On the wall of the makeshift studio, right next to the egg cartons that the tenants admit are worthless for softening the sound of their recording sessions, there hangs a quote from Wayne Coyne, lead singer of The Flaming Lips, about how music is at its best when it’s sloppy. I would have copied it down word for word, but I couldn’t see it that well in the dim light of a lava lamp. Sitting in a red glow in a DIY recording studio was the traditional way the guys in Backwords listened to their own tunes.

Though it’s obvious this three piece band from Park Slope likes to experiment with sound, sloppy might not be the right word to describe them. Sloppy is more fit for a group that randomly throws sounds together just to get a unique but completely unruly result. Your high school’s most popular ska band was sloppy. Tracks off of Backwords’ new album Quilt feature a local drum circle along side an ancient Casio keyboard and a fiddle player they found on Craigslist, but that’s only one part of the puzzle. Random noise is not the goal, and all random assorted pieces are made to fit, even if sometimes they have to be rammed into each other.

Brian Russ and John Sheldon live on a residential dead end block overlooking Prospect Park with their girlfriends and three cats. Tim Pioppo, the last part of the trio, has been sleeping on their couch while they put the finishing touches on the new album. Even though Backwords is pretty freewheeling when it comes to sampling outside sounds, when it comes to its own instruments, the band members are perfectionists. The day I showed up for a tour of the space, John was obviously running on empty from the previous night when he had to bang out a grueling 36 takes for one song on his drums. It was long nights like this that made having a recording studio down the hall sound so useful.

“We put the drums in the basement and the people upstairs are nice, so they don’t really mind,” explains John on the logistics of home-recording. “Besides, the guys across the street make more noise playing dominoes than our band ever could.” Both John and Brian have day jobs as teachers in Brooklyn and Queens respectively, so by the time they get home for practice they are already spent. “Its nice to be able to walk into the next room and go to sleep after playing all night. It also costs nothing, which is probably the biggest plus.”

The guys that make up Backwords find it easier to talk about their music piecemeal, track by track, than to saddle their band with a specific genre. When pressed, they give a pretty convincing runaround before settling on something close to “psychedelic folk-rock.” Even that seems too restrictive though, what with vocals that sound like they were ripped from a Beach Boys track laying on top of instrumentals that have that charming, lo-fi quality that sounds like it was recorded in a friend’s basement.

“We tried to get as many live recordings of bass and drums as possible,” Tim explains, “that way it sounds like three dudes playing music instead of something really over-produced.”

“It gives this album a more jazzy feel,” adds John, Backwords’ main songwriter, tossing in yet another genre to the mix.

Backwords

June 9, Café Steinhof, 422 7^th Ave. (betw. 13^th & 14^th Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-369-7776; 10:30, Free. Also, June 10 at Lolita and June 14 at Mercury Lounge.