Artist Profile: Twelve Point Buck
Twelve Point Buck, the Australian-based band, has been led in its genre-oscillation by the ever-evolving ideas of its frontman, Dad, since its inception in the late high-school bedroom fuzziness of its founder, and, since, has made its name intertwining the eviscerating guitars of post-rock with the lo-fi saturation of the last decade’s most prolific indie acts, constantly pursuing a north star embodied by an amorphous and ambiguous sonic landscape.
While Twelve Point Buck as a concept did not begin until its founder’s adulthood, its roots were formed through his teenage DIY experimentations. Although he did not grow up in a necessarily musical family, with very few stark memories from his childhood being tied to music, his discovery of music and instrumentation, when it began, took hold of him in a way that very few things have the capacity to do.
At a New Years’ party, when he was 16, Dad was pushed to choose a resolution, and, on impulse, he copied one of his friend’s: to learn guitar. Accordingly, he went out and got an electric guitar, spending the next year compulsively learning chords and, eventually, full songs. Yet, where most people would allow the habit to slowly fade out of their lives, Dad only became more obsessed.
When he had breaks from school, he would play up to 12 hours a day, and, at one point, he even began sleeping with his guitar by his side in an effort to become more familiar with his instrument.
While he views many of these efforts as rather cringeworthy and juvenile now, they indicated one very important thing; once music came into his life, it was here to stay.
“My understanding of music and guitar was [that] you make music; you don't necessarily play and become virtuosic or something like that. I mean, you could if you wanted to, [I was in the mindset that] making music is the thing you want to do and you don't want to taint your own. I think it is very foolish, thinking about it nowadays, because I think all art is mimetic, like a Plato quote: ‘All art is mimesis’. I think he's supposed to be saying it in a bad way, but I think, in a very good way,all art is mimesis.”
As his understanding of music and its place in his life grew, so did his desire to push the limits of the sounds he could create and the sonic ambitions he could pursue. Slowly, the original lineup of Twelve Point Buck began to form, and, as they recorded songs between various studios and Dad’s own DIY set-up, the makings of a deeply unique sound were given life.
In the course of these experimentations, Dad has a stark memory of one of the band’s first times in a recording studio, during which, while attempting to get the “right” sound out of a pre-amp he was using, he continued to pump the gain further and further. While the audio engineer warned him that it would clip, he kept going until he had achieved an approximation of the sound he wanted, disregarding convention and instead following his own sonic compass.
“In my head, it wasn’t like I would go to this volume and then it's clipping and that's bad… I think maybe that experience, that idea of recording or listening to things with your ears rather than looking at the cutoff level of a knob or the cutoff level of a frequency spectrum analyzer, j [taught me the importance of] just being you.”
From their first album onwards, through shifting lineups and sonic evolutions, Dad has remained the band’s primary sound engineer, ever evolving his bag of tricks and oddities when it comes to actualizing the sounds he has formulated in his mind.
While, at first, many of these creative recording practices were undertaken out of a lack of budget, they slowly consumed Dad’s creative consciousness; they became the ideal way to bridge the gap between the idea and the final product.
Almost all of his vocals for the Twelve Point Buck have been recorded on a dictation microphone ripped out of a trashed radiogram he found on the side of the road, and, often, he will still opt to use microphones such as SM57s in place of more expensive equipment.
On the group’s last record, Loud Music for Quiet People, this willingness to work outside of the box in pursuit of a distinctly inimitable sound was more evident than ever. From its stunning opening to its somber conclusion, and through the atmospheric and spoken interludes that tie the album together, Dad’s creative fingerprints, buoyed by the group’s current lineup, sit heavily on top of the chest-striking sounds and saturated atmosphere of the record as a whole.
Yet, this is by no means the result of a dominating or overbearing spirit. It is, instead, the creation of a singular and driven creative vision: one that has granted Twelve Point Buck its status as an almost one of the most idiosyncratic musical acts surging out of the Australian rock scene’s resurgent moment.
“I've read some very funny genre descriptions of what we are… but I like that there's like a debate about what genre of music we make. I think that's pretty funny, or at least encouraging, because the ethos is to kind of just make music that we like and not necessarily to be like, ‘We make X genre of music, and so we must be beholden to that’. Then, when you release your third album where you reject the standard, the masses revolt and think you don't sound like your old stuff anymore.Hopefully we just never sound like anything”
