Story #1
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
I started playing guitar when I was 13.
Before music took over, surfing was pretty much my entire childhood. I eventually gave it up when I was 17 after years of dedicated early-morning surfs, mixed in with those days where I was basically a fish and spent the entire day at the beach — crack of dawn until the streetlights came on.
All the dolphins knew me. I learnt to speak sonar waves while riding waves.
True story.*
*Well... the surfing part is.
I grew up in a special little town called Scotts Head, surrounded by three beaches — Big Beach, Little Beach and X Spot. Surfing wasn't something we occasionally did. It was life.
I was a talented competitive surfer and grew up surfing alongside people who went much further with it. Trent Munro, Asher Pacey, Paul Evans, Ben Evans and Neradah Falconer were all part of that surfing world around me.
Asher even taught me how to pop-shove-it a surfboard and how to catch a wave riding the board backwards, fins first. Neat tricks. Wicked surfer too. He always beat me in competition.
My father shaped surfboards and did ding repairs for local surfers. We also had local shaper Keith Richards from Oceanfoil Surfboards, who sponsored a lot of us kids.
They're really good memories.
By 17, though, I'd found something else.
Music.
So I gambled my childhood dream of becoming the next Kelly Slater on this new obsession and basically transferred the same mentality into guitar.
The fretboard became an extension of my arm.
I was completely self-taught. Never had guitar lessons. Never spent much time learning cover songs. I wasn't interested in becoming somebody else's guitarist.
I wanted to figure the instrument out myself.
Before everything changed, I'd play at least three or four hours EVERY DAY. Sometimes I'd dedicate an entire day to guitar and play for 10+ hours.
I'd play until my fingers bled.
What fascinated me wasn't simply learning technique. It was unlocking the puzzles.
A riff leads somewhere. A chord changes the possibilities. A scale opens another door. You combine things, pull them apart, move them around and suddenly you've constructed something that didn't exist before.
Something nobody else could have made exactly that way.
It's yours.
That's still my favourite part of writing music.
And then life took a massive turn.
In December 2020, I was attacked and assaulted by three men.
I came within an inch of dying.
I suffered skull and facial fractures, lost teeth, was bleeding from both ears and sustained a severe frontal-lobe haemorrhage. An ambulance happened to already be nearby getting dinner when it happened.
That coincidence may be one of the reasons I'm still here.
I was placed into a medically induced coma while doctors dealt with the swelling and the danger to my brain.
I survived, but I came out of it with a traumatic brain injury and permanent neurological consequences.
Recovery wasn't a movie montage.
It's taken years.
After months of neurological rehabilitation, I basically went radio silent. I deleted nearly every friend's number from my phone.
It wasn't because everybody was a bad person.
I knew I'd been given another shot at life, and I needed to start again.
So I did.
For roughly six years I've mostly ridden solo. I occasionally speak to two of the boys from A.U.S, and I have my girlfriend. That's about it.
And for five of those years, something even stranger happened:
I stopped playing guitar.
Completely.
After spending most of my life unable to imagine not playing guitar, I just stopped.
About 18 months ago I decided to go back to my roots.
I started building the studio again. I've put roughly $20,000 into music and recording equipment over the last couple of years.
I'm nowhere near the guitarist I once was.
The muscle memory isn't there. My technical ability has dropped massively.
And I'm okay with that.
Because the knowledge survived.
The 25+ years of experience I had before the injury didn't simply disappear. I still know my way around a fretboard. I understand how music fits together. I still understand the puzzle.
What I'm missing is the old drive.
The bloke who once played three or four hours every single day is currently lucky to pick up the guitar for half an hour once a week.
It's bizarre.
And the more I think about that, the more it pisses me off.
But there's another side to it:
I'm back.
My foot is through the door.
The studio is built.
The equipment is sitting there.
ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO.
My mind just hasn't climbed completely aboard yet.
Maybe I needed these years to process everything that's happened. The last 13 years contain stories I'm not ready to tell yet.
That's nightmare fuel for another day.
But two days ago, I tracked vocals over a beat I made two years ago.
It was the first time I'd recorded vocals since my dad died in 2013.
That's significant.
I'm not Batman anymore.
But I'm fkn back.
So anyway...
I'm BURBS, founder of A.U.S and TREBLEDEFF Records.
I'm also known through my newer project DYSEKNOSTICS, and there's another project developing in the shadows called PSYOPTIX that you'll hear more about in the future.
There are big things in the works.
Motivation might currently be running a little behind schedule, but there's one fairly serious problem with trying to stop this thing:
I'm a fkn unicorn.
So it's happening as we speak.
Nice chat. Glad we had it.
Now you know a little more about BURBS and how all this began.
I'll be back with another update next week.
Laters.
