and circuits completed through people touching each other.

This emphasis on personal closeness and gentle care can be seen throughout the band’s aesthetic, from their hand-screened t-shirts to their individually numbered record releases. A good amount of their music can be downloaded for free from their website—after experiencing the sheer ecstatic aural blossoming of their music; you’ll never quite look at electronic music the same way again.

—Jim Fingal

Invisible Downtown

How “Harvard” is this? The three principle members of Invisible Downtown met on a FOP trip. Joseph M. Bell ’03, guitarist and songwriter for IDT, recalls: “I met a lot of my bandmates on FOP. I brought a backpack guitar, and we started jamming. We’ve been playing together since then.”

While most Boston area bands fret over their indie cred, Bell unapologetically proclaims mainstream aspirations: “We want to be big, dumb rock stars. We want to be able to have the freedom to make the records that we want to make and have them heard. We’re lucky in that we like and want to make pop music that lots of people can enjoy.”

Sonically, IDT resemble a number of middle nineties “grunge-lite” acts—Better Than Ezra in particular. But thematically, Bell and collaborating lyricist Michael J. Palmer ’03 channel the spirit of Michael Stipe circa “New Adventures In Hi-Fi.”

IDT keeps in touch with its Harvard roots by occasionally returning to the Quad.

Says Palmer, “There is a small community of bands that still use the sound studio in Pfoho,” which lets him “keep up with [Harvard] student bands.”

IDT’s debut LP is entitled “The Safest Place,” and the follow-up, “The Eighth Grade Talent Show,” is already well underway, with a tentative release date in June.

—Bernard L. Parham

The Indefinite Article

Abe Kinkopf ’04, says of his band The Indefinite Article’s: “We lie somewhere in between straight live hip-hop and crazy whacked-out rock-hop. Someone called us, ‘The Roots on crack, but in detox.’ That someone was me.”

The band, made up of Kinkopf as frontman/MC, with four Berklee students providing the live instrumentation, has been together since November of 2004 and plans on being around for a while longer.

“We all have this band penciled into our lives for the next two years,” said Kinkopf. “I would not still be [...] working a boring-ass job at a publishing company if I didn’t have these guys. I would be writing comedy in L.A. or children’s novels on the shore of some South American country.”