Avi Zahner-Isenberg, the birth name of musician Avi Buffalo, has spent the last nine months composing and recording music in and around his hometown of Long Beach, California. By no means has he spent that time cooped-up in a studio. Instead, Buffalo’s been grinding away onstage as well as off with a constant stream of shows in the L.A./Orange County area with his new project, Litronix, which plays the Funzone in downtown Santa Barbara on Friday, April 22, along with a solo set by Buffalo. The Santa Barbara show is the only stop of Litronix’s mini-tour of the California coast with Avi Buffalo’s solo act on the bill, so it’s a special occasion.
Litronix started out as the solo project of singer, multi-instrumentalist, and beat-maker Kevin Litrow. Before Litronix, Litrow was a member of L.A.’s 60 Watt Kids, a surf pop-meets-Animal Collective-meets-Ty Segall psychedelic rock group, and Dance Disaster Movement, a brooding, fast-paced experimental EDM duo with post-punk overtones. Litronix is a much lighter, equally ’80s-influenced project incorporating layers of glowing synths with random vocal effects and Buffalo’s meandering guitar weaving a chaotic web of melody.
Buffalo expressed that he was always a big fan of Litrow’s music, and their partnership began two years ago. “I first started recording his music with my own recording equipment,” Buffalo said during a recent phone interview with The S.B. Independent, until the two hit it off musically, “and then we started finding other people to record us, and [produce] the new Litronix album together.” The resulting record, titled Pump the Gas, is set to be released “in the next three to four months is a reasonable guess,” according to Buffalo. Though Litronix was originally Litrow’s project, Buffalo was given free rein over the record’s production along with producer J.P. Bendzinski.