Building Pressure and Crafting Time: Syncronos Redefines Live Electronic Music
Syncronos is a musical collaboration of two people: Colby Davis and Todd Pruitt. I heard their debut EP, There’s a lot of Pressure in the Building, shortly after they released it in August this year.
The two-man band weaves together synth pads, crisp guiding melodies, improv solos, innovative drum beats, a tasteful touch of live flute, and a bass sound that gets one in touch with their body’s natural resonance frequency. Their music is made modular by the power of their linked Ableton setup and sequencers that they expertly manipulate to recontextualize different musical parts on the fly.
Syncronos takes the listener on a contemplative journey with each song. I had the privilege of sitting in on their latest rehearsal and heard some of their newest yet-to-be-recorded material. I effortlessly danced, stopping only to take photos. Afterward, I interviewed Todd and Colby.
Todd Pruitt and Colby Davis of Syncronos / The Evergreen Echo
Samuel (S): How did you meet? When did you guys first start playing together?
Todd Pruitt (TP): It was between my Korea tours, so it was between 2003 and 2005.
Colby Davis (CD): We knew each other briefly before we started playing music, but he's a bass player, and I'm a bass player. So we bonded over that.
TP: Yeah, I used to play exclusively bass.
CD: I was really into jazz throughout and after high school. I was in a jam rock band called Beecraft. It was very Phish-y. Very like jazz, rock, improvisation. I knew those guys since high school and played with them for years in Spokane.
TP: And then you were roommates with Sean [Gross], who I was friends with, so I'd come over and hang out with Sean and met you guys—you had musical things in the house, and we jammed together.
CD: Yeah, you played a gig sometime in the early 2000s at the Church of Bass place.
TP: Yeah, the place called Church of Bass. It was like an old warehouse building, and this guy who was a burner type had shows.
CD: Then we played with a group called Madly in Dub for years.
TP: And then this.
CD: So it's been like a number of different—
TP: —iterations—
CD: —and incarnations of it over the years, but we've known each other for over 20 years now.
TP: Yeah, a lot of jamming for fun and just recording things for years before we started performing.
S: Did you guys have a favorite piece of gear growing up that sort of held you through tough times?
CD: I think the bass, for me, did that. I definitely had lots of dramatic time where I worked it out on the bass.
TP: I had an Ernie Ball Music Man bass that I loved.
CD: I had another Fender Jazz Bass. Same thing. I loved it. And I sold it and then I had to re-get one in memory of the old one. They're nice, they're fun. They're beautiful.
S: Technology has done amazing things for music. It continues to remove barriers between people and what they want to express artistically. Are there any limitations that you insist on despite this?
CD: Funny, I had a whole bunch of those limitations. I wouldn't touch technology until I met [Todd], and you were doing the looper [stuff]. And I was like, oh, whoa, that's cool.
Meeting you and seeing what you did with just a simple looper pedal and a bass. Wow, that was mind-blowing. I was like, well, maybe technology isn't that bad. It’s kind of cool.
TP: I was kind of the same way—just that analog band person for, you know, ten years of playing. Someone brought me to an Oracle gathering, one of Michael Manahan’s early iterations. That was the first time I saw that kind of party happening with electronic music, people doing live things with electronic music. And I was like, whoa. That’s when I got my first looper pedal and a laptop and first started making things.
CD: After meeting you, then I got into records and trying to figure out how they did hip hop and how they made beats and trying to sample records.
TP: I think you turned me on to Ableton.
CD: Yeah. We got it so that we could sample records because it was the fastest thing that could—
TP: Make little loops.
CD: We just play records, make quick loops, make quick beats off of the loops, and then record that. And some of it was terrible. Some of it was like really fun. It was like, wow, that's funky. Wow, that's cool.
Okay. This is how they do it. And it was mind-blowing. Yeah, just playing it and messing around.
TP: Letting yourself sound like crap, just to see what it sounds like.
CD: With a mixer and two record players, we had, at that point, at least a thousand records.
TP: Oh yeah.
Todd smiling as he tweaks sounds / The Evergreen Echo
S: What are the points of failure in the system as complicated as this? And how do you guys deal with that on the fly when things go wrong?
TP: You just kind of get good enough at jamming on whatever's in front of you to pivot and make it work. One Cascadia [festival] we played in the Dream Dome. It was super hot and humid in this big dome. So hot that your computer overheated and wouldn't start up.
CD: Yeah.
TP: What did we do?
CD: I had just bought a drum machine.
TP: [And he] just like, makes up a new set on this new drum machine.
CD: Stressful.
TP: In front of a pretty good crowd.
CD: Yeah. At a festival where we were super stoked to play.
TP: It totally came off great.
CD: And that’s when I thought I’m not going to use a computer anymore. When we're here [rehearsing], I use the computer. When we play live, I don't have to take one in. We keep changing. We've gone through so much gear.
TP: Just altering setups to see what works best for playing together and getting good sound.
CD: I think we each want to be able to do certain things. And then they keep coming up with better gear that will do that. So you kind of have to migrate to whatever—
TP: It’s like upgrading yourself: one plan yearly. You just kind of make it a part of your technology budget!
S: You want to do different things together. What does that have to do with the name Syncronos?
CD: Things work in synchronicity, right? They're melding perfectly. You're not getting in each other's way.
TP: I like the Khronos time reference, too.
CD: Syncronos: ‘With time.’ Which is what music is, right? Music is like the art of time. It's like you're decorating time. Because it only exists in time. Like you look at a painting and the painter did it, right? But it doesn't occupy [time]; you could look at it for a second or 10 minutes. It's the same with a song, but really, a song will take you on a journey for an amount of time.
