Nat Baldwin played a dangerous set. Standing alone with his double-bass, he lurched from his written material, to guttural free jazz. The rhythm to “Enter the Light Out” was askew; the bow against his strings sounded raw. The half-hour or so set was searching at worst and exhilarating at best. And the audience, rapt as they sat on the floor or leaned against the dark walls, worked with him the whole way.

Baldwin had already played at Buoy, in downtown Kittery, Maine, several times. And that night, Feb. 7, he was also responsible for roping in the night’s headliner: the Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn band still soaking up acclaim for its 2007 album, “Rise Above.” Baldwin, who has recorded and toured with the band members, brought them to Buoy for rehearsals. But while they had the full lineup in attendance, front man Dave Longstreth opted for  a low-key performance. He took the stage, which is really just the corner of the room where bands tend to play, with two other singers and a guitar. Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian joined Longstreth in high, heart-tripping harmony vocals. Aside from the applause, the crowd didn’t make a sound.

In the months since its launch last summer, Buoy has emerged as one of the Seacoast’s top spots for edgy, independent music. An open, bare room with white walls and little furniture, it’s perfect for a band as close to the apex of hip as the Projectors. It’s hard to imagine a better venue on the Seacoast for their act—or for Montreal’s Sister Suvi and Shapes and Sizes, who play there on March 14; or the acclaimed avant-duo of Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone, who hit Buoy on April 17. Or for Sean Reardon’s monthly Unique States series, which, to quote the flier, “investigates the strategies of group dynamic with music and sound, composition and improvisation.”

Soon, Buoy will also be an art gallery. April 3 will see the arrival of Kittery Point-raised, New York-based artist Jacob Ouillette, who will work on an installation and show some of his canvases. Exactly what he’ll do is up in the air, which is largely how Buoy works.

Because while Buoy is a rising art space, it’s difficult to define. Technically, it’s a no-profit studio space that throws open the doors for live events. The cover charge is billed as a donation, and where most clubs make their money off liquor sales, Buoy is BYOB. At the same time, the two men who rent the space, Al Mead and Jeremy LeClair, and chief booker Brett Deschenes, want it to eventually sustain itself. But beyond that, nothing’s set in stone—even the audience they hope to attract. As Mead says, “We’re aiming for the curious mind.”

Last week I sat down with Mead, LeClair, and Deschenes to talk about Buoy. All three are talented, funny and self-effacing. They’re hard-pressed to hype themselves, but they’re dead serious about the arts—and about promoting the fringe, ideally at the expense of the mainstream. 

The building at 2 Government St. used to house a U.S. Post Office. Today, the space is split between Buoy on one side, and Tulsi, an Indian restaurant, on the other. A hallway at the back connects the two to the restrooms, and that corridor ends at what used to be a loading dock and is now a place for people to huddle and smoke during shows. 

The idea for Buoy dates back two summers ago to a bonfire on Cutts Island in Kittery Point. Al Mead and Brett Deschenes got to talking with the owners of the building, Paul Bonacci and Lucy Schlaffer of ARQ Architects. Bonacci and Schlaffer had just acquired it, and they learned that Mead and Deschenes were looking for a performance space.
When Bonacci and Schlaffer first acquired the building, it was home to an Indian catering business called Divine Cuisines and Drika Overton’s performing arts studio The Space. “Word on the street was that if somebody else purchased the building, everyone else was going to go,” Bonacci says. 

Bonacci and Schlaffer kept the rents unchanged for a year. Overton stayed in The Space studio, and Deschenes, Mead and LeClair rented it for a night here and there for performances. When the year ended, Overton moved out, and in July 2008, Mead and LeClair moved in. At a minimum, they expected to use it as studio space. Mead is a musician and a visual artist; LeClair is a musician and sound artist completing the Bard MFA program this summer. But they also planned to open it up for performances, exhibits and anything else that caught their attention.

The first show at Buoy took place last August, when the room was still a work in progress. By the second show, on Sept. 30, a new floor and other upgrades were in place. Seattle’s The Dead Science headlined a show that was scheduled to include Nat Baldwin and his band, but Baldwin had a scheduling problem—he had to rehearse for an appearance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” playing bass for Department of Eagles. But everything else worked exactly as planned. 

When the doors opened at 8 p.m., the room looked bare, strange and inviting. The new floor warmed the room with radiant heat collected by solar panels on the roof. A slow trickle of people appeared, some of them making their first visit. After they got the hang of the BYOB policy and made a few emergency runs to the local package store, the crowd gathered around the headliner, a proficient and somewhat diffident art trio in the vein of Xiu Xiu. And if it wasn’t their thing, they could always hang out on the loading dock.

“It’s really attractive to touring bands to come to a place that’s not run like a business,” says Deschenes. “And we always have listening crowds.  … We’ve had a few bands come through that were like, ‘That was the best night of our tour.’ It might not have been a lot of people, but everyone who’s here is listening.”

Buoy’s experimental slant will remind some scene veterans of another series that Mead and LeClair helped run, The Tong, a weekly event in 2004-05 that took place in the basement of The Muddy River in Portsmouth. Every Sunday night, music fans could show up to find the room filled with inflated garbage bags, or cordoned off with plastic barriers straight out of “E.T.” And the music, a cross-section of noise, rock and improv, always drew in the curious.

“I feel like this is the grown-up version of The Tong,” says LeClair. For one thing, they’re not in someone else’s bar anymore. “The Tong was in a borrowed space. It was fun to try to make something, to try to transform the room that wasn’t really transformable.” Now, they don’t have to set up and run a show in a single day; they can take all the time they want. Shows are intermittent, but the schedule will start to pick up this spring.

They’ve also taken their time becoming a gallery. Jacob Ouillette’s show on April 3 will be the first major event, aside from two kinetic art pieces that Al Mead has left out, built out of garbage bags which inflate and rotate over a fan. “We’ve had this place since July, and (Bonacci and Schlaffer) were like, ‘When are you going to get some art in there?’” recalls Mead. He knows why he waited: “It’s going to just be done right.” 

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ouillette is known for abstract works that he paints on canvas, paper, or right on the walls of a gallery. His show will mark a strong debut for Buoy, and Mead plans to bring more visiting artists in his wake. “I’m stealing a few artists that are represented by commercial galleries in New York. They’re not threatened to let these artists come up here and do installations or anything, because it’s like, ‘Look, we’re just a little ma and pa place up in Kittery,’” he says, laughing. “But it’s definitely a unique place for an artist to come in and do whatever the hell they want.”

There are a handful of other venues in the area that offer both art and live music. The ellO gallery in Portsmouth, for example, hosts occasional live shows. But Buoy might offer the area’s loosest format for artists and musicians to indulge their unconventional creative whims.

In both music and art, Buoy leans toward the experimental and against the mainstream. For example, don’t expect to see many straight-up indie rock or singer-songwriter nights. As LeClair puts it, “It’s popular music, just like any other vanilla popular music, of any era. That’s what I have a problem with. It’s not the way it sounds, it’s just that people are making it because they hear it. And they’re not thinking enough about what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.”

Fostering the arts—especially the ones that aren’t easy—is part of Buoy’s core mission. But supporting the neighborhood at large is another. “The idea is it will become more of a destination for independent music and arts,” says Bonnaci.

As well as connecting the Seacoast to the global arts community, Buoy could also anchor the local arts scene in Kittery, in a business district whose nightlife is mostly represented by restaurants. “It’s to this neighborhood’s advantage if it seems that something vibrant is going on,” says Deschenes. 

Bonacci, whose other tenant at 2 Government St. is the Tulsi restaurant, says, “I’d like to see a little more crossover.”
But even in New York City, casual diners don’t always hop next door for a free jazz bass solo. Mead also sees the disconnect. “Those people who have been eating next door and hearing the vibrations like”—he makes a series of erratic jackhammer sounds with his mouth—“I don’t know.  It comes down to really shaping the perceptions of just how art can work in the community.”

“All you can do is what you think is right,” says LeClair. “We bring (artists) in that are truly interesting to us, that we think are good, and it’s going to grow from there. There’s nothing else you can do.”

Experiments don’t always pan out. Take the Mardi Gras event on Feb. 24. Deschenes and the others had put out word that the Buoy would host a party: “Bring whatever non-electronically amplified noise maker you may have, be it a cello or homemade instrument or kitchen pan or goat or anything in between, and we’ll see how much and what quality of noise we can make, leading us to some form of a dance party, we hope. That’s usually the way things go.”

Almost no one showed up. A few guys—Buoy’s operators, as well as local musician Owen Thompson—were playing, and they kept up a moody improvisation, switching from drums scattered around the room to a guitar lying on the couch, or taking turns at the centerpiece—the guts of a piano, lying on the floor with its strings exposed, ready to take a hit from a mallet. Every so often, they locked into something that worked, and a minute later, they’d stop. By 10 p.m., a few more people had arrived, and they brought tequila. Someone started riffing on George Michael’s “Faith.” At that point, as LeClair put it afterward, things started to get a little “kumbaya.”

The Buoy crew seemed disappointed that more people didn’t show up. LeClair blames some of it on the fact that people were expected to come and contribute. “People don’t want to do anything,” he says. “They just want to watch something.” 

When LeClair mulls over whether they’re running a business, Deschenes jokes, “Clearly we’re not.” Buoy bills itself as a “no-profit” operation, which has its downsides. The concert schedule is erratic. The cover charge, which mostly goes to the band, is billed as a donation, and not everyone donates the full amount. For now, they don’t bring in enough money to cover rent. And someday, rent will go up. “We’d hope in three years that we would raise the rent to where it would be more profitable for us,” says Bonacci, who currently runs the property at a loss. “But that’s part of the experiment.”

There are easier ways to run a club. But defining the possible can rule out surprises—like the Future Islands show last August. Mead recalls, “It was the first time that people were walking down the street, and came in.  … There were these kids that could hear it—I mean we were also sound-testing the room—but they could hear it from blocks away.” LeClair remembers a pack of kids, drawn to the noise, just hanging out in front of the space and smoking. Not everyone in the neighborhood liked it, but just about everyone was engaged. 

Mead probably sums it up best when he says they’re looking for the “curious mind.” In our interview, he reached for a way to describe who Buoy is for: “Just that person who (hears about) this strange space that really, in this economic climate, is choosing to do something that could possibly work in this economic climate. This collective … this group of ragtag…” At that point, he gave in and just started laughing. “They might just save the world.”

For Buoy’s complete concert schedule, visit www.myspace.com/buoygallery.