Andy Brawner began Time Since Western as a solo project, but after making most of 2008's A Sun Goes Down by himself, he came to see bedroom recording as his pitfall. Brawner, who lives in Milwaukee and works in Madison, doesn't consider himself a singer-songwriter or an engineer, though he certainly experiments with both roles. He looks back on A Sun Goes Down a tad critically, but its tunes hold up with an unassuming ache, a healthy mix of straight-up guitars and spacious, reverb-tinkering sounds amidst popularized and overrated lo-fi static. Other musicians fleshed out Time Since Western as a live band for a while, but Brawner's back to playing its shows solo, in Mark Kozelek's Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters fashion. Last year he recorded two new songs, "Dizzy" and "Fire Gone Lee," at Chris Walla's studio in Portland, and he'll be sharing more new material when he plays this Sunday at The Frequency. (He also shares his less-polished audio experiments on a MySpace page called Time Since Whatever.) Brawner sat down recently with The A.V. Club to talk about his new tunes and reigning in his sonic whims.
The A.V. Club: How do you keep something from sounding lonely when you're doing it by yourself?
Andy Brawner: When I made the record, there was a lot of abusing certain machines. That whole record was recorded in a bedroom that was a square, I don't know, 10 feet by 10 feet, with drywall and carpeting. It's not a good-sounding room at all. I think I did fairly good job of obscuring the reality of that space by using reverb and tape delay. I think I ran whole mixes through tape machines to get tape delay, to the point of feedback. There are things on that record that sound kind of like dub stuff to me.
AVC: You used some effects on this record, like the guitar feedback deep in the background on this record.