Brick+Mortar Add New Dimension to 2-Man Band

By Jim Testa


When Brandon Asraf and John Tacon started making music together a few years ago as Brick + Mortar, they had no intention of duplicating the dynamics of two-person rock acts like the White Stripes or Black Keys. It all just kind of… happened.

Coming out of the guitar-centric Asbury Park music scene, fans really didn’t know what to make of this bass and drums duo with the weird electronic samples. But their high-energy performances, as well as a relentless performance schedule, quickly won over a devoted following.

“For us, the goal was never, let’s do this trendy two-person band and people will take us seriously,” Asraf says. “It wasn’t really ever a conscious decision. I had never been in another band, and John has been my best friend since like eighth grade. He was playing drums so he was like, Brandon, learn how to play bass, and I did. And then he quit the band he was in, and we’d just start playing improv. We’d get together and just improv together and jam for hours and hours. We actually tried for a while to have someone else play with us, and it just didn’t work, because we were so synched. We just have this rapport with each other where it’s just super-fast and it’s like we know what the other guy is thinking. And there’s no emotions allowed; we are not allowed to get upset at each other. The way we work is that each of us just says whatever we feel, because that way we know we won’t something that you both feel stinks.”
”We started calling ourselves Brick + Mortar about two and a half, three years ago,” Asraf adds. “We had been playing together for years before that as this instrumental group, we played all the time, but we had no plan, and it was all instrumental so it wasn’t very popular. But then I started teaching myself how to sing, and we started figuring songs out, and I was like, let’s just release an EP and see how people react to my vocals. I wanted to see if I could write something that I care about, and see if people would relate to it. And they did.”

“So I said, okay, let’s do some more songs and see if we can generate enough buzz to get to the next level, and really get to tour, and maybe record an album,” Asraf says. “And that led to hooking up with MAD Dragon (Records), which is kind of a bigger deal with some PR behind it.”


Brandon Asraf

MAD Dragon, based at Drexel University, offers a unique program that allows students to learn the music business by actually running a record label. Brick + Mortar will be releasing a 7-inch EP as part of MAD Dragon’s “Making Moves” series, curated by the band Motion City Soundtrack.

“We’re like the Frankenstein of the Jersey scene right now,” Asraf said. “We do stuff, we make records, we book tours, but we don’t sound anything like the other New Jersey bands we really like. I think we’re just one of those bands that’s going to have to figure out how to do it our own way. We’ve got some buzz, I guess, but we don’t really fit into the kind of a category where a legendary rock ‘n’roll booker or a legendary punk rock band is gonna hear us and say, ‘Yeah! I’m going to plug you into all my contacts! We just don’t fit into that kind of thinking. One song’s rock ‘n’ roll and the next song’s… not. I love what we’re doing, and we have this circle of friends that we play shows with. But when we play with those bands, we hear their fans say, well, I like this kind of music, and you’re not like that. I’ve never been in another band, so I really don’t know how that works. But it seems like all these other bands are sharing contacts and booking agents and whatever and we just don’t fit in.”


John Tacon

Asraf explains that a Brick + Mortar song will start with his vocal. “Then I add bass and John adds drums, and then I just sprinkle on top sounds that I thought were good,” he says. “I think the way we work is more in the way people would do old dub, where they’d just take a basic groove with singing over it, and then just add different samples and sounds. And I think that’s where our reggae/dub sound comes from. I don’t use a computer or a synthesizer. I’d just put sounds into a sampler and add them onto a track, and see if it sounds good. Originally it was all super-experimental, it was a very organic way to do it. We never had the idea that we wanted to sound like a certain other band or record. And that’s still pretty much the way we do it, we just know more now. I don’t need to spend three hours making feedback with a microphone now to get the sound I want, I pretty much have figured out how to do it. We’ve definitely been mutating in different ways since we started, but I guess that’s what every band does.”

Brick + Mortar just released the song “Other Drugs” via Filter Magazine, which can be downloaded for free here . The band’s Making Moves 7-inch EP will be released by MAD Dragon Records on June 19.