STACK #188 June 2020

FEATURE MUSIC

it to make it sound more unique and reflect where we were. We found an old stereo in the shearing shed next door and ran piano parts through it. It was an awesome period of discovery and experimentation. The album begins with a short intro of you walking to the piano, sitting down, depressing one of the pedals, and sighing, before Aeroplane Bathroom starts.Why is this intro track called Goodwins ? The cottage on the farm where we made the record is down a little lane that we call Goodwin’s Lane, so we call it Goodwin’s cottage. I believe people named the Goodwins lived there once upon a time. The farm has been in my family for 150 years so there’s a lot of history! When you listen to the record, I want it to feel like you’ve been invited into the space in which it was made. The creaking door at the entrance is such an idiosyncratic sound and was so synonymous with the recording process for me. So the album starts and finishes with that sample. (knocks and murmurs of space) but Volcanic is a primo example of their collection into one song.The vocals also morph into a slightly warped, fuzzed state when you change tempo. How you know that these things are right to include in their places – what feeling do There are many small airy details across the album

you get that informs you they’re correct for the song? Great question. I’m always afraid of things that are too beautiful. The things that I write about are so deeply personal and usually reflect something I find difficult to talk about. So the idea that someone listening would miss out on that underlying grief or uncomfortableness because they’re distracted by the beauty is something I try really hard to avoid. When we’ve laid down the vocals and the main instrumentation and everything feels like it’s sitting nicely, I usually feel a pull to counter that with something gritty. I wanted Volcanic to live in two parts: in the first part you’re being told the story of what it’s like to live inside an anxiety attack, and the second part is a musical enactment of that. The metronome actually doesn’t change, the piano part is just played slowly and gradually sped up until it’s twice as fast so it feels like a loss of control. And the repeated line “Am I starving you out” is fuzzed out because it’s like an expression of subconscious – the self-destruction of pushing everybody away when you are in that anxious state. ZKR

GORDI Sophie Payten (AKA Gordi) talks highlighting the grief behind aurual beauty, experimentation in engineering, and capturing the atmospheric minutiae of the cottage on her parents' farm where she recorded her breathtaking new album, Our Two Skins .

at the fireplace as a replacement for high-hats. One sound that featured a lot on the record was this tiny toy Casio Tonebank keyboard. I used to play with it as a kid so it’s decades old and was living in the toy cupboard that my Mum still has for her grandkids. We also ran a lot of things through a Fostex Tape Machine, that I bought on Gumtree, to give it that warm, warbly feeling. A lot of the process was about recording something and then re-amping

On your last (debut) album, you used particular re-recording techniques across the whole to create a textural thread; For Our Two Skins , was there another such quality you used to plait everything together? We chose to make the record in a cottage on my parents’ farm outside of Canowindra. So the biggest sonic thread is the space itself. We would mic things up from the kitchen with its lino floors, we used the steel chimney

Read the full Q & A online at stack.com.au

Our Two Skins by Gordi is out June 26 via Jagjaguwar.

they might have been Fran just messing around, and we fell in love with it and made sure we kept it in there. Fran has said that on tour, he felt “everywhere and nowhere at the same time – and no one in particular.” Has the current state of restrictive travel come to colour or deepen these feelings about the frenetic nature of touring? I love touring. I hope I never lose the wonderment that comes with overseas travel. The frenetic nature of touring is often mellowed by the long time spent in the van, looking out the window and contemplating the world around you. I think all this time away from playing shows and touring is only ratcheting up my excitement for the chance to do it again. ZKR

so much we felt we needed to honour our roots, and this felt like a true way to do that. It really symbolises the approach to this record, which was trying to move forward and be adventurous while acknowledging where we came from. Beautiful Steven is some seriously romantic poetry to Melbourne; who/what is the titular Steven? Steven is a fictional character in a fictional story about a real place. The song is set in the high school Tom, Joe R and Fran went to. It's a look back at the rough days of being a teenager in a Catholic all boys school, and being secretly in love with the cool kid.

full-kit rock rhythm; it gives such a sense of atmosphere to the story. Did the beat ever exist in a different way? Yes it did; this song went through a few different styles. It ended up being a song that we had a lot of fun with. It became a chance to get creative and use atmosphere to our advantage. The piano in NotTonight is very mesmeric, with the repeated chord in the chorus, and meandering accents throughout. How/ where was it recorded? Yeah, that piano really became a feature of that song. It was recorded on the grand at Head Gap. The rhythmic notes in the chorus kept getting pushed further up and up throughout the mixing process. Those meandering accents were exactly that: I think

The fantastic Sunglasses AtTheWedding never breaks out of its hi-hat beat into a

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