Ghostland: population 2

At the Austin Music Hall, observe for yourself how success hasn't changed Austin's hit synth-pop duo

By Joe Gross
XL MUSIC WRITER
Thursday, February 21, 2008

September 2006.

Audiences at the Austin City Limits Musical Festival are blown away by Ghostland Observatory singer Aaron Behrens in his tight pink T-shirt and Willie Nelson braids, braying like Freddie Mercury. Behind him, Thomas Turner wears a big blue vampire cape and twiddles knobs. Is this a punk-rock band? An electronic act?

It seems impossible to believe that something so brash, so outre, so wrigglingly alive, could come from a town known for its devotion to the guitar, to the earnest songwriter, to the noisy garage punk.

Overnight, Ghostland becomes the talk of the town. Of course, some were already veterans of the duo's $5 shows at Emo's. The buzz was there, but it was the quiet mumble of hipsters rather than the holy-cow-look-at-this roar it became after the ACL set.

December 2006.

A mere three months after their ACL gig, the band performs "Ghostland at the Opera," a sold-out show at Hogg Auditorium. Laser lights, opera seating and $25 tickets. Five bucks to $25 in less than a year — not bad.

The Ghostland snowball is heading down the hill, fast.

July 2007.

The band tapes an episode of the Austin City Limits TV show, a performance that was released on DVD in November. Everyone assumes that Ghostland, like scores of bands before them, will make some changes to further their career. They will get a new booking agent. They will sign to a bigger label (or in their case, sign to a label at all). They will start letting other people do some of the heavy lifting for them.

February 2008.

In most ways, Ghostland Observatory is operating exactly the same way it has been since the band started six years ago.

Turner hails from Fort Stockton and did some time in Dallas. "That's where I first experienced electronic music and just thought, 'This is it,' " he says. He arrived in Austin in 1997, throwing raves here and there.

Behrens is from San Saba, about 49 miles north of San Antonio. "I grew up with all kinds of different stuff," he says. "A lot of Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Hendrix and the Doors and Steppenwolf. I also really liked dance music like Prince and James Brown and Elvis." It's shocking (shocking!) to find out that he was a ham. "I always liked performing and being in front of people, (being) a clown," he says. "In high school, I got into Rage Against the Machine and Deftones and System of a Down, a lot of screaming, a lot of teen angst."

Behrens played in the hard-rock band Dismount before starting Waking Helix with drummer Andrew Hamra. The two placed an ad for a keyboard player, which Turner answered.

"Thank God he did that," Behrens says, with no irony whatsoever.

By the end of '02, Thomas and Behrens were writing songs together. They ditched Waking Helix for a fetal version of Ghostland Observatory. They fiddled with the format, adding and subtracting members, moving from more traditional pop rock to electronic dance. By 2004, their transformation was complete, the Ghostland idea boiled down to its core elements. Turner manipulated keyboards and sometimes played drums. Behrens had turned from a hard rocker to a soul explosion, sometimes playing guitar, sometimes just prancing around stage, fooling a whole mess of people into thinking he was a girl.

"I was always trying to find my voice, but I was tearing it up all the time," Behrens says. "I didn't get in touch with my feminine (side) until I got to Austin. I got a little Queen, saw how Freddie Mercury did. A lot of it was just letting go of myself more instead of being so uptight."

The band's first full-length album, "delete.delete.i.eat.meat," arrived in 2005 on Turner's Trashy Moped Recordings. "I always wanted a label and just figured I could crack the code," Turner says. "Paparazzi Lightning" followed in 2006.

These days, they're still self-releasing their records on Trashy Moped (although now they are distributed by the powerhouse Alternative Distribution Alliance). Ghostland's new album, "Robotique Majestique," is out Tuesday.

They're still booking themselves — but now they're selling out the Austin Music Hall and doing two-night stands in Seattle. Everything is the same, just scaled up.

"Thankfully, it has been working," Turner says. "When it works, especially in today's music business, you best leave it alone. I think it comes down to that I'm very particular about all the details and, you know, it's worked so far, so why change it?"

The band is still making music the same way, as far away from computers as possible. Turner remains obsessed with analog synthesizers. "Maybe even more so now," Turner says. "I don't use computers. I'm just comfortable with using sequencers and synths. Some people are comfortable with laptops."

What success does afford them is time. They recorded "Robotique Majestique" in Turner's father's barn in Liberty Hill. "We spent a lot of time on the production on the natural echo and natural room sounds," Turner says. "There was a definite mood that tied it all together."

"Each record is a time stamp of when the first song was written to the last," Behrens says. "I didn't play a lot of guitar on this album, but that was just the way it was moving."

And though Ghostland might now be able to pay more attention to recording their electro-rock, they're a synth duo whose primary focus seems to be the live show. In fact, they built their rep as a live act, which makes sense in Austin, a town obsessed with how bands throw down on stage. The band's Hogg show came complete with a massive light show, looking as much like Pink Floyd as, say, Suicide. Of course, sometimes it doesn't translate. Even hard-core fans were disappointed with the band's Oct. 16 gig on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." Frankly, it looked like karaoke.

"It was an interesting experience," Thomas says diplomatically. "It sounded fine from where we were on stage, but the way bands come through on TV, it doesn't ever bang the way it should."

Both Turner and Behrens are pretty sure this won't be a problem Feb. 29 at Austin Music Hall, where they'll play in front of 4,000 of their closest hometown fans.

"It's going to be crazy," Turner says. "The live show is a release."

Of course, if you saw these guys at Emo's or ACL or Hogg, you expect nothing less. Some things shouldn't change.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926