Oct. 11, 2010
J.P. Niehaus, Avalon Manly
On Saturday, Oct. 16, Colorado Spring’s own Edifice will be playing a free show at Clyde’s to release their new record, “Arc Mentis.”
The band’s release will be covered live by 94.3 KILO, a popular local rock station.
Ryan Lewis and Joshua Baumgartner, lead vocals and guitar, and backup vocals and drums, respectively, started the band in 2003. Brendan Brossard, also a Denver native, joined the band in 2005 with his talents on the war guitar, a unique instrument consisting of a six-string bass and a six-string guitar, all in one. – a rather intimidating-looking instrument, to say the least.
In 2007, violinist and cellist Adrian Johnson joined the band, completing the foursome.
This combination of talents holds the promise of good solid rock with a mix of new style that is a breath of fresh musical air.
Lewis and his fellows chose Clyde’s as the venue for their release party with great deliberation.
“We have a lot of friends here at UCCS and we wanted them to be able to see us play and it offers an intimate setting on a small stage that is nice,” he explained.
Another reason behind the choice of venue was the personal involvement of half the band here at UCCS.
Johnson graduated from UCCS with a Master’s in computer science and works during the day as a computer programmer.
Lewis is curently enrolled as a Computer Science major, and he plans to break into the field of bioinformatics – a fancy term for the software used in medical research.
The band toured for the first time this summer, when they travelled through Illinois, Missouri, and Colorado playing in well-known rock-spots like Rockford and Grayslake, Ill., near Chicago, and a college campus in Trinidad, Colo.
Lewis, who booked the tour, described it as “a big learning experience, like four guys being married to each other.”
Music, for the members of Edifice, has always been a way to escape reality and dream a little, and they use their work to “grow as [people],” expounded Ryan.
The band’s melodic undertones and deep lyrics are meant be “a vehicle for individual and collective growth for the audience,” said Lewis.
Lewis runs a musical side project apart from Edifice, called the Color Zero (tc0).
Lewis uses tc0 as “a projecct to explore and exploit the various eccentric characters and exotic lands securely encrypted within this grey matter called my mind….where sense and nonsense are made manifest in the audible and occasionally visible wavelengths.”
On tc0’s website, Lewis lists band members as himself, the couch (with contributions such as “inspiration” and “bad posture”) and the coffee table (“laptop stand,” “cat magnet,” “green tea holder”).
The music Lewis produces alone is possessed of a somewhat darker, more synthetic feel than Edifice’s work.
Edifice seems best classified as crossing between the boundaries of alternative and ambient rock.
The band compares itself to the styles of bands like 10 Years, Oasis and Staind, though they value their own harmonies and musical philosophy as original.
Violin, guitar and a multiplicity of drum patterns run strongly through Edifice’s songs, as if Buckethead, Yellowcard and Spill Canvas had all been put in a blender and made into the smooth, deliberate sounds of Edifice.
The Rundown
What
Edifice Concert
Where
Clyde’s
When
Sat., Oct. 16 @8 p.m.
How Much
FREE