On Repeat Pushmi-Pullyu

It's nice when a few of Madison's widely scattered music-clusters intersect, and that's why last Friday's show at the Neighborhood House Community Center (just off Regent Street) was so fun. This food-pantry benefit pulled together experimental instrumental rock (The Bilderberg Group, masterminded by Decider's own Joel Shanahan), death metal (a crazy tight set from Dissent And Revolt), and post-punk (The United Sons Of Toil, who put the whole thing together). Better yet, the show finished with Pushmi-Pullyu, the kind of act that doesn't play often in Madison clubs but quietly puts out a lot of work on home-run record labels.

Pushmi-Pullyu, the duo of John Kruse and Corey Murphy, set up their keyboards, laptops, and mics on a table festooned with a string of Hanukkah lights (light-up dreidels and menorahs and stuff). What followed was a fun set of morose synth-pop numbers, but with a careful touch. Kruse, a University of Wisconsin undergrad, seemed a little shy as a singer, but he carried a tune quite well, and both guys stuck to melodies and synth tones that sounded friendly and sweet without turning into kitschy lo-fi Casio-plonkers. Even their cover of MGMT's "Kids" had a sober, patient feel to it.

Kruse's own label, Mine, All Mine! Records, is now set to put out Together, a split EP with New Zealand experimental act The Enright House (who will celebrate the release along with Pushmi-Pullyu tonight with, naturally, a show at Kruse's house). He says Pushmi is a departure from one of his other aliases, [praw], which focuses more on "really ambient type stuff." In Pushmi-Pullyu, he says, "I wanted something with more beats and more actual song structure.... I guess I'm still trying to find a balance between the more poppy stuff and [ambient]."

"Where The Sidewalk Ends" by Pushmi-Pullyu

The duo's three tracks on the release don't necessarily decide one way or the other. The first, "Darkwave = MC Squared" (a cover of one of Enright House's songs), finds Kruse's vocals relatively buried, but under an arrangement of synths and beats that's mostly sparing and uncluttered at the core. "Adding stuff doesn't necessarily add to the song," Kruse says. On the instrumental "Manderly (He Walks Alone)," Pushmi sounds a little like another experimental local band, All Tiny Creatures, beginning with a lone, simple melody line that gradually works in more patterned layers until it almost sounds like a different song. Then it scales back, all in the course of two and a half minutes.

But the last track, "Where The Sidewalk Ends," is the real one to puzzle over. Essentially, it's eight minutes of laptop-tweaked synths arcing and swelling through some implied melody. Kruse's voice is hiding out somewhere in there, and a trumpet and trombone echo up near the end. As abstract and obtuse as all this sounds in writing, Kruse and Murphy maintain some kind of order and grace throughout the track. For experimental music that doesn't seek much publicity, Pushmi-Pullyu's stuff is wonderfully resourceful and accessible.