post-ironic neo-trans-global sub-trip-hop ambient country

Guitar / bass / balalaika player for the ChickenFat Klezmer Orchestra and other bands.

This delightful pack of roving musical clowns offers release and abandon to the brokenhearted with their confectionary melodies.

I play squareneck resonator and Weissenborn slide guitars. 

BURMAUNDERGROUND founder, Robert Detman, is an inveterate tunesmith from Flint, Michigan, based in Oakland, California.  

Conceived in Chicago in 1996, the band’s name came unbidden after Detman heard a story about computer programmers in Myanmar. After years of deliberation and practice–and a move to the West Coast–fledgling songs were developed in the kitchen of Detman’s San Francisco Mission District apartment in the early 2000s. The writing flourished with an acoustic guitar, a borrowed electric piano, and effects found and created using reversed analog tape and the echoes across the cityscape on a lonely Saturday night. Those efforts, recorded on a Tascam digital recorder, birthed the spare production of the subdued yet catchy songs on 2003’s POST-WHISTLER RESTORER. Later that year, an offshoot of Detman’s sonic explorations, utilizing elements of ambient and industrial music, culminated in the experimental band CHERNOBYL, and the ethereal album NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND.

After several years’ hiatus, Detman returned to his musical excavations post-pandemic, penning dozens of new compositions and, in 2023, the self-produced SUBAQUEOUS LUNAR AFFIRMATIONS, a song cycle that transmutes late night despair into revelations glimpsed at the dawn of a new day.

2025 promises a banner year of two albums. Detman’s unique songcraft led to the first, the cathartic DOMESTIC SURREALISM, which explores the lyrical power of personal resolve in tales of disconnection and despair married to solid song arrangements and steady tempos, imbued with indelible hooks and judicious production values. The second half of the year will see AQUARIAN EMPIRE, featuring more escapes from the quotidian, the parallel life of the mind. An alternative life?

Inspired by timeless song craft, and with a penchant for discovery and pursuit of the unconventional, BURMAUNDERGROUND's music is a realm of indelible hooks, melodies galore, sincere yet unsentimental and emotional writing, executed with solid, exploratory production.

Detman's writing about music---> https://100songsproject.substack.com/

IPI: 00425248174

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