Buffalo Daughter @ Substation

With special guest babybaby_explores

📸: Buffalo Daughter

Saturday, June 3rd • 7 pm

Buffalo Daughter first bloomed in 1993 and charmed the Beastie Boys enough to get them to release Captain Vapour Athletes on their Grand Royal label in 1996. On and off for the next 27 years, Buffalo Daughter—guitarist suGar Yoshinaga, turntablist MoOog Yamamoto, and bassist Yumiko Ohno (and new drummer Masahiro Komatsu)—have released music that’s possessed an unerring sense of fun and quirky adventurousness. The group’s distinctive electronic pop and funk revel in paradoxes: they possess a knowing naïveté and a nonchalant tightness; they’re off-kilter yet groovy, idiosyncratic yet accessible. Forays into abstract expressionism such as “Baby Amoebae Goes South” and “Vapour Action Forever” reveal that Buffalo Daughter are unafraid to go impudently mad on their analog synths. Time has not dimmed their freewheeling creativity, as their more recent techno-ish releases such as We Are The Times and new single, “Chatbot Baby,” prove.

YouTube video
YouTube video

Providence, Rhode Island trio babybaby_explores distort rock and pop into new, fascinating shapes on their 2023 album Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow. Their spontaneously generated songs feature warped, serpentine guitar riffs by sam m-h, bass lines that zig when you expect them to zag, Lids B-day’s wonkily FX’d vocals, and Gabe C-D’s weirdly danceable drum-machine beats. babybaby_explores’ closest antecedent might be the über-eccentric Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, as they display a similar knack for creating songs that are as inventive as they are catchy.

💌 Be Our Pen Pal! Find out what’s happening in Seattle by subscribing to our newsletter.

Author

Dave Segal

Dave Segal

Dave Segal is a freelance music writer for The Wire, Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard, and other publications. He formerly served as staff writer at The Stranger and as managing editor at Alternative Press. Find him on Twitter @editaurus