Last year Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez changed their duo’s name from Buke & Gass to Buke & Gase, mostly to help out phonetically challenged folks who were rhyming “gass” with “ass.” But though they’re willing to hold your hand when it comes to pronunciation, that’s all the coddling you’ll get: what makes Buke & Gase so magnetic is their insistence on mutating indie pop into something you’ve got to bend your brain around to understand. Not only do they both wield sui generis instruments—the gase is a hybrid guitar/bass, the buke a modded baritone ukulele—but they also run their output (and their singing) through a maze of effects pedals and processors. On first listen, the new General Dome (Brassland) delivers minimalist yet colorful guitar-and-vocal melodies woven into a bizarre tapestry and driven by nothing but bass drum and a “toe-bourine”—and once you check under the hood and see how the band’s engine works, you can appreciate even better what goes into creating the layers of their sound.

AS: It’s the buke, the gase, and the bass drum, which has a snare drum inside it or some kind of rattly thing. I’m always trying to figure out ways to make the bass drum sound like more than just a bass drum. And then Arone has on her foot this device that she calls a “toe-bourine” that’s made of tambourine jangles on a toe strap from a bike.

AS: Well . . . [Laughter.] Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s . . . difficult. It’s hard to communicate exactly what we’re doing. Because my signal is split into two different sounds, and it’s hard to communicate exactly how we want that in the mix. And also we’re not a standard—we don’t have a drummer. It’s just a weird mixing experience for us. I find it’s even difficult to mix a recording, because we’re trying to fill up a certain dimension of sound with this sort of rock-influenced instrumentation, but it’s lacking in some ways but then enhanced in other ways. It’s strange. We bring an engineer with us now, and he knows exactly what to do.

Wonderful!

AS: Yeah, just like geeking out and stuff.

Yeah, that’s great.

Fri 2/8, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, $14, 21+.