Flam

Description

'Flam' starts with a cinematic drone, followed by what sounds like droplets of water torture, and a cacophony of clocks and childhood music boxes, and maybe something underwater. Something like a title arrives on the sound screen as GTD launches into the kind of activity we love them for: that interrogative conversation between Steve Gunn's guitar and John Truscinski's drums and percussion, though here they venture into new territory, as Steve explains: "This 'Flam' session was open and experimental for us. We deliberately didn't have many ideas and wanted to see where a more spontaneous approach might lead us. In the studio, we were able to set up several different stations; a synth area, a guitar area, drums, and other effects happening in the control room with the sound engineer. We moved freely to our different stations and tried what we felt. We listened a lot." Do you know the GTD soundscapes? Have you ridden their ebbs/flows/tsunamis to those strange, dreamy, cellular places? It operates far from the earthly everyday of smartphones. It's like a discovery, a wonder. Things shine. The song 'Fin', for example. A melancholic guitar rides a relentless subconscious drone. The drone rises. The guitar searches. Then it finds its pace, its gallop. Do you struggle with internal noise, the minute-by-minute fluctuations, the way it can all feel utterly untenable, then suddenly it lifts, there's lightness, even notes of rapture, and how the hell did we get here? This music too. 'Conviction' moves celestially, atop a heartbeat. The guitar feels exploratory, as if looking around, capturing. Then something cataclysmic happens, and for a few suspended seconds, we are in what that cataclysmic thing is, maybe a planet exploding, maybe the Big Bang. And now, it softens, opens. "We didn't really have a program and we didn't know what the general direction of the record would be," says John. "Listening to it, I think there's something like a process of struggling with transition. A lot of the tracks feel like hibernation or something waiting to be born. It feels like a winter record to me. At the end, it feels like the listener has made the journey with us. The last track, 'For Ika', seems ready to move to the next phase, at the end of the album." The next phase, or rather the afterglow, one of the true delights of this record. The way the riffs and rhythms lodge in the head, the soundtrack, the score, and maybe even the tour guide our inner reflections. Like half-remembered dreams. Like things we search for but can't quite touch. "John and I have spent so much time playing over the years that we've developed a language together," says Steve. "We kept going and it started taking different forms. On our previous recordings, we would play the pieces we had written together, and we prepared by playing a lot before recording. That gave more structure to what we were doing. But this session was different and less structured. There's a broader vision happening. We just tried to follow the music wherever it went."