by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"Our keyboard stands are all medical walkers and supports that I pulled out of the garbage," says the Unireverse's man in Ottawa, Michael Caffrey. "I love producing electronic music, and my goal in life is to not use other people's resources in anything I do."

Taking after classic Moog cover bands, the Unireverse are all about reusing and remodelling. Ever since Montreal's Brian Damage and Alex Moskos founded the band in 1999, they've crafted astral electronic music with antique analog synths, samples, canned beats and other people's songs, spinning familiar and obscure tunes way out into the stratosphere. Not surprisingly, there's often a fine line between the trio's tangents in covers and original Unireverse material.

"Sometimes a new song sort of materializes from a cover," Damage explains. "Other times, when we're doing warm-up jams in rehearsals, just getting loose and taking it out a bit, Michael will throw down a beat and we'll all get in on that and see where it leads. Sometimes it goes in pretty interesting directions, and sometimes we even remember how to reproduce it later."

Plays the Music is the band's new CD, their debut with local label No Type following a series of ultra-indie CDRs. Although the disc features several original tracks alongside covers of the Beatles, Donna Summer et al., the Unireverse's production methods remain greener than thou.

A wheelchair technician by day, Caffrey is the band's go-to guy for discarded goods and modified gear, but his freegan finds aren't limited to the medical industry.

"Car audio is such a fashion," says Caffrey, describing vanity items like decorative wiring and plexi-glass plates used to show off name-brand speakers. "Really absurd stuff, but it runs well on batteries, batteries that will no longer [power] really elaborate medical chairs. I've been using them in our soundsystem, so we can set it up absolutely anywhere. Soon we'll be able to play in the middle of the woods in a blackout."

Moskos shares Caffrey's love of plundered gadgets, like a device he used on "Daemon Bubbles," a track from the new CD. The "toy," as he calls it, attaches to clips that grip your fingers, allowing the user to create "corny" hip hop sounds by wiggling their digits. Just add loops to make it bubbly, stir in slowed-down samples from a decrepit recording of The War of the Worlds ("It sounds like a demon MC," Moskos says), record a cheesy chorus for R&B flavour, and voilà, "Daemon Bubbles."

There's no shortage of original incidental sounds on Plays the Music - such as power tools and the band members' approximations of barnyard animals - but "20 Rats at Once" has its roots in old sound effects records.

"One of them was ‘Rats,'" says Moskos, "and as we were listening to it, we were like, ‘Uh, there's more than two rats there.' We kept saying, ‘Ugh, that's like 20 rats at once!' A lot of this stuff comes out of our weird sense of humour - Brian and I both have mice at home, so there are some vermin issues. Basically, I think we spend too much time together."

With Corpusse at la Sala Rossa on Saturday, Aug. 20, 10 p.m., $7

>> Music Listings