Local Music Q&A: Campfires

Virtually all of local rockers Campfires' songs are drenched in thick layers of noise, with guitars buzzing and crackling. Meanwhile, frontman and band founder Jeff Walls, his voice bristling with static, navigates the crumbled surroundings.
 
Walls, 26, who records solo under the Campfires name (the project expands to a trio for live performances), discovered a fondness for these scraggly lo-fi recordings as a teenager in Kalamazoo, Mich. Utilizing two boom boxes, he'd rig a makeshift studio in his parents' basement. Working alone, he'd hit record on one player and lay down a keyboard track. Then he'd play back that tape, adding guitar atop the keyboard as the second machine recorded. By gradually repeating the process, he was able to compose dense mini-symphonies.
 
"As you went back and forth, the guitars would start to sound a little like My Bloody Valentine," says the Logan Square resident. "When I started recording digitally [as a student at the University of Michigan], it sounded way too clean. So I had to figure out other ways to get back to that [sound]." Seated in Lincoln Square coffee shop The Grind (4613 N. Lincoln Ave.), Walls discussed the group's lo-fi aesthetic, playing hooky in high school and why Weezer is dead to him. Kinda. Click here to read our full interview.

Listen: "Stormy Late Fall"

What do you think of Campfires?