This story begins like so many great modern tales: with an overzealous German sitting at his computer, disseminating misinformation. To set the record straight, Jason Farrell, the guitar mastermind behind Bluetip, did not nearly die in a heroic trek from the fifteenth floor of the World Trade Center’s smoke-filled south tower. Despite what you might have read online, he was nowhere near the place.

Farrell, it turns out, was actually plotting an escape of another sort. After six years as Bluetip’s primary songwriter, singer and guitarist, he grew tired of having his songs picked apart by committee.
“It was just a very frustrating endeavor,” says Farrell. “Everybody I played with in that band, they were great musicians, but they didn’t all like what I was writing and I was writing about 95 percent of the music. Sometimes when you have that many people sticking their spoons in and stirring you get amazing results. We just wasted a lot of time.”

Farrell felt the time had come to steer the plane into the ground. As he puts it, “Kill this, lay it down as fertilizer, start a new band.”
And just like his lower Manhattan stomping grounds, Farrell’s music has bloomed anew. With the help of Drummer Joe Gorelick and Bassist Jim Kimball, Farrell formed Retisonic, a band with a complex post-punk sound, much like Bluetip’s, but with a sunnier disposition.

“Through all the Bluetip albums, as much as I like that stuff, it’s got some dark, depressing stuff going on,” says Farrell. “It’s very easy to evoke a response that way.”
Writing upbeat songs about sad topics, he says, is much harder.

“It’s very difficult to write uplifting songs,” says Farrell, “So most people write ‘I hate my mom.’ “These are still sad topics, it’s just how can you make it an enjoyable topic and not such a fucking goth bummer?”

With Retisonic, Farrell and company are exploring harmony, something that was missing in both a literal and figurative sense with Bluetip.
“One of the things we’re doing with Retisonic is embracing things that we do like, rather than being close minded,” he says. “In Bluetip there was no one else to sing in the band. No one was really interested in this whole other side of vocals. I like Cheap Trick and they’ve got amazing harmonies, and I like some of the Beatles stuff and that’s all harmonies. I also like Minor threat and there’s none. It’s just taking whatever element from whatever we like as an influence for the song.”

On the band’s initial offering, the “Lean Beat” EP, Retisonic proves to be a stipped-down powerful outfit. The simplicity, says Farrell, is by design.

“I think sometimes if you throw to many instruments on a song, if you’re trying to squeeze in all this stuff, they cancel each other out,” says Farrell. “Here’s a song idea, a simple song idea, so treat it as such. don’t embellish it with a bunch of crap. Don’t throw a bunch of chrome on it and call it a Cadillac.”