The Cooperage hosted a delightful trifecta of all-local music on Friday evening featuring Jacob Slade, Will Pfrang and the Good Land Gang, and Blacktop.
Blacktop is the indie pop project of Austin Wood. His style incorporates elements of surf and folk with an abundance of dreamy, atmospheric textures. Tracing his origins of making music, Wood recalls, “In high school I started doing video and photo stuff for my older brother’s band, and eventually I started playing keyboard for them. Their bassist quit so then I learned the bass, and it just kind of progressed into writing and recording my own stuff from there.”
HOMESHAKE, Hermanos Guiterrez, Khraungbin and Crumb are among Wood’s biggest influences. There is no deep meaning behind the name “Blacktop”; Wood just thought it sounded cool, remarking, “I love when artists just have short, two-syllable monikers.”
Blacktop’s most recent album “Gardening is a Practice, Not an Idea” dropped in September with the deluxe edition recently released in February. Describing what he wanted to do with this record, Wood shares, “The first thing I ever put out as Blacktop is not on streaming services but it was a lot of synthpop, and for a while I found myself deviating away from that sound and going more towards lo-fi bedroom pop, which is kind of what I did with “Sun Room” (2022). With this new album, I wanted to take that idea from “Sun Room” and build more into the production. I mixed and recorded everything by myself at my home studio so it was definitely an adventure.”
The album’s name is a reference to Buddhism, as Wood continues. “I’ve been getting pretty into spirituality over the last few years, and the title is a quote from a book by a Buddhist monk who passed away two years ago named Thich Nhat Hanh called “Heart of the Buddhist Teaching.” It’s like an intro for people who are interested in Buddhism and it was pretty eye-opening for me. The quote uses gardening as an analogy for working on yourself and how you exist in the world, where if you want to reduce the suffering that you experience day to day then you have to put in work.”
Wood has been taking a step from writing new music in order to focus on refining his live set. Currently he plays with Jordan Taylor on guitar, Jacob Olson on bass and Jacob Slade on drums. Blacktop is at Company Brewing on March 23rd and Cactus Club for MKE Music Night on April 23th.