Anamanaguchi: The Ninja Turtles of Rock

One day prior, Berkman isn't feeling nearly so cool. He stands in his Williamsburg apartment and stares out a window at the J train, growling while popping a giant roll of Bubble Wrap.

The lanky guitarist/programmer, dressed in purple flannel, nondescript jeans and a pair of silver Adidas Sambas, has been out of his comfort zone the whole day, thanks to the pressure of Endless Fantasy's impending launch and everything that comes with it. It has turned his apartment into a laptop farm; two longtime Anamanaguchi friends sit in the living room, burying their noses in screens and joining the un-fun.

Berkman starts to rattle off the to-do list: a nationwide tour that kicks off in mid-May, just days after the album comes out; an unfinished music video, slated to launch day-and-date with the album on May 14.

"We still need to do merch," comes a voice from couch. That's Léia Jopse, a freelance photographer who lives in Astoria, N.Y., and a longtime friend who has taken up stopgap management duties because the band's longtime manager quit managing bands altogether a few months ago. So they need to design and order merchandise from scratch — everything from shirts to MP3-loaded USB drives.

Drummer and programmer Luke Silas looks up from his laptop on the couch: "We also have a music video coming out in the summer ..."

Berkman loads a 30-second test clip of the band's next music video, for the album's title track, in which a young woman sits in a bedroom with a giant, glowing cube — just like the one drawn on the album's cover. He plays the song over the clip; even though it's not synced up, the song's twinkling, rave-pop melodies match this iridescent cube, glowing in animated, oil-slick rainbow colors.

"All of that stuff you see in this shot right now, it didn't exist until the day that we shot it," Berkman says. The box, and all of the other otherworldly lighting in the shot, were designed from scratch by bassist James DeVito. He's not around today because of work ramping up at his day job.

A couple of days later, the 25-year-old DeVito opens up his Brooklyn apartment to show off the whole rig. The box sits in the middle of a dusty, debris-ridden basement, next to giant poles, a field hockey goal and other machinist gear. The giant box is made of radiant acrylic, he explains, and its edges are lined with programmable LED lights. Two of its sides have been treated with a "rear-projection fill," DeVito says, which means he can project images on them without the light shining straight through. Could make for a cool addition to the band's live show, he admits. (There's also a giant drone-looking device down here, equipped with a slice of pizza and a GoPro camera, but more on that later.)

Two years later, Berkman found out about a high school friend's 8-bit music project, called Approxim8. (This friend, Kurt Feldman, went on to start renowned electro-shoegaze band The Depreciation Guild.) "It sounded like [Sega Genesis game] Zombies Ate My Neighbors," Berkman says. "I was like, whoa, what's doing this?" After conducting some chiptune research, he downloaded a freeware program, Nerdtracker 2, to take his own stab at music made for the NES's sound chip.

Eventually, his love of rock bands and game soundtracks — particularly PS1 games Legend of Legaia and Vib-Ribbon — collided, and he set up a four-track in his bedroom to record rock instrumentation atop Nintendo beats, all by himself. What to call this project? Why not Anamanaguchi? "It sounded like fake Japanese, and I was doing this on a Japanese platform," Berkman says.

By this time, Berkman and DeVito had bonded through playing gigs and having mutual friends. They were a year apart at the same high school, and they started hanging out to play video games and make music. Heck, they even worked at the same pizza delivery shop. In 2006, DeVito began helping Berkman as a bassist and live rig technician to make Anamanaguchi a real-deal live outfit. (The band's other first live member, George Brower, actually lives with DeVito to this day and is half of the electronic group George & Jonathan.)

When DeVito combined his two biggest passions to enroll at New York University's music technology program, Berkman felt compelled to do the same the following year. Around this time, DeVito's other band fizzled, while Anamanaguchi's first EP, 2006's Power Supply, began picking up steam among chiptune enthusiasts. And for good reason — already at this point, nobody was approaching Berkman's style of combining guitars and 8-bit melodies to create tooth-rottingly sweet sounds. In the summer of 2007, a few of those fans wanted to fly the band out to LA for a couple of gigs, but only Berkman and Luke were on board. Could anybody else fill in?

Hey, we could ask that one cool guy at the NYU music tech program who's from LA, with the really weird hair. Maybe he could put us up, and even play.

Serendipitous, then, that Warnaar was in LA when Berkman and DeVito were looking to fly out for a couple of summer concerts. He picked them up from the airport in a camouflage-green Hummer, driving them away at 90 mph.

Warnaar fondly recalls the weird reason he was leasing a Hummer: "I used to have a sick Jeep that I destroyed while chasing aliens in the desert one night. I was in high school, and it was a school night. We drove five hours into the desert in California. We definitely saw aliens, but we ended up in a sand pit. Our friend Buck was sleeping in the back."

Warnaar had one day to learn Anamanaguchi's material, and he pulled off the two-concert series with no issues. Attending both of those shows was Luke Silas, an LA native who played in Warnaar's high-school-band circle much the same way Berkman played in bands before meeting DeVito. Silas also had parents who played music for a living and encouraged him at a young age, starting with violin and cello but soon turning to the drums.

By the age of 12, Silas had started "the worst punk band ever," and soon after that, he began obsessing over video game soundtracks. "Because I paid so much attention to the music in video games — any fuckin' chiptune musician will tell you the same thing — it's gonna be something I wanna do," Silas says. "Particularly the sound palette that's embedded in my brain." From there, he began attending electronic-music classes at the Hamilton Academy of Music while training on drums, and he fell in love with an LA solo chiptune artist known as 8-Bit Weapon, who performed using a Commodore 64 as a musical instrument.

Silas soon started a band with his friend Zack Robinson called Dracula Mountain, which sounded like "18-year-olds playing Dragon Force." One day in 2007, the duo stumbled upon Anamanaguchi's debut EP. Robinson immediately wanted to fly the band out to play some shows in LA. Silas introduced himself at the two shows — his incredibly proficient drumming skills were the opening act.

"Zack probably formed Anamanaguchi," Berkman admits.

Anamanaguchi's members admit that Berkman has sometimes floundered as a leader. In the early days, he was likely to wait until the day of a concert to tell his bandmates there would be a concert, for example. But the down-to-the-wire schedule for the soundtrack brought out the best of him — and from the sound of it, the best of every other band member. Riding the Scott Pilgrim momentum, the band pressed forward with another tight-schedule project: a series of singles throughout summer 2010. Each written and recorded within two weeks, the singles saw the band continue riding its creative high.

Other opportunities soon popped up: a request from The Nerdist Podcast to use a song as its theme song (obviously!), and an offer to compose music for Pendleton "Adventure Time" Ward's next animated series, The Bravest Warriors (Berkman and childhood friend Jon Baken contributed a few tracks, including the show's theme). All well and good, but band members had a bigger mission on their minds: to make their version of The Smashing Pumpkins' Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness — essentially, their own stuffed-to-the-gills double LP.

"I feel like an asshole every time I bring this up," Silas says before describing a recent review of the 1995 Smashing Pumpkins re-release. "People could see the album as an arrogant, pompous prog move that nobody does anymore, to release a double record. The truth of it was, it was the only way [the Pumpkins] could effectively show the amazing streak of songwriting that Billy Corgan and his band were doing for that whole stretch. That's what this is. Pete and Ary have been writing more incredible things than our band ever had."

"'Prom Night' has 42 tracks in it," Berkman says while loading the Eternal Fantasy single's raw, multitrack audio onto his computer's Pro Tools mixing program. When I point out that the number of separate instrument tracks on the screen is larger than 42, he corrects himself: "That [number]'s not including vocals."

He demonstrates how the song sounds with its separate chunks isolated, from a disco-ready guitar lick to a sampled kick drum to an NES tone — and a weird one at that, thanks to a rare NES expansion chip called VRC6 (known for augmenting the audio on Japanese Castlevania cartridges). It's easy to lose the sense of what's 8-bit and what isn't when the song plays all at once.

Berkman smiles. "When I'm writing music, I'm trying to write what I want to hear, and arrange it in a way that's perfect. It doesn't matter what the limit is, whether it's a Nintendo or a Game Boy." Then he queues up another song, "Japan Air," to prove his point: "We're not limited by the Nintendo anymore with this record. This is 16-bit right now. We're upping the bits, basically."

Sure enough, the Warnaar-written, rave-ready "Japan Air," along with much of Eternal Fantasy, eschews the band's NES restriction of old — a fact you'd be forgiven for not noticing. Anamanaguchi's trademark blending of analog rock and digital nostalgia remains, only this time, the band employs new tricks for its old dogs. Bit-shifted vocal samples. Pedal-affected bloops that recall more recent games, like the N64 curio Snowboard Kids.

As Berkman splices and picks through the raw, unfinished tracks, his teenaged nonchalance melts away just enough to reveal a confident artist at his peak.

"[In the past], we were limiting ourselves with the Nintendo, and that was a very conscious choice," Berkman says. "We only did that so we could get good at micromanaging. Now we have the big picture, and we can micromanage huge shit. I understand every principle about this sound now. Instead of saying, 'I can't do that because it's not a Nintendo,' it's saying, 'I can't do that because I don't want to, or because it doesn't fit the style of the song.' That's a much more natural and organic way of limiting yourself. That helps me focus on the things in the song that do matter."

As if to dispel the fear that Berkman and company have gotten way too serious about their craft, pretty much every 15 minutes, someone in the band — usually Berkman — interrupts with some of the most ridiculous nonsense imaginable.

"Then we'll see the pizza in space, mixed with footage of the best party ever. This will be cut with footage of this falling back into earth. It's a lot more ambitious than a lot of other music videos. If we wanted to make an easy music video, this would not be it."

Anamanaguchi's dream of financing a slew of post-album content suffered a setback when a distribution deal with Yep Roc Records fell through at the last minute, leaving the band not only manager-less but also investment-less. It's led to lengthy discussions between bandmates and close friends about whether to turn to their fans by way of Kickstarter (as of press time, the band has launched such a campaign.).

All that's left is to answer the obvious question: If Anamanaguchi are living, breathing Ninja Turtles, then which turtles are they?

Berkman obviously wants to be Michelangelo. The party dude. He looks like a human cartoon — even more so with a guitar slung over his shoulder, bouncing around while his mop of curly hair swivels to and fro. But he doles out Michelangelo duty to Silas, pointing to his quickness to compliment and feel positive about anything in the band. Warnaar, reserved and sometimes a little too-cool-for-school when not in his comfort zone, is a dead ringer for Raphael, while only one Anamanaguchi member could claim the "Donatello does machines" line.

Which leaves Berkman as Leonardo. The leader. "I'm the start bro," he says with unabashed excitement. "The 'let's do this' dude."

Next up for the start bro, then: to unleash his Endless Fantasy on fans. To move beyond the artificial barrier of Nintendo-only music so as to share his vision of positive, fun tunes with everyone, gaming fans or no. And, whether by Kickstarter or surprise record deal or sheer willpower, to execute on the giant message from his pizza music video's storyboard notes, currently large and in bold type on the HDTV in his Williamsburg living room: "Party scene. I can't fucking wait for this."