Features

Man At Work: Toro Y Moi

The Sound of Love and Basketball

In early November, Chaz Bundick—aka Toro Y Moi—staged an album listening party crossed with an art gallery show at Brooklyn’s Project Parlor for his latest LP, Anything In Return. The 26 year old displayed 13 pieces of art, which he drew to coincide with the 13 songs on his then-forthcoming record, that the audience could view while listening to each track. “I draw for fun, but I think I could churn out a pretty rad graphite still life if I had to,” he says of his work. “The inspiration was that I wanted an excuse to draw more.”

The Columbia, S.C-born artist, who holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the University of South Carolina, combines his own blend of electronica, chillwave, synth-rock and funk. He refers to his overall sound as something like “love and basketball” and says that in the live setting, the audience should expect his performances “to be loud, more psychedelic and upbeat.”

Bundick first started performing when he was about 15 with his high school band, The Taxi Chaps, “who were really into indie rock.”

For his third LP, out now on Carpark Records, the songwriting and development process occurred mostly in the studio like previous releases, Freaking Out and Underneath the Pine. Some have labeled his music as Afro-Punk—a style made famous by a New York festival of the same name that combines Black culture with a DIY-punk aesthetic, which Bundick performed at this past summer. And on Anything In Return, he meshes his indie influences with a soulful, rhythmic, danceable and poppy synth-based sound.

He says that the Palmetto State will “always be home. South Carolina’s culture affected who I am today, which indirectly affects my music. But, I think I was more musically influenced by things I found in thrift stores and online.”

Though Sonic Youth and “music with synthesizers” are also major influences, Bundick also says that his experimental, stream-of-consciousness recordings and remixes are “mostly inspired by boredom, but a lot of the times, I’ll see or hear something and say, ‘I wanna make something like that.’”