Joel Bruner says it all started his senior year of high school in Kansas City, Missouri, when Logan Bay was playing bass in a band covering the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” for a talent show. Bay sent word around that he needed someone to fill in on vocals and guitar, and Bruner stepped up. All the other acts, says Bay, did step dancing and rap routines, but the crowd went bananas for their bad rock ‘n’ roll anyway. A few months later Bruner took off for upstate New York to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on an Air Force Academy scholarship; Bay finished his last year of high school and went on to Millikin University in Decatur. Despite the distance, they continued to collaborate on projects: every couple months Bay would throw a theme-driven house party and Bruner would create a videotape of visuals for the chill-out room.
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“We’re walking the line between artist and designer,” says Bay. He’s opposed to what he believes is the prevailing “sit down and be schooled” attitude, which–he says–allows an artist to think he or she can feed an audience self-indulgent work and attach random meaning to it. “We’re interested in the way stuff is built,” Bay says, “and we’d like to bring people into our perspective.” Says Bruner, “We think buildings dance,” though
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
