Christopher Earl "The Squire" Zajkowski sits at the little dinette table in his South Wedge crib drinking coffee and chain-smoking clove cigarettes while his two snow white cats slink about. He talks excitedly about music and laughs often and loud. Since the mid-80's, the 44-year-old Zajkowski has been cranking out music in his rudimentary cellar studio as the one-man band The Squires of the Subterrain.

The Squires of the Subterrain creates pure transistor pop. It's sugary and fun. It's simple and sing-along catchy despite its lush layers. There's a lot going on for its sole member.

Perhaps recognized most as a drummer, Zajkowski plays all the instruments. "Everything's a drum in my hands," he says. "I'll pick up just about anything if I can get a halfway decent sound out of it and if it goes with what I'm working on at the time. Nothing fancy, that's for sure." And he juggles it all in a retro, low-fi, analogue medium.

"I'm not beating the analogue drum and putting down digital," he says. "Digital's great if that's what your thing is. I'm still very analogue. Maybe I'm resistant to change."

Zajkowski first got a taste of four-tracking in the early 80's, he says. "Just seeing the potential of a studio in your house, just experimenting and playing with the medium was mind-blowing. Up until then, the idea of recording was just, ‘Wow, how do you do it? Where do you go?' I didn't take it all that serious at first. I had always dicked around with a tape recorder and a microphone or two cassette decks."

Yet while Zajkowski dicked around with the solo stuff underground, he rocked on the surface as a drummer in The Essentials, which became The Salamanders, which then became The Rosey Beats, which eventually became The Hi-Risers. He also spent time drumming for The Riviera Playboys. Yet his real satisfaction was underground, with his assorted instruments, eight-track reel-to-reel recorder and four-track deck. Ultimately, he quit drumming in bands to pursue The Squires exclusively.

"I'd already been doing the Squires for years," he says. "Writing and recording, and it was just a great place to be in my head and we weren't writing or recording." Zajkowski would head downstairs either with ideas in his ideas, or to face the ones lurking around the furnace and washer and dryer.

"It usually starts with a thought or a feeling," he says. "Any way I can get into it. Sometimes I'm chompin' at the bit and I really need to get down to the studio and work out a silly idea I may have. And then other times I've gone down with absolutely no idea and I'll just muck about and something comes out. Just dicking around in that realm of sound, putting on headphones - there's a whole world inside the speakers. I kinda liken it to pulling out a blob of clay and just squishing it around and seeing what happens and letting the process dictate the path."

Referencing Brian Wilson in describing The Squires of the Subterrain may be lazy, but it's accurate. Like the Beach Boy, Zajkowski takes a simple pop base and builds and builds on it without obscuring the original little gem. At times it's pretty, and at times it's pretty weird.

 "I've heard it described right from the early stages as sometimes goofy, sometimes sad," Zajkowski says. "And that's probably still applicable today."

Zajkowski says he's lost count, but according to his website, has released seven CDs, including the latest, "Adventures In Radio Land, TV Land, and The Blog-O-Sphere." And he notes that there were a dozen or so cassettes before CDs were around.

He describes each album as reactionary. "If one project is more straight-up then I'll get a little weirder the next time," he says. "Then I'll go a little poppy."

Recordings are the only way you'll ever hear The Squires of the Subterrain. Zajkowski has no interest in starting a band.

 "I don't need to tell you that's a lot of work," he says. "I was in a band 15 to 20 years, and it was great, with some wonderful experiences and some not-so-wonderful experiences. I finally made the decision that it's the music; that's what it's about, not all the headaches that go along with the music business...just to be able to play in the musical sandbox."

Still there's a demand. Through Zajkowski's own Rocket Racket Records, Squires CDs have gone global.

"It's all over the place," says Zajkowski. "But it's very spotty. It's not like I have a huge cluster of fans in any given place. Rochester's probably the biggest, but I might be wrong about that too."

The Squires of the Subterrain

squiresofthesubterrain.com