About the Artist
Roger Sellers is a lot of things. He' s a minimalist composer with a knack for making hypnotic, enveloping songs from a few repeated musical phrases. He' s a gifted musician who is mostly self-taught, having abandoned formal study because it was draining the life from his work. He' s a self-described disciple of Phil Collins. What he is not, however -- despite multiple press reports to the contrary -- is a DJ. "I started developing a decent following in Austin," he says, "but most of the time when I would play, the press would say something like ' Local DJ Roger Sellers,' or ' Roger Sellers is playing a late-night DJ set.' I think it was maybe because my live set involves a table full of gear, a drum set and headphones, but the average person probably knows more about DJing than I do.'" To combat the misunderstanding, Sellers printed up stickers reading, "Roger Sellers is Not a DJ,"and eventually adopted the alias Bayonne, changing his name without altering his approach. And it' s a good thing: Primitives, Sellers' debut as Bayonne, is a rich, complex work, the kind with no clear rock parallel.