"While there’s elements of electro-pop in his sound, that description doesn’t do the guy and his fascinating music justice. ... Over the course of his set, Turner employed a dizzying array of electronic sounds that provide percussive layers of texture, which complement his vocals. Turner can sing. He doesn’t fake it or try to make inept singing interesting; last night he was solid and so was his set."
-- Westword, July 30, 2008
Nuts + Berries plays and programs songs about an American West strewn with designer fast food joints, open-air malls and mazes of subdivisions. Armed with his trusty laptop, electrotroubadour Brad Turner performs infectious ditties adorned with uncannily organic digital harmonies.
The result sounds like a mishmash of the quieter, quirkier songs of Joanna Newsom and Talking Heads, the analog electro pop of Kraftwerk and Laurie Anderson, and the sugar buzz of jukebox staples from half a century ago.
In Turner's home studio, Nuts + Berries songs bubble to life from a handful of rickety samples recorded through the laptop's pinhole microphone or ripped from a box of audition tapes discarded by a community orchestra.
Onstage, Turner croons while he tweaks the clicks and chirps that pour from the computer's output jack, reshaping the songs during each show.
"I love performing with the laptop," he says. "I'm like a conductor. I have a basic arrangement worked out, but I can stretch and twist every part of it. I can let the sounds breathe or I can make them go berserk. I'm always a click away from derailing the whole song, so it's a huge rush as the music unfolds."
Outside of Nuts + Berries, Turner also contributes bass guitar and synths to Denver-based dream pop outfit The Bedsit Infamy, which released its debut album on Banazan Records in April 2008.
We are playing a show together. That is good. We should make it that we are literally playing together. That would be sweet. Can you do live electronic improve?
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