After six years, Be/Non has a new album

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As experimental space-rock masterminds go, Brodie Rush is a pretty down-to-earth guy. The man, whose weirdo art ideas and prog leanings have flavored the act Be/Non since its 1994 inception, turns out to be a nice borderline-innocuous fellow.

When I meet him at his midtown home, he’s in domestic mode: His kid is parked on the living-room couch, wrapped up in a TV show, and Rush is busy calming his overexcited dogs. He offers a wide smile, his eyes warm behind prominent square frames. His hair sticks up on all sides, as though he has been absently pulling at it all day, and he presents more as comic-book nerd in suburban repose than as imposing musical madman. As we walk down to his basement, joined by keyboardist John Huff and bassist Ben Ruth, Rush happily advises me to watch out for the litter of newborn kittens sharing the space.

Rush doesn’t mean not to be crazy anymore. It’s just that his personal brand of insanity has translated lately into a sort of perverted perfectionism. The band is preparing to release a new album, Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic, on Haymaker Records (the cassette version is out next month, the vinyl in early 2016), the first new Be/Non material since 2009’s A Mountain of Yeses. Rush and his comrades have been working on it over most of that gap — allowing, the members explain, for plenty of fussiness.

Ruth and Rush estimate that for each of the 12 tracks making the final cut on Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic, there were anywhere from 50 to 100 versions of each that came before.

“The creative process for this particular record started after we were kind of done playing the last shows of A Mountain of Yeses,” Ruth says. He’s perched on a stool in the cluttered practice room. “We just started by recording ideas — they weren’t necessarily supposed to be songs. And then Brodie would sit down here and figure out how those things would go together. And we just kept coming back to the tracks. This album was like pulling from a million different things and sounds and discovering what was going to stick and stay.”

Rush adds, “We just felt like, you can have a completed song, and it sounds good from start to finish — everyone plays what you decided to play and everyone had some special moments — but it’s just not right. It doesn’t have quite the right feel. So rewriting and rearranging that tune, letting it change into something else, throwing it out, coming back to it — we wanted to let ourselves do all of that.”

It wasn’t until Huff — an on-and-off member of Be/Non since the late ’90s — rejoined the band (for the fourth time) in January 2014 that Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic fell into place.

“When John came back to help us wrap this up, it almost seemed like we had been writing the songs with him in mind,” Ruth says. “He was like this missing piece that sort of tied everything together. It just clicked right in.”

Throughout our conversation, Huff has been absent-mindedly plugging away at a two-layer keyboard station. The room occasionally fills with his eerie, extraterrestrial notes — the same kind that stud Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic. He has known Rush as long as Be/Non has been calling itself a band. This guy, Huff tells me, is his favorite collaborator.

“We’re like psychic twins, kind of,” Huff tells me. With his thick beard, low-slung man bun and black leather vest, he looks maybe two Kool-Aid pitchers away from being a cult leader. “In ’94 or something, I was in this stupid fuckin’ band with these hippie dudes, and we’d get fucked up and play music. Brodie came over one day and hooked up all these Casios and delay pedal effects, and I was just like, ‘What the fuck?’ That was the first time I’d ever seen him play, and my brain was fried ever since.”

Brain frying counts among Rush’s specialties. The music he ends up creating from this spot, at his squeaky desk chair at a computer station flanked with high speakers, is meant to be transportive. Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic, he tells me, was supposed to be a meditational record, kind of. Despite the time it has taken and that original intention (however tongue-in-cheek Rush may be), it’s not a rabbit-hole concept album, some impenetrable prog-rock fortress. Think of Mystic Sunrise/Sunset Magic instead as a starlight drive down a smooth, abandoned country highway to a loosely paneled psychedelic shack from which Rush’s voice peeks out. It’s a trippy 45 minutes but not for a moment dull.

“Honestly, one of the biggest challenges [of Be/Non] has been trying to keep it interesting,” Rush says, “and to make sure people keep wanting to hang out when you’re doing it for free — because none of us have been making money on it — and for zero prestige.” He laughs with Huff and Ruth at this, but he’s not really joking. “We don’t get asked to play good shows with big artists who come through. We do it, basically, for no payoff other than getting drunk and playing shows with people we like. So the challenge has just been, like, ‘What’s it all worth? Why?'”

Rush has earned the right to get a little existential. He’s 38, and Be/Non has been his baby since he was 17. As the project’s sound has evolved, so has Rush’s take on it. (“Your drive to want to get out and not make money on tour and just play for nobody is a lot different at 38,” he says.) Up to this point, Be/Non has never really needed a “why” — and now that Rush is thinking about it, he’s glad to have Haymaker’s owner, Brenton Cook, on his side.

“With Brenton, he’s kind of rekindled the idea that somebody could potentially give a shit and that it might mean something to somebody,” Rush says. “That guy is a savior to Be/Non in so many ways. I never thought we’d get to do this again [record an album]. It’s been such a great thing for us.”