Avi Buffalo goes quietly into the night

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Avi 5

Avi Buffalo is done, frontman Avi Zahner-Isenberg announced in a Facebook post on Monday night.

Saying that the project “makes me wake up sick, confused, depressed, out of touch with myself and irrelevant to current music’s existence,” the 24-year-old pronounced himself “available to be anyone’s guitarist/songwriter/producer/engineer/whatever works” and vowed to “keep makin’ music left and right.”

The announcement comes as no surprise to anyone who witnessed Avi Buffalo’s December show at the Echo, a workmanlike affair, and it comes four months and a nationwide tour after the release of “At Best Cuckold,” the band’s second album for Sub Pop.

avibuffalo-pehrspace2009

The first, “Avi Buffalo,” came out in April 2010, a couple years after the preternaturally gifted guitarist and his friends emerged from playing small L.A. venues [above, Pehrspace in early 2009]. “I started it when I was a wee-15 year-old and it went WAY farther than I thought it could,” Zahner-Isenberg wrote. “In fact, the Avi Buffalo project went too far, and I don’t think this project was meant for even the minute exposure on a “professional” scale that it got, as it ended up causing a lot more pain and drained my creative energy.”

Zahner-Isenberg also expressed his aversion to touring — it “sucks and isn’t worth it” — and said he is looking forward to collaborating with other artists. Among those projects is the band Litronix, the new project helmed by Kevin Litrow of Dance Disaster Movement and 60 Watt Kid.

“I am trying to stack the learning opportunities on top of each other in hopes that they will lead me to something good,” Zahner-Isenberg wrote. “Perhaps also after a while of working on other people’s stuff I could come up with something else of my own again, put it out on a label, tour, etc. It’s just gotta feel free if that happens. I will probably honestly be 40 or 50 when that happens and extremely fat.”

Full text of Avi Buffalo’s announcement here

Top photo by Carl Pocket