For the last decade plus, William “BRAIN A” Currier has cooked up a curiously genre-defiant blend of bedroom-pop, electronic music and post-punk drive, delivered with lo-fi hip-hop ease.

Currier was born the youngest of three siblings in 1984, in “a little geodesic dome” his father built in Southern Illinois. By the time Currier turned three, his father had taken his own life, prompting his mother to secure public housing. “My earliest memories are by the train tracks, then the trailer park,” he says. In 1993, his family moved to Chandler, Arizona to be as close as possible to his ailing grandfather in Southern New Mexico—and the neighboring state was the closest she could find work. Currier considers his grandfather in legendary terms, “He grew up in the Great Depression and hopped trains, singing for his super playing folk and blues before he started serving in the military and went MIA as a POW in Korea” he says, noting that his grandfather and uncle taught him his first songs on the guitar, instructing him how to play a 12-bar blues when he was 10. It failed to keep Currier out of trouble though, and in his teenage years he fell in with bad crowds. “Our house burned down my first year of high school, setting us back to zero again,” he says, noting struggles with mental illness in the aftermath. 

But it was in these years that Currier found his salvation. “My biggest outlet was always art and more specifically, music. I got my first drum machine towards the end of high school and piece by piece also started learning basic scratches on turntables and sampling-based bedroom production styles.” Inspired by records like The Cramps’ Bad Music For Bad People, the self-titled Bad Brains, Brand Nubians’ One for All, and Freestyle Fellowships’ To Whom It May Concern… as well as eclectic sides by Elliott Smith, Howlin Wolf, Tangerine Dream and more, Currier began reverse engineering what he heard, and applying his skills in the Phoenix hip-hop scene, where Currier found like-minded people and began working with artists he admired. 

Now settled on three acres on the outskirts of Deming in Southern New Mexico with his wife, Currier says he is finally comfortable again sharing the music he has used as therapy his whole life. “I’m really just a 10-year-old kid in his room playing the guitar at heart,” Currier says. 

Jason P. Woodbury