For Autolux, obsessions stand the test of time

Getting the members of Autolux to talk about their music in terms of music is difficult. Guitarist Greg Edwards and bassist Eugene Goreshter reluctantly mention a few acts, such as ‘70s German group Can, Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground, but they offer them as examples of comparisons other people often make to describe the trio’s broody noise-pop. As they prepare for a New Year’s Eve show at Spaceland, they are more inclined to talk about nonmusical artists.

“Our music is just as much informed by Dante as by the Velvet Underground, as an observational standpoint,” says Goreshter, 29, a classically trained violinist who was born in the former Soviet state of Moldova and moved with his family to Long Beach when he was 7.

Indeed, the only real musical presence in Edwards’ Silver Lake bungalow is the soundtrack from the David Lynch movie “Blue Velvet,” playing on a laptop computer on a table, and an old toy piano sitting on the floor. It’s the instrument that’s featured in the introduction to the song “Asleep at the Trigger,” which is the most surprising, innocent moment on Autolux’s debut album, “Future Perfect.”

Much more evident is Edwards’ love for literature and film. Goreshter is taking great interest in a collection of writing about filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard that he picks up from a coffee table that also sports works by such challenging novelists as Andre Gide and W.G. Sebald.

Perhaps, the low-key musicians suggest, their approach is more akin to that of many writers and filmmakers -- which might explain why the process of developing the band’s sound and releasing a debut album took nearly five years.

“I read a David Lynch interview about working on ‘Eraserhead,’ which took him five years,” says Goreshter. “He loved the process of living in the set, where there’s no distinction between your life and your art.”

Edwards, 33, adds: “You have to be obsessed. Not everybody is.”

To make the album, though, they found a seemingly unlikely patron to share their obsessions. T Bone Burnett, best known in recent years as the man behind the rustic revivals in the soundtracks for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Cold Mountain,” made Autolux the first signing to DMZ Records, the label he started with “O Brother” filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen. Burnett also produced “Future Perfect.”

An odd match? Autolux’s music is built on Carla Azar’s powerful and musical drumming, Edwards’ liquid guitar shapings, Goreshter’s rumbling bass and the understated vocals of all three -- dark, spooky and gothic. The backwoods-rooted music Burnett oversaw for those movies features fiddles and mandolins and pained, understated vocals for a sound that is dark, spooky and gothic.

“It’s all gothic, it’s all wailing,” says Burnett. “Gothic, strange and beautiful.”

Still, the relationship has less to do with specifics of the music than with the people making it. Azar, who in the late ‘90s was the drummer for the band Ednaswap, has known Burnett for a long time and has played on numerous sessions for him. In 2000 she mentioned that she had been working with Edwards, who met her while his band Failure was touring with Ednaswap, and Goreshter, with whom she had collaborated on a live experimental score for a production of the Dario Fo play “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.”

Typical of the band’s slow evolution, it took some time before the group played a show that Burnett was able to attend. But it took very little time for him to be impressed.

“I went to see them at Spaceland, and there were maybe 30 people there,” Burnett says. “The only direct communication from the band that night was Eugene standing close to the microphone, and he sighed and exhaled. His stage patter was one exhale. But the music was beautiful, the resonance was beautiful -- a raw, young band, but it sounded like there were six or seven people on stage.”

Burnett immediately signed up, and though he likes to keep things moving, he fell into the band’s pace.

“He indulged us, and that’s a great thing,” says Edwards. “He said at one point, ‘I’ll be here till the bloody end,’ and that’s what I loved. He was about doing it until everyone was happy with it.”

Burnett says it was no big deal.

“I view 95% of a producer’s role as support and encouragement, to facilitate,” he says. “Especially with a band like this with a strong vision, the last thing I want to do is shape something. It’s their first record. They get to do what they want to do.”

What they wanted to do was find a very personal form of expression, and that meant taking measures to avoid predictability. Among the first orders of business at the band’s creation in 1999 was for Edwards (who had played bass in Failure) and Goreshter (previously a guitarist in the rock band Maids of Gravity) to switch instruments.

“We decided to switch to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations in terms of our relationships with our instruments,” Edwards says.

That was just one of the bigger elements of what the two describe as “a lot of tinkering” that took place slowly through studio experiments and in live presentations, with much attention paid to film and other visual elements.

“As painful as it can be, as we’ve set this standard of stressing ourselves and being hard on ourselves, it works for us,” Edwards says. “We’ll probably keep going this way -- until we make millions of dollars.”

“Or pesos,” adds Goreshter with a half-smirk. “It’s sonic masochism.”

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Autolux

Where: Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., Silver Lake

When: 9 p.m. Friday

Price: $12

Contact: (323) 661-4380