Music

Buke and Gase's Handmade tale

by Nicole Villeneuve

Buke and Gase have a band name that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Named after the homemade instruments that make up the foundation of their sound—the buke, a mutated baritone ukelele, and the gase, a guitar-bass hybrid—the first question is almost always inevitably about those handcrafted oddities. The bonus is the attention it draws to the control and the process; the downside is that it can feel like it’s reducing the duo to a novelty.

But the Brooklyn duo’s sound is much more than the sum of those parts: loud, frantic, warm, and, at times, with singer Arone Dyer’s vocals, downright beautiful. The Fugazi leanings of their music betray the seeming cutesy crafts-fair tween-ess of making your own instruments.

We spoke with the duo after their deceptively complicated soundcheck in Toronto to talk about their excellent new album General Dome and, since we’re only human, their buke and gase.