New Jersey-based Brainstatik is best known for completely-improvised live concerts, where we perform long-form jams combining ambient, world, progressive rock, and space music, liberally shifting and mixing genres within each piece.
Every song is a spontaneous exploration of diverse musical themes, with nothing rehearsed or planned beforehand, so Brainstatik always sounds completely different each time we play.
Brainstatik has been together for 13 years and performs smaller shows in galleries as a duo or trio, or in larger concerts with the current full lineup of five members. Everyone in Brainstatik is a certified electronic gear junkie, each choosing from a huge sonic palette from which to make sounds.
Armed with this complex musical toybox, guitars can sound like drums, keyboards can make guitar sounds, and drums can play keyboards, which often can confound audience members (and sound engineers) who can't quite tell who's playing what part.
Brainstatik's current lineup of multi-instrumentalists includes founding members Robert Burger and Ken Palmer, along with Mike Hunter, Glenn Robitaille, and Jim Silvestri. Click here to see who's played with the band in the past, and here for a little deeper Q and A with the band.
The music heard at their our shows is always organic, with each piece constantly evolving and morphing into something new. Brainstatik can sound ethereal and quiet, complex and orchestral, or experimental and edgy. The resulting performance often sounds rehearsed and composed, but in reality the band has no explanation for where the music takes them at any live show... it all just happens at that moment, almost beyond our control!
The risk of a creative "train wreck" is always there, but the members of Brainstatik thrive on taking our music right to the edge every time they perform. We'd be quickly bored doing it any other way! Listen!