BEIRUT ~ Biog

www.beirutband.com

While Beirut may sound like a full Balkan orchestra playing upbeat marches and hymns to a lost homeland in the form of 3-minute pop songs, Gulag Orkestar is in fact the work of one 19-year-old Albuquerque native, Zach Condon. Recording almost entirely at home, Condon (armed with horns, violins, cellos, ukeleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congos, organs, pianos, clarinets, and accordions) created a rich, antique soundscape to underlie his own deep-voiced, distinctly modern vocals. The end result resembles some ragtag gypsy ensemble elegizing a lost-- and timeless-- European heartland.

Though young, Condon is no stranger to songwriting. At the age of fifteen, under the name Real People, he recorded an electronic album inspired by his love of the Magnetic Fields. A year later, influenced by Frankie & the Teenagers, he crafted an entire doo-wop album. An intense commitment to music contributed to his decision to drop out of high school at the age of sixteen and travel to Europe-- a journey that was to provide the direct genesis of Beirut. Drinking heated wine with accordionists in smoky Leipzig attics and playing trumpet on the streets with members of a wandering Parisian band exploded Condon's musical horizons. Even more memorably, the record collection a homesick Serbian neighbor blasted at odd hours of the morning proved an entry into the world of Balkan brass and gypsy music when Condon knocked at the door one night, curious to know what it was he'd been hearing dimly through his apartment walls. Returning to the desert of New Mexico, he brought back the lush arrangements of this foreign and exotic world and began recording a song every day, naming them after paintings and dead cities.

Condon recorded most of the tracks on Gulag Orkestar in his bedroom in Albuquerque, but this past winter moved to Brooklyn and booked time at Sea Side Studios in Park Slope. There he was joined by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost (of A Hawk and A Hacksaw), who added additional percussion and violin harmonies. The resulting record resembles a Neutral Milk Hotel born behind the Iron Curtain, sweeping and glorious, steeped in the melodies of the Old World yet undeniably immediate and new.