Antler Antennas

Table space is a rare commodity at Antler Antennas show. The six-piece Milwaukee electronic/funk/spazz-hop band travels with stacks of keyboards, sound boxes, laptops and electronic gear, more than they can comfortably fit on the keyboard stands and folding tables they bring with them, so for their show Saturday night at the Sugar Maple, they’re trying something different.
“Since we’re always running out of surface area at shows and always end up having to pile our gear, for this show I got this promotional kiosk from work and re-purposed it into this two-sided contraption that lets us stack our gear vertically,” says multi-instrumentalist Sean Behling. “We’re hoping it works as sort of a focal point for the show, giving the audience something to look at while we play. This show for us is kind of a special occasion. We don’t always bring out all our gear, but this show is going to be one of those where we’ll probably have a good two and a half hours of setup, likewise on the tear down.”

This March, the sextet released its first EP, Sidewalk Tectonics. Saturday’s show will celebrate the band’s latest single, “Singular Irregular,” a shifty, spaced-out jam which the band has posted for free onlinealong with eight remixes. The song suggests Anticon in its synthesis of hip-hop and electronica, but its influences are too varied to make that comparison completely clean, and like much of the band's oeuvre, a wiry, punk energy runs through the track.

“Our songs genre hop in ways, so I have a hard time describing our sound,” Behling says. “A lot of them are born out of playing around with keyboards and drum machines and coming up with parts that we like, and them maybe deconstructing them using glitch plug-ins and seeing what happy accidents we can find in the studio. It’s a really rewarding process for us, since it can take us in a million different directions, so it always feels fresh and new. We’re all kind of nerds, so we like the technical aspects of making records, doing sound designs and playing with synths and just seeing where it takes us.” - ExpressMilwaukee.com