Sound Team

Sound Team is an American music band based in Austin, TX. Four of the six group members--Bill Baird, Matt Oliver, Sam Sanford, Jordan Johns, Gabe Pearlman, and Bill’s younger brother Michael--attended the same high school in San Antonio, TX, where they played music in several different loud ensembles. Eventually they all moved to Austin.

Bill Baird and Matt Oliver met in Austin in 2001, when each was a sideman in one of the many pick-up groups playing the beer-joints around town. They formed a partnership, and immediately began recording crazy songs on cheap gear that drew inspiration out of everything from traditional American folk and pop song forms to German synthesizer music.

In 2002 Baird asked his younger brother Michael and Michael’s friend Jordan Johns (both of whom were still in high school at the time), and his old friend Sam Sanford if they’d like to make a band. After playing a handful of shows in various performance spaces and punk dives, Gabe Pearlman enlisted and the lineup was solidified by early 2003.

The group released a 7-inch, several cassettes, handed CD-Rs around to friends, and things moved along. After touring in 2003 and 2004, the group converted an abandoned record-pressing plant into an analog recording studio and released the Marathon LP on the St. Ives label, a vinyl-only imprint of Indiana's Secretly Canadian. In the fall of 2005, several songs from previous Sound Team cassette and vinyl releases appeared on the Caroline-distributed WORK EP.