About Swirlies
Swirlies is an American indie rock band formed in Boston in 1990. Since their first records in the early 1990s, the band has released studio and home recordings that blend shoegaze and twee pop with electronica and lo-fi music.
Swirlies released five studio albums between 1993 and 2003. The band have since assembled to tour occasionally with a roster of musicians led by founding guitarist/songwriter Damon Tutunjian.
Guitarists Seana Carmody and Damon Tutunjian met in Spring 1990 through mutual friend Rusty Nails, a punk fanzine publisher who wanted to start a Go-Go's cover band. Formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tutunjian, Carmody, Nails, and drummer Jason Fitzpatrick learned two songs before abandoning their original objective in favor of writing originals. Under the name Raspberry Bang, the group released one song on a 7-inch record compilation to benefit animal rights.
In November 1990, Tutunjian's high school friend Andy Bernick was enlisted to play bass and M.I.T. student Ben Drucker was recruited to play drums. The band began writing and recording songs characterized by shifting tempos, loud vibrato guitars played through numerous effects pedals, Tutunjian and Carmody's melodic vocal interplay, and occasional bursts of screaming and other noise. They completed their first 4-track demo in December 1990, and played their first show on January 25, 1991. Because of the band's practice of alternate guitar tunings, Bernick took to playing tapes or static from an old AM radio to fill time while Carmody and Tutunjian adjusted their guitars.
In 1991 Swirlies made some 8-track home recordings, which saw issue as the band's debut single "Didn't Understand" first self-released as a cassette and then on 7-inch vinyl by Slumberland Records. A split double-single with Boston noise rock band Kudgel followed, and the group entered the studio to record another single and compilation tracks for Boston's Pop Narcotic label.
In 1992 the band signed to Taang! Records and released the eight-song mini-album What To Do About Them culled from a mix of previously available and unreleased home and studio recordings. Musician/cartoonist Ron Regé, Jr. contributed artwork to the album's cover as well as lo-fi recordings that were woven into the record's sequence. The band also set to work recording their first LP, around which time shifts in Swirlies' personnel began to occur. Ben Drucker only drummed on a third of the new album's studio tracks, and for the remaining songs his parts were handed over to a pair of session drummers. In January 1993, Andy Bernick departed to pursue ornithology for the remainder of the academic year and Damon's former roommate Morgan Andrews was brought in to fill in on bass guitar and assorted noises. It was this lineup that toured to support What To Do About Them and that appeared in the video for "Bell" from Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, which had already been completed but was not yet released. Named for an obscure piece of vintage musical equipment, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton made use of Mellotron, Moog, and other analog artifacts that the group had unearthed in the studio. During sequencing the band threw in numerous lo-fi compositions, soundbites, and rants, and collaged together an album jacket from arrays of found images and objects that matched the album's eclectic aesthetics. Hailed for melding "the high waters of shoegaze creativity and the mounting currents of indie rock", Blonder Tongue Audio Baton quickly rose to prominence in the American noise pop canon.
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