”. It hardly seems that Colour Buk is even remotely vying for mainstream acceptance, perhaps a symptom of growing up in Jesse Lacey soaked cultural entropy, yet Adam couldn’t help but smile as told me of an attractive Russian woman who approached him at the end of their set at the Delancey. “She told me that our music cured her of sadness,” Adam grinned, “we had a moment.”
Download Colour Buk’s Live In The Well
