SXSW 2012

Beat Connection’s members – the duo of Jordan Koplowitz and Reed Juenger – met in summer 2008, in that first youthful flush of “hey wait, I don’t live with my parents anymore...” and began making some late-summer-appropriate house beats in Garageband. Studying avant-garde composition and working at a local radio station, Juenger realised that melody, verses and choruses exist in pop music for a reason: high-brow-experimental-self-referential-sound- sculpture was no way to get the ladies. Years passed, and they moved on from Garageband, started DJ-ing; things went full circle, their tastes changed, they started writing more music, paid some bills with DJ fees and bought some better equipment. By the summer of 2010, aided by friends and lovers, including featured vocalist Tom Eddy, Koplowitz and Juenger were sweating it out in an attic studio, walls coated in soundproofing lifted from a college radio station. Tracks were refined and polished, friends were dragged in to listen over and over again to tiny segments of music that wouldn’t make the cut. They had a few epiphanies: realising that the flow of an album really enhances each song, they applied the knowledge they had gleaned from the dancefloor. They borrowed some nostalgia. During this time, ‘Surf Noir’ transformed from a labour of love into an essential soundtrack reflecting the anticipation for the summer months when everyone cuts loose.