Barnaby! frontwoman brings the noise
Barnaby! is hard to pin down. Tempos shift, tunes take twisting turns and some endings are abrupt. But one of the band’s constants is the inventive songwriting of Mimi Sun Longo, who also provides growling vocals and a singular guitar style.
At a recent performance, Longo stared at the ceiling with half-rolled eyes during a rare solo but belied her aw-shucks stage presence with punk attitude. There’s a reason for that exclamation mark in the band name.
“This is a release from the angst that plagues me every day,” explains Longo, 36. “The angrier I am, or the harder the day, the better I perform. No one gets hurt when I’m venting my feelings onstage — and the audience gets to yell, too.”
Longo was raised in the Unification Church, derided as “Moonies” after its founder, Sun Myung Moon, who died in 2012. Her given name is Mi Sun, after the Korean guru accused of leading a cult. Her parents are charter members of the popular local band Slambovian Circus of Dreams. She once played cello and sang in a folk group featuring three-part harmony.
“I’m a facilitator and can’t stay still,” says Longo, who is a project manager for IBM. “If rocking out doesn’t get the job done, I’ll put on a big show [taking a few months to produce an elaborate secret gig] or have a dinner party with people who don’t know each other to create something weird.”
Five years ago, in the parking lot behind Quinn’s, Mike Rasimas (drums) and Harrison Cannon (bass) bought into her six-string vision. “We bring in ideas,” says Cannon. “But in the end, she’s our fearless leader.”
Longo makes up chords to fit the sounds in her head, which serve as the building blocks for unorthodox progressions that drive the band’s songs.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, so I start playing notes until I find something that is either dissonant enough or complementary enough to make it feel right,” she says. “I write in bits and pieces, and we put it together.”
At a show in May, 60 fans filled Happy Valley Arcade Bar in Beacon to dance, sing along and bop their heads. The youngest, Nora, 8, hopped around during the furious first tune, “Olga,” which switches from slow prelude to furious cascade. Somehow, the zigzag chord progression and guitar riff in “Panther” fit with an unpredictable drumbeat. An interlocking bass part completes the groove.
Tunes flit about. During the encore, “Bull’s Eye,” Longo and Cannon stared at each other and counted bars to ensure that they nailed the shifting parts. At song’s end, they smacked a high five and cracked wide smiles.
Lately, Longo has been sporting sea foam-green hair and neon-green eyebrows. Almost always, she dabs a dark dot under the center of each eye, which might become tattoos.
“If I didn’t have this musical outlet, I’d be a banshee, a werewolf or some kind of ghost terror,” she says. “It’s so rewarding and therapeutic to play with two really good musicians and be able to make people have feelings.”
Barnaby! (barnaby.band) and Watson will perform at 7 p.m. on Aug. 3 at the Kube Art Center, 211 Fishkill Ave., in Beacon.
