Mat (Cyan), Craig (Magenta), Lauren (Yellow), Ryan (Black)
Influences
BMX Bandits, Tullycraft, Cornelius, Stereolab, Walt Disney, Hanna Barbera, Shonen Knife, The Electric Company, Henry Mancini, Ennio Morricone, Nintendo, Fantasia, The Rentals, Danny Elfman, Two Tone
The Buddy System is an elite team of pop scientists. When one of them has an idea, they all rush to the lab and work through the night to bring it to life. Together, they weave a gentle tapestry of sound and vision, music and animation. Bouncy synths and blazing guitars team up with misanthropic monsters and Satanic horse cults to bring order to the chaos, and vice versa.
But life was not always so exciting for The Buddy System. Lauren Gregg and Craig Sheldon were mild-mannered art school students when they first met. They became fast friends, but it wasn't until three years ago that they joined forces as the Kangaroo Alliance, an animation duo that's brought their vibrant cartoon stylings to television shows such as Yo Gabba Gabba and art publications like Pictoplasma.
After relocating from Brooklyn to Athens, Georgia, they met up with longtime friend and Kindercore co-founder Ryan Lewis to discuss creative pursuits. Ryan had played in a ton of bands – The Four Corners and The Agenda being just a couple examples – and the three of them tossed around the idea of a band where every song has an animation. When Mat Lewis, Ryan's brother and former drummer for DC bands Pocket Rockets and The Max Levine Ensemble, moved to town, The Buddy System was born. They immediately set to recording music, animating cartoons, and booking shows.
Live, The Buddy System grabs the audience by the scruff of its collective neck and throws it into a strange, colorful world where cats can fly and bunnies divide asexually like amoebas. Their songs explode with all the energy you'd expect from the soundtrack to such a wild scene. But maybe "soundtrack" is the wrong word. Neither the music nor the animation take a back seat to the other. Instead, they are inextricably linked, each image synced up with a sound, like the two are playing a game of Mirror and forgot who had been leading and who had been following. The Buddy System stands in the center of all of this insanity, dressed in the colors of CMYK, surrounded by TV sets and glowing, plastic sheep.
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