Kevin Bronson on October 15th, 2009

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The debut album from Letting Up Despite Great Faults – the tongue-twisting moniker of L.A.’s Michael Lee – is as much a feat of DIY techonology as it is artistry. It’s essentially a bedroom pop record … made in a really high-tech bedroom by a really fussy guy who a couple of years ago trashed everything he’d written and started from scratch.

The album’s fuzzy synth-pop, full of beeps and whirrs and almost treacly melodies, is an homage to the shoegazey side of the Sarah Records catalogue, twee-poppers such as the Radio Dept. and artists in the Morr Music family, such as Lali Puna and the Notwist.

• ||| Download: “The Colors Aren’t You Or Me” and, via Pitchfork, “In Steps”

“Pop songs aren’t that complicated … but I’m pretty critical of myself,” says Lee, whose childhood piano lessons and love for artists which as the Chemical Brothers, the Crystal Method and Orbital induced him to explore the world of synths. “I ended up having some friends who were at Colburn [School of Music], and once I got exposed to them, I realized how simplistic my world is.”

The way his vocals are buried in the distortion, you’d think Lee was a man alone with his vaguely melancholy journal entries. Instead, Letting Up Despite Great Faults is a patchwork collaboration, and the 30-year-old SoCal native gives a lot of credit to bassist/keyboardist Kent Zambrana – “He’s my sounding board,” Lee says – not to mention somebody named Ableton Live.

Ableton, of course, is not a person but sequencing software, and Lee’s entire album was constructed using it – all learned via tutorials found via Google or YouTube. “It took me some time to figure it out,” Lee admits. Adds Zambrana with a laugh, “We’ll be at his house, and I’ll use the bathroom, and on the toilet will be printouts from the Internet on how to use Ableton.”

Chris Gregory and Rachel Koukal, who also play in Lee’s live band, contributed to the album, as did Lorealle Bishop, Amy Izushima, Patrick Staples, Colin Heck and Andrew Lynch. And then there’s somebody named Panda Beach – a fan Lee met on MySpace who lives in Indonesia – who contributes backing vocals on “The Colors Aren’t You Or Me.”

Like a lot of Lee’s creative process, it was a matter of experimentation. Take the vocals by Koukal (Automatic Drawing) on “Our Young Noise.” “It was just, ‘Hey, can you sing over me on this song?'” Lee says. “It totally worked out.: