Sound Team

Sound Team was an American band based in Austin, TX. Several of the band's previous and current members--including Bill Baird, Michael Baird, Will Patterson, Jordan Johns, and Sam Sanford--attended Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, TX, where they played music in several different loud ensembles. Oliver attended High School in Houston and in Paris, briefly. Eventually they all ended up in Austin.

Bill Baird and Matt Oliver met in Austin in 2001, when each was a sideman in one of the many pick-up groups playing the beer-joints around town. A rocky partnership was formed, and they immediately began recording crazy songs on cheap gear that drew inspiration out of everything from traditional American folk and pop song forms to German synthesizer music.

In 2002 Baird asked his younger brother Michael, Michael’s friend Jordan Johns (both of whom were still in high school at the time), and his old friend Sam Sanford whether they’d like to make a band. After they had played a handful of shows in various performance spaces and punk dives, Gabe Pearlman enlisted and the lineup was solidified by early 2003.

The group released a 7-inch, several cassettes, and their audience continued to grow. After touring throughout 2003 and 2004, the group continued to work dead-end jobs, pooled their cash, and converted an abandoned record-pressing plant into a make-shift analog recording studio. The result was the Marathon LP, which appeared on the St. Ives label, a vinyl-only imprint of Indiana's Secretly Canadian. In the fall of 2005, several songs from previous cassette and vinyl releases appeared on the WORK EP.

Support slots on several high-profile tours culminated with an appearance in Central Park opening for the Arcade Fire and David Bowie, and by the end of 2005 the band was signed to a contract with the Capitol Records label. In June 2006, their long-awaited debut album, Movie Monster, was released on Capitol, but the band was dropped shortly thereafter. Since then, Sanford and the younger Baird gave up on the band and went on to pursue other things.

On September 15, 2007, Sound Team played their last show as one of the acts at the 2007 Austin City Limits Music Festival [http://www.aclfest.com/default.aspx] . Matt Oliver was interviewed prior to the show in the Austin Chronicle [http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A535766] .

See also

* Music of Austin

External links

* [http://www.soundteam.net Band Site for Sound Team]
* [http://subculturemagazine.com/reviewdetails.php?id=292/ Review of "Movie Monster" on Subculture Magazine]
* [http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/36965-movie-monster Review of "Movie Monster" on Pitchfork]
* [http://www.bigorangerecords.com the Big Orange label]
* [http://www.myspace.com/soundteam More Sound Team on the Internet]
* [http://www.geocities.com/jimmybobbin/stives.html St. Ives label/Secretly Canadian]
* [http://www.carolinedist.com Caroline Distribution]