Official Artist Profile:
Turbo Volcano creates an evolving sound with no boundaries that gravitates toward electronica and vintage industrial music.
Evolution
"It's a unique story for sure. I created Turbo Volcano in late 2021 as a way to market my print and clothing products without paying any social media companies. There are a lot of small business owners out there frustrated that we have to use these awful hate-for-profit companies to market our wares. What other choice is there? But I draw the line at paying them." said Bussler.
"So, instead of giving them money to spread vanity and misinformation, I bought a bunch of music gear and built a new studio instead. It was definitely the right way to go. That's how Turbo Volcano came about."
"What surprised me was how much fun I had making the music, and, that some people out there actually enjoyed it! Turbo Volcano quickly expanded beyond marketing and turned into my favorite hobby and the spearhead of the CGR Publishing music publishing business."
Turbo Volcano spun off several side projects including the syntwave band Omega Ronin, the EDM artist Robot Kitten Factory, the ambient project Seatropica and more.
Mark Bussler is a 20+ year veteran of filmmaking and Internet video production with a background in art, design, and marketing. His work can be seen on PBS and various web outlets like Vimeo and YouTube.
"I approached music from the video editing side of things. I used to DJ, and I've created tracks for films and videos over the years and produced about 5000 edited videos, so it wasn't much of a stretch to take that background and turn it into a full-fledged production studio. The software is nearly identical."
"After all web video moved to smartphones, I closed my video production business in 2019 and tore down the studio. It was pretty miserable ripping out cables and selling them. I assumed my A/V career was over and concentrated on print."
"So, it felt like redemption to turn around and rebuild it in 2022 for music. This is way more fun than video, and I'm excited about all of the upcoming projects that CGR Publishing is working on."
New Turbo Volcano albums are constantly in development.
Music Style
"The Tubo Volcano sound is all over the place by design. It's like the R&D department of CGR Publishing. It can be anything. Industrial metal on Monday turns into soothing ambient by Friday. It's always a surprise."
"Rarely do I go into a song with an idea of what it's going to sound like, I just bang away on the keyboards or drum machine until something emerges and then I harness it. Songs like She Wears Pink and Velour in the Shuttlecraft started out with a few bars of funk bass line and evolved in the studio. These days the Turbo Volcano songs seem to have two or three bass synthesizers playing at once mixed with some wobbly 1980s glam synths and a few drum machines."
"I love 1970s funk and disco, and obviously enjoy 80s synthesizers and pop music from the best decade ever. Combined with some old school industrial influence, the Turbo Volcano sound seems to have evolved into a hybrid industrial-funk sound that I think is pretty groovy."
"My projects like Omega Ronin and Robot Kitten Factory adhere to a specific genre. Turbo Volcano does not. It's a constantly moving sonic experiment where I mash up sounds into something rad to the max."
Update: September 22, 2022
Thank you to all who have followed Turbo Volcano on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Deezer, and other streaming services over the past year! The first year of Turbo Volcano has been very exciting.
The newest Turbo Volcano album is titled No Champagne in the Volcano Room and concludes "Operation Turbo Volcano."
"The question is no longer "can I make Turbo Volcano work?", the question is now "where does it go from here?" says founder Mark Bussler.
"No Champagne in the Volcano Room is a pretty wild and experimental journey through synthesizer funk and electronica. It's the second to last album produced in my original basement studio (followed by Robot Kitten Factory's Every Dimension.) It's all getting a lot bigger from here. I'm happy with it, but the sound needs to be sculpted further and that's the next phase."
Turbo Volcano moves into CGR Publishing's new multi-track recording studio in late 2022 for its next album.
"There's a lot of similarities between producing video content and music. However, video is irrelevant these days with the rise of TikTok and smartphone videos. You can have all the gear or experience in the world and it actually works against you because it's not what the audience wants."
"This is where music is very different. People either like a song or they don't, but if they do, they get absorbed in it and lost in the layers of sound design. So, from my perspective, sound design is the new video editing. I'm telling a story through layers of waveforms instead of cuts and dissolves."
"Additionally, from the publishing side of things, there's value to music. It's global. It appeals to everyone. It has lasting value. There's going to come a day when everyone discovers that the disposable 15-second goofy video fad is over - but music has been around forever. I hate adapting to trends. We're [the producing team] just digging in and producing music from here on out, and Turbo Volcano is pioneering that process."
The new CGR Publishing studio is going to be the home for other projects such as Omega Ronin, Seatropica, Robot Kitten Factory, and more.
"I doubled down on sound design for the next several projects. Also, I needed more room. With the last few albums, I had sequencers piled on top of drum machines sitting on keyboards and a tangled cable nightmare. That's all been worked out."
"Video is still up in the air. With only two video outlets [YouTube and TikTok] there's no good home for what I have in mind. YouTube is pretty handy for instructional content, but it's time-consuming and, frankly, not all that exciting to make. TikTok is ok for little bits of info, but it's also a counterproductive time-suck. I might make some videos for the website but that's a maybe. Right now, the focus is on sound and the next several album projects. You'll be hearing a lot from Turbo Volcano."
See the complete catalog of Turbo Volcano music and related projects at CGRpublishing.com