Kevin Bronson on December 4th, 2019

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In 2015, when Avi Zahner-Isenberg announced the end of Avi Buffalo, he said that although the band life was not for him, he would continue making music and maybe even release some, joking that “I will probably honestly be 40 or 50 when that happens and extremely fat.”

Well, the songwriter-composer-producer-guitar whiz is still only 29, and he’s looking mighty trim in recent photos on social media. And this week brought a new (and jaw-dropping) Avi Buffalo song, “Skeleton Painting,” a epic 6 1/2-minute journey through the hallowed halls of orchestral and prog rock. The scope is Floydian.

To rewind: Avi Buffalo burst out of Long Beach (reluctantly, as it turned out) as a teenager, hailed as a prodigy. In 2010, he released a self-titled album for Sub Pop, followed by “At Best Cuckold” in 2014. Both earned deserved acclaim. Since he checked out of the band life, he has dabbled in ambient and improvisational music, collaborated with artists such as Litronix and Ari Prado, toured Europe and pursued painting. He’s also playing in the new band Sink Drinkers.

“Skeleton Painting” was some two years in the works. It was recorded in living rooms and various studios, including the Lab Studio in Highland Park (with Frankie Siragusa engineering) and Woodshed Music in Long Beach. Production comes courtesy of DeRock Tucker (who also played bass) and Dave Andersen, and the lavish arrangements feature strings by Meg Webb and woodwinds by Dave Dillon. Mark Chalecki did the mastering.

Says Zahner-Isenberg:

“I wrote this song while I was working on a painting, which is the one I ended up using for the cover art, and I actually just needed to take a break from the painting. And while I was looking at it, I wrote the chord progression of the song, then the following night the lyrics. Next, I arranged it and recorded it with live musicians. I wanted to include different things musically that I’ve been inspired by lately, such as folkier, warm guitar stuff, also blended with more rock motifs/fuzz, then to get specific with the solo section having it’s own chord progression, my old friend David Dillon on clarinet (he’s on both my first and second albums) and finally an orchestra-sounding layer of Meg Webb on violin and cello.

“Lyrically, I was also inspired by the painting, working off of these layers and layers of skeletal figures, representative of the collective experiences across generations of personal love and loss, and dynamics of individual experiences versus a collective experience. Also, like lots of my songs, I don’t really know what they’re about all the time, I just write what feels good and spin off on lots of tangents and ideas real or imaginary. It was a pretty abstract piece but I felt inspired to try tying it together with musical motifs and have it be sort of a ‘few songs in one’ kind of approach production-wise, too. Thanks to Derock Tucker (bassist, producer) and Dave Andersen (engineer, producer), I was able to really feel happy with it at the end, as it was a lot to mix, and this was also our first production ever together, so I think it turned out sweetly!”

Dense lyrically and complex yet warm sonically, “Skeleton Painting” feels like some sort of thesis, a song that begs to be read as well as heard. Here’s hoping we hear more.

||| Stream: “Skeleton Painting”