Robin Goodfellow: The Band Named After Some Weird Creature-Thing

Nathaniel Burgundy IV was suited up with jacket and bow tie, his head adorned with a bejeweled, golden pyramid, and he was plugging echo-pedals and synthesizers into the wall.

It was Tuesday and Dave Lawson was holding his weekly DJ night, Tuesday's in the Forest, at the Loving Touch. Lawson invites guests each week to split DJ duties throughout the evening (and last week I was that guest). Burgundy was plugging into the wall because he was about to go on as one-half of the duo Robin Goodfellow -- Adam Pierce being his other half.

They were about to perform a few songs from their forthcoming full-length album.

The band is named for an ethereal sprite, a shape-shifting entity that usually takes the form of a troll-ish being who used his mystical and malevolent powers to bring these two local songwriters together... or so goes the story.

"What to say?" Burgundy said, after performing their song, Susannah, You See Beyond live, last week. "There's so much to say...We really had no choice but to form this band. We were basically told" -- supposedly by the entity known as Goodfellow -- "that we had a choice: form this band OR our lives would be ended prematurely and we would burn in hell, potentially-for an eternity."

Pierce chimes in: "So we said OK."

"But we asked," said Burgundy, "can we just play some noisy stuff over some drum machines."

Apparently that was OK. "We were told our souls would be spared," said Burgundy.

And that's their story, they say.

As for the songs, they are much more than noise. Yes, thick layers of fuzzy feedback and dazzling echo-pedals are warbling the melodies of Burgundy's gurgling synth and Pierce's grated guitar wails, but at it's heart they have a meditative drone-pop sensibility, spacey, mesmeric and owing considerably to the motorik-kick of '70s Krautrock styles.

"It sounds like cows roaming over green pastures," Pierce offers, straight faced, before they start the next song, Diamond Smile, Diamond Eyes, which is available on a recently released cassette EP.

This character Goodfellow, Burgundy said, is "with us at all times."

The duo, in between songs during live shows, will drop hints that this character may actually have six, sometimes nine, limbs with which he may be punching himself.

They're an imaginative pair, to say the least, and that definitely comes through in their music. They just finished an album (with newly-settled Ferndalian, accomplished engineer and fellow musician Andrew Davis) and hope to release it in early spring.

Follow Robin Goodfellow here for the latest updates on the band along with upcoming shows.