The Sound Museum

When music is in your life from the beginning it is easy to decide to grab some buddies and start a band. Well that is how bands that don’t really leave the garage or the basement get started…and….end, however this story has a different outcome. Unlike the high school band you grew up hearing your father talk about these two are making a name for themselves. To be honest they accomplished more by 8th grade than your fathers band has accomplished as of today. Sure the two have picked up a couple guys along the way to becoming a band but seriously can you have a band with just a guitarist and a drummer? I guess…but isn’t better with a bassist and a man on the keys…OF COURSE!!!! The group I am referring to is The Sound Museum, now sit back and enjoy the ride.


Bill and Bart are the nucleus of The Sound Museum, the two of them have known each other for quite a while and were playing shows in eighth grade at high school dances (remember what I said above about your father’s band). The two have played any show offered to them and any form of music asked. As true musicians they just want to play, Bart and Bill have played coffee shops, festivals, restaurants and traveling to different cities. Bill and Bart met Zack while in the eighth grade and entered a High School Battle of the Bands, and won. After much backlash from pissed of bands for losing to a mixture of high school and grade school musicians Bill and Bart already had some confidence. Bill and Bart met Gordy in high school. Now that we have met all of the parts of The Sound Museum (Bill, Bart, Zack, and Gordy) lets get back to what they have accomplished together and where they are going.

The current Sound Museum has really only been playing as a group for a couple months. That being said through different projects these band members, save Zack and Gordy playing together, have played many a show with one another. Bill and Bart before adding their two bandmates decided to put together an EP, which did two things for these young men:

1. Gave them the platform for which to stand and say “We are a band, her is our CD.”
2. By putting money forth, mentally moved playing music from a hobby to potential career.
The two of them now have a sense of who they are as a band and have physical media to hand to those interested in hearing them. With the EP and the addition of Zack and Gordy the band has started to see some doors open to them. Rome Ntukogu set them up to start a show at Mainstay Rock bar downtown featuring The Black Owls out of Granville, OH and the CEA’s Best Rock band The Kickaways. In March 2012 The Sound Museum will be the house band for MOTR Pub in Over the Rhine. When I asked the group to describe their music I was given multiple answers but I think the best came from Zack.

From what I have heard[of the songs Bill and Bart laid out on the EP] if I described our music it would be like if Pink Floyd, Radiohead and the Flaming Lips had a love triangle and spawned a child it would be us…


The fact that The Sound Museum doesn’t want to be locked down to 1 genre of music allows them to be free creatively and all four members can put their “2 cents” in on how the music sounds. There is very much a King Arthur and the Round Table feel, without a ‘front man’ they all call the shots. I asked the group why they don’t have a singer for the band and it isn’t because they don’t want one as much as it is one hasn’t fit the mold of the group. That hasn’t stopped The Sound Museum from succeeding. With or without a singer this group will continue to preform at a high level, there are only big things ahead for these guys.
Do yourself a favor and get out to see these guys play.
Cheers, - William

Back in 1997 during that one fall I attempted to go to graduate school I was introduced to Isotope 217's album The Unstable Molecule and it completely caved my brain in and demolished my thoughts on music. It was a completely brilliant fusion of instrumental styling's that brilliantly expressed the feelings and emotions I tend to go through in the fall. In the years after that I would return to The Unstable Molecule ever fall, something about it felt so appropriate, right up there with starting up smoking again and picking apples.

As with most things, time eroded the power of the record and a few years ago I started looking for new instrumental albums that incorporated these elements of jazz, rock, classical and brought them together into a meld of cold beauty.

In 2008 it was Sylvain Chauveau's Nuage, in 2009 I dove into the menacing noir sounds of Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore and last fall I was obsessed with the masterful work On Velvet by Grimace Federation.

Recently, while cleaning out my hard drive, you see my nature is to purge, I hate clutter and every few weeks I have to get rid of the stuff that causes clutter, even if that clutter is digital files. It is a bit of a mental block for me.

Anyway, in the process I came across the self titled EP by The Sound Museum, which I remembered enjoying quite a bit but due to getting sidetracked by something or another I never got back to it. The Sound Museum are fucking epic in the way that the fore-mentioned artists are epic. A beautiful fusion of alt jazz, ambient sound and psych rock that meanders through your heart like a slow walking group of high school kids that you want to punch in the back of the head for being so much cooler and better than you will ever be again.

The layers and layers of sound slowly melt into each other forming a bedding of imagery that helps transport you out of your ho-hum existence into a place where cardinals hang out with flip cams to film your fantasies about three ways with Halle Berry and your old 2nd Grade teacher Ms. Andersen who though a little older and heavy set, still smelled like cheap flowers and pinched your cheeks in a way that made your 2nd grade nub wax and wane with the tide.

I have found my fall album for 2011 and it is the self titled EP by The Sound Museum. - Tim Baker, Syffal.com