The Beverage Station – Little Grey Cells

released on CD and digital May 30th, 2025

Little Grey Cells is the debut album from The Beverage Station, the composer nerd synth pop duo of Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson. This album is what happens when two people start out as math majors, end up in grad school for composition, fall in love, and end up making the disco dance party of their dreams. 

Though they have lived together for many years, Little Grey Cells marks the first joint project for Jascha and Lainie. They first met at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute in 2003 and reconnected when they entered the Princeton graduate composition program together a few years later. They quickly bonded over their shared love of asymmetrical rhythms, juicy vocoders, and medieval dance bands. Now both are teachers who have written for ensembles like JACK Quartet, Ensemble Klang, Dither, Sideband, The Penderecki Quartet, and PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra). Together, they have founded and led new music institutions like The New Music Gathering.

One day in their Brooklyn home, Lainie heard a sketch that Jascha was making with one of his synthesizers. She had ideas for vocals to go with it, and that sketch became the album’s first single “One and One”. Beginning with this track, they found their co-compositional groove, with Lainie and Jascha each adding different layers and ideas to these songs, stoking the cozy fires of their own nerd-dance paradise, taking turns building tracks from initial sketches to final mixes. What The Beverage Station has become along the way is a band that takes inspiration from Kraftwerk and Laurie Anderson, Pet Shop Boys and Perotin, Sylvan Esso and South Indian rhythmic cycles. The Beverage Station is a band for listeners who love to noodle through sonic pattern-puzzles while simultaneously dancing their hearts out at a backyard barbecue.

Hallmarks of this album include intimate vocals, lower-case story-telling, algorithmic synths, organic vocoders, head-bobbing polymeters, and home-grown field-recordings that range from Norwegian rain to Parisian parks to Brooklyn pile-drivers, and a prominent seagull on “AMFI”.

“Labor Day” plays with catchy yet slippery rhythms, with its shifting groups of 9’s and sometimes 8’s and 10’s. Lainie’s vocals in “One and One” float over the beat in a way that constantly creates moments of surprise, whereas her vocals in “BLAMO” span centuries of musical style by shifting timbres over the repeating 71-beat cycle. Listen to the kaleidoscopic unfolding of a recording of a seagull’s cry in “AMFI” – that single sampled bird sound is the source of all the material driving the highly processed synth track, while Lainie’s vocals crackle and build with the goal of getting at the mind behind the gull.