There's a lot of ink spilled about The Depreciation Guild's good looks and unofficial member: a Nintendo gaming system—but they're much more than all that. Live, their lush, textural sounds will make you gaze at your shoes, but their synth-pop side will leave you a bit more alert. See what way they sway you while catching the Brooklyn band tonight at Fontana's (and at Mercury Lounge on the 7th) before they head out on tour.

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the band? The band started in 2005 kind of as a hobby. I really wanted an outlet for creating the two types of music I was (and still am) into, which was lush-sounding guitar pop and melody-driven simple electronic music music. So i started creating a few compositions and recorded a few songs as demos, and within a short amount of time, those songs were released on the netlabel 8bitpeoples and I decided to involve my friend Akira in the process so we could start playing shows.

Since then, Akira left the band to pursue his career in engineering, and I've been joined by college friends (and twin brothers) Christoph and Anton Hochheim on guitar and drums, respectively. We put out a full length at the end of 2007 and have played mostly in New York (but we did get to play in Mexico and LA recently!), and we're getting ready to do our first serious tour of the east coast in the next couple weeks with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

What would you be doing if you weren't making music? Hard to say, I went to school for childhood education, but teaching has always been a fallback plan. I teach now at a music school, but I'd much rather be playing music professionally.

What's the story with the Nintendo—how did that come about? I've always loved the sound and wanted to learn how to make music for the system, so in 2003 i discovered a program through the internet that you could use to sequence songs for the Famicom (NES) and export the code to an actual cart using the proper hardware. The Famicom that we actually use live was something we bought on eBay and the special game cart we use was given to me by a friend in Japan.