Buddha Rays

Jake Descends From the Sky to Make Instant Coffee For and Eat Riff Salad with the Psychedelic Blues Band

By Jake Webber

A Buddha Ray is one of many sobriquets given by different cultures to the diffused light that shines through low-hanging clouds in the near-evening. It’s one of those things people see all the time but struggle with a name for. Those distinct spears of sunlight that touch down from sky to earth have been a timeless source of inspiration for artists, and honestly, I was shocked some band wasn’t already going by it. 

The band Buddha Rays sports Julian Aziz on guitar and vocals, Alexander Edwards on bass and Jon Dugan on drums. Their sound is fittingly timeless, inspired heavily by Blues and the psychedelic rock of post-Syd Pink Floyd with a loping, wandering feel and a focus on fidelity. 

I made instant coffee for everyone mid-interview, but only after we were out of wine and had gone through all my vinyls, settling on The Door’s title album to play (very loud) while we talked.

Our conversation easily became a friendly one, transitioning from a “safe-space” outside, everyone in masks, to inside my living room. And then into my kitchen where we all discussed the music (and the literature: Julian sports a Little Prince tattoo on his arm; I lent Alex a copy of Tolkien’s Silmarilian) that had brought us to where we are, while Jim Morrison’s wild screams careened, offhandedly, in the background. 

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Jake: So you guys just released your new EP (Desert Rose). Did you record that during the pandemic?

Julian: About half of it. Half of it, we’d already laid down before Covid hit big and we took a break, then, but eventually decided it was time to get back into it and finish it up. 

Jake: Did you record it mostly at home?

Alex: Nah, we did all of the recording at Bubble Studios, which is owned by Chris “Frenchie” Smith and Alex Lyon (who also mastered the tracks). 

Jake: It’s a super jammy sort of sound; I got the feeling you guys probably write everything collaboratively. Would you say that’s true?

Julian: Absolutely, you’ve got our number.

Jon: Exactly, Alex or Julian will come in with a riff and we’ll jam on it until we’ve figured out where all the pieces go. It’s all a really organic process of just letting the song unfold with the band.

Alex: We figure if we can do it in the room together and it sounds good, it’ll probably sound good on the record.

Julian: When we all started playing together it was—I heard this term recently on Youtube—it was like a “riff salad.” It would just be one cool riff after another, after another. Then we’d repeat that a couple of times and call it a song and it was… well, it was terrible.

Jon: It was like Frankenstein, just piecing all of these parts together. 

Julian: We were also all bringing in stuff we’d written in our pasts, so they were literally like dead body parts, in a way, that just didn’t quite fit.

Alex: I think coming from that software-driven environment and transitioning to something more organic and finding these moments where the flow really hit and everyone was melding, but still doing their own thing, was the revelation that really defined our sound on this EP. We really took that change to heart and stuck with it. It’s why we recorded the whole thing live.

Jake: I didn’t realize it was all recorded live. So everything we hear on the EP is exactly how it was in the room?

Julian: Exactly, every solo was improvised, every beat was maintained, everything you hear is exactly how it sounded. We wanted it to be as close to seeing us live as we could get without sitting you down there in the room with us.

Jon: And that’s where we got that feedback, from each other, in the room, like we all knew it was clicking.

Jake: I can tell there’s that improvised quality, especially lyrically, it has that bluesy quality of the words fitting into the music rather than the other way around.

Julian: Exactly, we’d get the flow going and then I’d improvise a word, or maybe a sound or a sentence and just try to build from there. The first song, Oh My, is pretty much about exactly what we see outside of ourselves, but a lot of my inspiration comes from introspection and trying to poetically decipher a feeling. I definitely think the lyrics are a big part of what makes the songs important to me, but creatively they tend to come last.

Alex (to Julian): I always wondered if on I Don’t Know if the words “I don’t know” were ever just a placeholder because you didn’t know what to say.

Julian: You know, I never really thought about it like that, but yeah, maybe, ha. That might have been exactly what I was thinking. It’s hard to remember exactly where everything started. Sometimes I definitely have an idea of something going on in my life that I want to explore, but a lot of the time that introspection just arises naturally out of a placeholder like that. Sort of like the whole sound, it just kind of unfolds. 

Jake: Do you think the quarantine really brings out that introspective quality in your writing process or is that just where you normally sit?

Julian: All the lyrics were written before quarantine; all the songs in full, really. Everything was already in the works or ready to go before we found ourselves isolated. We just had to go into the studio to record the second half.

Jake: You like to keep your solos pretty tight, I’ve noticed. Who would you say is your biggest guitar influence?

Julian: David Gilmore, without a doubt. Simple, slow, methodical. I like these things to sound planned out, even when they’re not. Sort of like life in general; you always want to seem like you’ve got a plan. I like to pick a cool phrase, pick a few good lines and think before you play. I actually learned that from Alex.

Jake: And Alex, what bassist are you sweet on and where would you say you fit into the band and the rhythm section? 

Alex: Definitely a fan of Joe Dart from Vulfpeck, he has a great way of picking up the lead and making the bass into a melody instrument, but mostly the rhythm section is like a conversation I’m having with Jon. It’s its own deal while the rest of the music is going on, and, at the same time, it’s the heartbeat. If it's off everything is off. I like to walk around the neck but we’re always trying to hold it down and keep it tight.

Jake: I detect some Bonham vibes on the drum solo from Across the Land. Who would you say is your biggest drum influence?

Jon: I feel like saying Bohnam is almost a cop-out, like what rock drummer isn’t influenced by Bonham? Definitely, though, I think he has this ability to play it up when necessary but also to be fairly reserved and bring it back down to the beat. I like Ginger Baker as well, or anyone who has jazz roots. Just that ability to sound like you’re playing off time even when you’re right on the beat is incredible.

Jake: Your two singles and the EP all have the same album art. What’s the significance of that image?

Jon: Well we hooked up with this artist named Ishaq Fahim and he’s done a bunch of artwork for shows around Austin. We just sort of poured out our heart to him and he came back with a whole bunch of new ideas. The artwork itself was very Arabian Nights, with that desert vibe. These guys are both from Arizona, so that works well. It’s all that sort of mysterious, sort of wandering-through-the-desert feeling.

Julian: And I’m also Arab and I find a lot of inspiration in that sort of climate and culture. I think (Fahim’s) art really spoke to that whole aspect of our music and our inspiration.

Jake: I know what a Buddha Ray is, but do you guys want to talk about what that means to you?

Jon: Sure, we were sort of in that process of coming up with a name and we were called something else before…

Jake: What was that?

Alex: Galactic Cactus.

Jake: That’s a pretty good one, but go on, I’m sorry.

Jon: Anyways, yeah, I was just sort of out camping with my girlfriend and we were looking up at that diffused, crepuscular light coming through the clouds, and wondering what is that light called? We looked it up and Buddha Rays popped up as one of the names for it, and I fell in love with that.

Alex: And it really fits too, just the way the vowels flow together. We liked everything about it, we knew it was our name pretty much immediately after we said it.

Jake: It’s a good word too. “Crepuscular,” also a good one.

Julian: Hey, maybe it’ll be our next album name.  

Listen to more of Desert Rose, the new EP from Buddha Rays, on Spotify or Bandcamp.