Tipsy

Brought together through a mutual passion for experimental music and noise, the lounge-collage duo Tipsy emerged in San Francisco with Tim Digulla and David Gardner at its core. Gardner had previously collaborated with sonic manipulators such as PGR and Big City Orchestra, while Digulla had launched noise experiments on a walkman during junior high under the moniker No One. He sustained those explorations within the San Francisco noise scene, where the two first met at a warehouse sound event. Drawn to the remix potential of early easy listening and lounge music, they launched Tipsy and captured 1997's Trip Tease inside the Bloody Angle Compound, the recording studio belonging to their label Asphodel. The album fuses contemporary and vintage dance rhythms with the aesthetic of '50s and '60s easy listening to form a surreal musical confection, and three singles appeared: Flying Monkey Fist/Space Golf, Space Golf/Nude on the Moon, and Grossenhosen Mit Mr. Excitement. In 1998 the duo lent their avant-kitsch sensibility to a remix for Pulp's This Is Hardcore single. Following a two-year absence from view, Tipsy resurfaced in late 2000 via the Hard Petting single, signaling a tighter, less lounge-oriented direction that carried forward into the second album, Uh-Oh, issued in early 2001. The members pursued separate endeavors, among them commercial music, before regrouping in the studio during 2005 to begin work on a third album. Recording wrapped in fall 2007, yet the resulting Buzzz surfaced a year later on Ipecac Records.