Luis Berrizbeitia, guitarist of Bloomington duo Rese Tips, said he likes when he looks down at his guitar and sees his cuticles bleeding.
The band’s drummer, Joseph Komari, has finished a show with blood-coated hands and drums scattered across the room.
Some bands, Komari said, might halt at an instance of injury or destruction — “Hold on, everyone, we’ll redo it.” But for Rese Tips, that physicality — something of a primal element — is an essential aspect of its music, Komari said.
The duo plays a technical but noisy brand of math rock, a genre named for its affinity for unconventional song structures, time signatures and tempo changes. Berrizbeitia and Komari said they want the listener to feel their music.
“We kind of want our music to be this, almost like you’re in a maze, but you’re not necessarily lost,” Berrizbeitia, a junior, said. “Well, maybe you’re in a maze, but you know exactly where you’re going. It’s this controlled fall, where there’s these different aspects, and you’re opening all these rooms and it’s totally different.”
Berrizbeitia and Komari formed Rese Tips in May as an outlet for songs Berrizbeitia had been writing. In the six months since, they said they’ve tightened the screws on the project, turning early, noisier performances into precise tightrope walks.
And though they know their music still isn’t conventionally accessible, the duo said it’s been rewarding to play for people who might not listen to math rock normally, especially as part of the local house show scene.
“Sometimes, at worst, a party can make it so that whatever you play doesn’t matter; people are going to have fun anyway,” Komari said. “At best, it can make it feel so much more alive ... And the same thing with people who aren’t dancing. At worst, they could not care, and at best, they could be soaking it all up.”
The duo has also had the opportunity to play for varying crowds, Berrizbeitia said. Its student status and musical credentials means it plays shows within Bloomington’s collegiate-oriented indie rock scene, but its inaccessible music and DIY values have led them to shows within the punk scene, too.
Really, the band doesn’t “fit in” anywhere, but for a relatively new band still looking for a foothold, that can be helpful, Berrizbeitia said.
Now the duo is working on writing songs for a debut album. It’s about halfway through writing it, Berrizbeitia said, and the process is collaborative, with Berrizbeitia writing riffs with some structure and Komari, also a guitarist, working with him to refine them into songs.
“I find it really important to keep that dynamic in the band, because a lot of Bloomington bands, it’s like one person writing everything and then dishing out the parts, which is fine for some people,” Berrizbeitia said. “There’s just two of us, so it requires a very intimate connection. I think we’ll write the best music that way, because I value what he puts in.”
Komari said he and Berrizbeitia don’t think about their own “sound” as a band, but the music just seems to cohere. Their own musical sensibilities combine with their disparate influences, including the frantic math rock of Hella, the nervy post-hardcore of At the Drive-In and Fugazi and the hypnotic rhythms of Animal Collective.
And even in the short time since Rese Tips formed, they’ve learned to only accept their best work, tossing out early material and keeping only some of the fruits of their summer writing sessions, Berrizbeitia said.
Two weeks before they enter the studio for the album’s first recording session, Berrizbeitia said he’s thinking about what he’ll pack for lunch that day; he wants to be in the perfect physical and mental space to record.
Now they’re working on stringing it all together and writing songs that take listeners on a ride without overwhelming them.
“Structurally, how can you bamboozle the listener?” Berrizbeitia said. “Which is what I think adds to the excitement of it all. It’s just going up and down, side to side. It’s like being stretched in all these different ways.”
The duo said more than anything it wants to be memorable and to make people notice and think about the physicality of its music and performances. Komari said he’d much rather people be disgusted by Rese Tips’ music than have no opinion of it at all.
“I don’t necessarily want to make music that is just like cool to dance to and freak out to,” he said. “I want to get inside people’s heads. I don’t think about that actively, but I know I want that to happen. I think about it in live performance ... I notice we’re trying to create a certain energy, a certain feeling that will get inside your head. That’s something that I care about.”
