Photo: Evan Wyss

For years, the term D.I.Y. had a very specific connotation: kids with little instrumental knowledge getting together and learning how to make music they liked for themselves and their friends, then extending that self-starting motivation to getting their own shows, booking their own tours, paying for their own recording sessions, etc. The do-it-yourself ethic may have reached into other areas of its proponents' lives, and the "yourself" part may have stretched to include an extended family of fans and peers, but the image it conjured in the mind was always pretty much the same - kids in a garage with guitars - and the soundtrack to that image was always pretty much punk rock.

As technology, availability of means and variety of tools have gone, however, so has D.I.Y. The young folks making their own music in the late aughts have more than guitars and Tuesday nights down at the VFW Hall; they've also got portable studios on laptops and signal-processing software and a free means of distribution at their fingertips. What's more, they've already got a half-generation of influences and inspirations in place, to give them an idea of what can be done and how to do it. Old-schoolers can bitch about bands rising to prominence via hipster blogs and Myspace numbers all they want, but the bottom line is, these kids are doing the same thing kids have always done: re-mapping the landscape of independent music by learning how to make it with little more than their influences, and the implements at hand.

"The Internet's very weird - it's almost like we feel guilty, knowing how many bands take the live route to get noticed, spending years touring on no money," muses Kyle Wyss of St. Petersburg, Florida's Blind Man's Colour. "And we're just summer kids recording on our MacBooks. It's a little too easy."

Wyss and co-conspirator Orhan Chettri actually started making music the old-fashioned way, banging on instruments with their friends as freshmen in the high school band room. When Wyss' older brother's interest in obscure and emerging electronic-music styles began to mix with the influence of their parents' old Zeppelin and Pink Floyd records, though, live rehearsals gradually gave way to improvisational weekend four-track sessions and experiments in sound manipulation.

"My brother was always the music outcast in school," Wyss remembers. "He was listening to, like, the Microphones before anybody else, and he used to DJ a lot, house and techno, so we'd always hear that stuff, and it was something we just adapted to our sound.

"We never liked new music, we thought new music was stupid, but then my brother would show us something, and we realized there was new music that was good, not just pop radio stuff. So we just mixed it in with our old favorites, and I still think that's what our stuff sounds like."

"I would think that's the best combination," adds Chettri, "because you retain the history, but you're also moving forward."

Chettri and Wyss' forward movement led them to a sound both organic and experimental, an eclectic mix of psychedelia and warped indie-pop that filters the traditional singer-songwriter format through tools, toys and more to produce a truly original sound without sacrificing warmth or melody. It also led them to a world of indie rock they never knew existed - the cadre of blog-worthy sonic architects constantly reinventing underground music's bleeding edge.

It was one of those purveyors, the revered Animal Collective, that unknowingly helped nudge Blind Man's Colour toward national attention when Wyss tossed a couple of hastily thrown-together covers of AC tunes into Blind Man Colour's online presence. A few influential websites noticed, and were thorough enough to include mention of the band's originals when they posted; before Wyss and Chettri knew it, their efforts were blogged and linked to by none other than mercurial tastemaking pop-cultural icon Kanye West. West's item provoked a response from labels in record time. Wyss says he was contacted by several influential imprints - including Blind Man's Colour's current home, uber-hip Brooklyn concern Kanine Records (Grizzly Bear, Oxford Collapse) - within 24 hours.

"I was in English class on the computer, and somebody posted a link to West's blog item on my Facebook page," says Wyss. "I clicked on it, saw our artwork that he'd found and a link to a song. I couldn't tell if it was, like, some joke thing; I looked into it, and realized it was real, so I posted it on Orhan's Facebook wall."

In a matter of weeks, a short lifetime of fiddling for fun with computers, instruments, and the unique sounds coming from both their heads and their efforts became a trendy indie-scene buzz. Chettri and Wyss had already committed to finishing ideas they'd recorded on the spur of the moment, left, returned to, modified, walked away from, added to again - in some cases literally over the course of years - for their first full-length, yet were still monkeying with various tracks. But no more; Kanine will release Season Dreaming August 18.

Now, along with friends Ben Goodman (bass) and Ashton Sheridan (drums, sometimes), the two 19-year-olds have seen this chapter of their collaboration come full circle. They're back in the band room again, trying to figure out how to play their own heady material live for a spate of shows in Florida and New York to celebrate Dreaming's arrival.

"We've been really nervous lately," says Wyss. "We haven't done this in so long - we've been in our rooms making music, not out there playing. But if we did it back then, we should be able to do it now.

Blind Man's Colour plays New World Brewery in Ybor City tonight, August 24, and Orlando's BackBooth August 25