SYMBOL & SURFACE

Symbol & Surface is the product of two brothers and two friends intersecting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Brian (guitar, vocals, keyboards) and David (guitar, vocals, banjo) Bauernfeind are separated in age by three years and a good number more in degrees of personality.  The songs of Symbol & Surface are bridges they have built to connect and the crossing of the space between them has yielded music with an uncanny sense of clarity and purpose that can only come from two persons with a shared point of beginning.  Stefan Kuhl (bass) and Matt Decker (drums) complete the Symbol & Surface collective and bring a greater focus and power to the songs’ inherent clarity.

The quartet completed its first release, Brothers, in the fall and early winter of 2011.  The five song EP blends acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, banjos, bass, and drums in an introspective push through the reverberations of faith and love on the walls of the mind and heart.  But the songs show direction in their movement through emotional confusion.  The record is not another apathetic lamentation of disillusioned youth but the sound of reaching and nearly grasping purpose and meaning.

Brothers is an offering of a band wise beyond its years.  Recorded and mixed in David Johnson’s Minneapolis home studio, Johnson and the young band have produced a first release with uncommon maturity in both quality of production and musicality.  At its release show and other venues throughout the Twin Cities, Symbol & Surface have exhibited the same level of maturity and polish in their powerful live performance.  The journey forward for this group can only be marked by things greater than those they have already brought into the light. 

-Written by John Nielsen of The Cloud Hymn

• BandSoup: Hot One of the Week
• First Order Historians: 5 Questions w/ Symbol & Surface