Bright

by Ted Drozdowski

Little sonic symphonies for the soul are Bright's stock-in-rock. Sometimes the quartet's tunes have words, but usually they're instrumentals played right from the heart . . . or wherever the magic of improvisation comes from when musicians flip an internal switch and just start to play, without any notion of what a piece will sound like, where it will go.

"The best gigs happen by accident, when the music surprises us," says guitarist Mark Dwinell. One of Bright's finest recent outings was last year at the Middle East, where the harmonics produced by the overdriven guitars (often in open-D tuning) of Dwinell and Paul LaBrecque seemed to build shimmering stalactites on the ceiling of the downstairs room, as drummer Joe LaBrecque and bassist Jay Dubois created a spiky underpinning of jabberwocky rhythms.

That was the biggest audience the four-year-old group have played for, though their two CDs -- '96's Bright (Ba-Da-Bing) and last year's The Albatross Guest House (Ba-Da-Bing/Darla) -- and two singles mean Bright's music might reach any number of ears. That's how they got their first album deal. Bright tape all their rehearsals, and a cassette culled from early jams reached Ba-Da-Bing owner Ben Goldberg via a pal of the band who took it to trade at '95's Indie Rock Swap Meet in Washington, DC.

So far Bright's new stake on territory mapped by Glenn Branca, Can, Faust, early Sonic Youth, and other musical magic realists seems strictly a cult thing. Especially lately, since the band have stopped gigging for a spell to complete a new CD for release in April on Darla. But who knows?

"The music sort of determines itself," Joe LaBrecque allows. "There will probably be some pop songs, but we're not interested in laboring over them. New things always tend to come up. It's interesting not having any idea how something's going to sound, and then it clicks and we feel like, 'Hey! We did that!' "