Globular + Geoglyph
MESSAGES FROM THE RESONATOR
by Mister Mime
August 22nd 2020
The ‘downtempo-psy’ genre contains some subtle yet impactful musicality. Case in point: the album in focus today: "Messages From The Resonator” by the dynamic duo of the chillout scene Globular and Geoglyph. Some of the most exciting stuff in music is happening in this very sonic ecosystem.
I would describe this music as organic, compassionate, cosmic, twisted and confusing, all of which can be used to describe the human condition itself as well as the nature of the universe. But that’s just my take.
I love listening to electronic & instrumental sounds coming together through the medium of psychedelia! I feel there cannot be enough of this sound, and is one of the relatively unexplored frontiers in music as of today.
I like the spaces in each track, that give off a comforting feeling of outer and inner space, and allow a natural buildup into formidable sonic stories.
The subdivisional interplays, from slow-swung triplets to the glitchy fractalizing effect of faster subdivisions, are done very elegantly.
As for the artwork, I was attracted to it like a bee to a flower!
The journey starts at ‘The Observatory’ : which I took to be as an induction into the journey we were about to embark on.
Be it the flute intro that sets up with a sparkling, dub-esque, cosmic-sitar-like sound, or planar transmissions that push you on with a gentle ebb, a psychedelic caress; it feels like this sonic place is home. Feels to me like seeking a world beyond one’s current perception.
I hear in the tracks a level of slow, meticulous detail like in ‘A General Benevolent Presence’, or a buzzing beehive of ideas and influences craftily woven together like in ‘M.I.N.D.’
The minimal yet distinct instrumentation, feels sweet and comfortably unfamiliar in the sea of psychedelia.
The best part is that the music and the concept are open for interpretation by the listener who may use it like a spacecraft to explore the astral expanse of creation, bound only by their own imagination.
NOTE : This interview was done as a 3-way Zoom call, so please bear that in mind if you find any discrepancy in the coherence of the text.
MM: Let’s talk about your collaboration process.
Globular: Well for my part, I generally don’t like collaborations. I find them really really difficult. It’s hard to work with other people and to relinquish control. Especially since most collaborations are done over the internet, sending files back and forth. There’s too much competition, it’s a slow process. But this happened more organically because Chris and I were just hanging out, chilling and making music. We started to make a couple of tracks and it just kind of evolved, and after a few tracks, we thought we should make this into an EP or an album. I’ve only ever done one other proper collaboration, and it was also a strange process. So we were in the same space, and it clicked.
Geoglyph: The thing is that we didn’t start out mainly to collaborate, instead to make some particular sounds and solve some specific problems that we were both encountering in our work. So there’s a particular artist we wanted to look at and kind of emulate the sound a little bit, which is Tom Bailey - The International Observer. He was also a member of the Thompson Twins, the 80s pop band which is so different and he is an excellent producer. He makes some weird noises. So we started out trying to make some of those noises saying “How is he doing this?”. So the first track of the album came out like that, we weren’t really trying to make a track. We were just trying to figure stuff out. And then we did a couple more of those, and then we had like 4 tracks; then we did a couple more, and we had an album. This happened over nearly 3 years. So we were trying to make sounds, recreate sounds of other artists and the tracks just came out of that.
Globular: Almost invariably, we didn’t really succeed trying to replicate other peoples sounds, which is why the album sounds pretty unique.
Geoglyph: You could say we failed, but failed upwards.
MM: How much would you say that the sync between the two of you as people facilitated the process of music-making?
Globular: I would say it’s the main reason why it happened. We were hanging out, having fun and making music. If that wasn’t the case, I don’t think it would’ve happened.
MM: What were your influences in and out of the genre(s) in which you make music?
Geoglyph: We both have a background in Alternative Rock and Heavy Metal. That’s a really consistent thing in the psytrance scene. Everyone’s a metalhead.
MM: Yeah, I recently realised this trend, and it goes all the way back to Skazi for me. Why do you think this is so? Is it because it was the sound with the most intensity at the time, and we all caught on?
Geoglyph: Yeah, that might be it. I think TOOL has a lot to answer for, cause for our generation they were definitely the CROSSOVER point into psychedelic culture. I grew up with late 90s grunge, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, moving on to Tool
MM: I suppose yes. Tool did break that barrier for a LOT of people between rock, metal and psychedelic music
Geoglyph: Yeah, and teaching us to listen to longer songs, 10-minute songs, so you needed patience to listen to them. Morison’s songs are often about 10 minutes long.
MM: All the tracks are of healthy lengths, from 5 to 9 mins. Is that intentional or more subconscious and resultant of your expression?
Globular: Pink Floyd is quite an obvious influence. For me, whenever I write a track I like to have something that feels complete, and I find that often to exhibit the body of the track properly, I just need to set the scene for like 5 minutes before it gets there. I actually find it really hard to write a short track because with a short track you just drop straight into it. It has to be...perfect, it has to be right there as soon as you’re there. Which for me, is impossible. I need to tell the person, "Look, this is where we’re going to go, this is the vibe, this is the feeling, and this is where we are going to end up."
Geoglyph: I think we did shorter intros on this album, we usually do extended intros, and also we didn’t overlap the tracks in this album, which is something we both have done separately, where the tracks overlap (between the transitions). People do tend to put things in Spotify Playlists these days. So, I think there are 2 different ways of listening, you got that Pink Floyd, listen to your album start to finish, Dark Side of the Moon thing, then you got the modern tendency to make mixes and playlists. So that’s the tension at the moment, is that people like Morison and I would really like to make something that’s long and flows together, like an hour-long, but we also know that people want to shuffle it, so this is our shuffle album perhaps.
MM: Yeah that being said though, I do believe your listeners would actually take the time to listen to the whole thing. Yet sometimes you just want a bit of that sound. If you have only a bit of time for example, then you just want a taster. So for instance, in my case, I just pick the song with the title that appeals to me the most, 'Fractal Mandala' or whatever, depending on what I’m feeling, and sometimes I preconceive the track based on the title because it gives a kind of perceived meaning or context before listening to it.
Globular: Yeah, that’s the idea of choosing a good song title, to draw you in.
Geoglyph: Morison has a big book of song titles
Globular: Song titles ready to go (Shows me his list on the phone)
MM: Ott has got a similar such list on his phone as well! It’s a creative way of naming your tracks for sure.
‘The Cogs of Cognition’, ‘Synchronicity City’, ‘Fractalicious Fantastifications’, In Formation (Who doesn’t like a good pun?!), The Might of Chondria: Psy track names just get me! Some more than others.
The psychedelic genre can be credited for some of the most interesting, whacky, confusing song titles, depending whichever way you look at it.
How do you manage to relate the song itself to the track name?
Globular: This album is a little bit different. Like Chris was saying, a lot of times when we started the track, we were trying to replicate or understand another producer, so there are a few tracks in there which are just evident and specific references.
MM: It’s all about the references
Geoglyph: And then there are a lot of wordplays. We took some of the track titles from the samples that we put into the tracks
MM: I’m a big fan of themed albums. I’m sure most artists have some sort of theme or thread running through their records, but I like it when there’s an apparent story, sonic signature, and like in your case, thematic artwork. If you look at someone like ‘Shpongle' for example, they can be defined even just by their artwork.
Globular: The trick is really, and I think a lot of artists would say the same, to give the illusion of that kind of thing. So a lot of the time that theme is not really there, but you’re adding little elements, instructions, and so on, and that’s enough for people to interpret it in their own way and build a little story around it
Geoglyph: Yea you’ve got to leave some gaps for the imagination
MM: Even if you don’t leave many gaps, people are bound to perceive it from their own viewpoint
Geoglyph: If you think about the most famous psy/prog concept album, 'Dark Side of the Moon’, what’s it about? 'Sergeant Pepper' as well... what’s that even about? It doesn’t matter.
{MM: Narrating my 8th grade, Creative Writing Contest, Pink Floyd discovery story}
Geoglyph: That’s it, your imagination fills in the gaps.
MM: What is the concept or theme for “MESSAGES FROM THE RESONATOR”?
Geoglyph: I’m not sure it has one.
Globular: That’s up to you. I would say there’s a very loose feeling there, but it’s something that we applied AFTER making the album: it’s supposed to be these alien guys sending out this resonating message back to earth, this music is the resonance that they send out.
MM: Is it the aliens sending us the messages, or are we sending them out?
Globular: Maybe it’s us! I was thinking that they are sending these out to Earth, but it could be us as well
Geoglyph: There is a little bit of a sci-fi theme to it
MM: You have a solid, colourful and exciting discography that resonates with me. Reagrding the colour scheme and nomenclature of the record, how does it tie in conceptually with the music ?
Globular: Funnily enough, the piece that we both liked of Gareth Hovey, the artist that we went with, is a black and white pencil piece. Initially I was trying to get Chris to go with the black and white pencil piece because I thought it was so cool, but Chris was like “NO! It needs colour!”.
Geoglyph: It kind of popped out of the page, which is good for vinyl sales, I think…though a pencil-drawn sketch would have looked very cool as well. But we didn’t really know much about Gareth’s colour work
Globular: Yeah all of his work is super colourful apart from the pencil sketches. A lot of his work is aimed at people who make colouring books. They are all kind of simple, with areas for block colours. We left a lot of the colouration down to Gareth, we just gave him an idea of the theme.
Geoglyph: We sent him the album, and he heard the album before he sent us the artwork. I don’t think he even knew what the titles of the tracks were. We gave him one little hint that Morison and I had both been reading a series of books by Iain M. Banks called the ‘Culture Series’, and we mentioned that we were thinking about the series when we wrote the album .
Globular: Gareth was also a big fan of it. A lot of psy heads are Culture fans, so a lot of people know this series. So Gareth knows, and that helped him to draw this. The first thing we saw was the back cover.
Globular: No , his first sketch was the inside cover
Geoglyph: That’s right; the first sketch was the inside cover, and that had two people. Then, the front cover came through last if I remember correctly...I was like ‘Whoaaa! What is that thing, this glowing gemstone..’.
MM: Yeah, it looks like it’s capable of sending some messages...it served the purpose right
Geoglyph: I don’t know where he got the skulls from, really cool and the coral, lots of coral and snakes. But he pretty much themed that himself.
Globular: We didn’t give him too much direction.
MM: That’s the cool thing with artists of other disciplines. Do you guys take any inspiration or ideas from arts apart from music itself?
Geoglyph: Oh yeah, I follow so many pages and people on Instagram. My favourite at the moment, it’s called “70s Sci-Fi Art”, and it’s basically covers of 1970s novels, beautiful spaceships, landscapes, dinosaurs, and all kinds of weird stuff. Check them out on IG. That one’s a big inspiration.
MM: So when any visual artist listens to music, they probably don’t think of it from a technical point of view as you or I would. It stimulates them differently, right? So maybe he would have seen these colours and images through these frequencies
Globular: Maybe, man, hopefully. Personally, I can’t say I draw direct inspiration from the visual world. I love visual art and everything I see, but there are very few things that give me direct inspiration
MM: It could be subconscious.
Globular: Of course, subconsciously, everything influences me, the whole world around me... that’s what the music is.
Geoglyph: Oh, one graphic thing that definitely inspired us while we were making the record: we were reading the comic book ‘Saga’ which is printed by the publisher ‘Image Comics’…you’ll love this! So it’s a long-running sci-fi graphic novel which is very trippy and we both really enjoyed it.
Globular: Brian Vaughan, is it?
Geoglyph: Yeah, and the artist is...Fiona Staples. I don’t know much about comic books, it’s not really my speciality. Are you up to date on it, Morison?
Globular: I have the anthology, so I think I’m up to date. I’ll have to check
MM: I took a break from movies and TV shows, and started reading comics again, and it was so good. Cause when you’re watching a movie, and your brain just stops for a minute, the pictures are still moving. But in a comic, you can take that pause, relish it, and come back to the next frame. Also, the writers and artists are incredibly talented.
Globular: Yeah, you can stop anytime and drift off into whatever world you’re in
MM: So that was cool. I did get a very spacey, colourful psychedelic and less serious Star Trek vibe from the record. I’d say more ‘Space Odyssey’ actually
Geoglyph: Yeah...we did take some samples from old, out of copyright sci-fi films. There’s one we sampled in the track called M.I.N.D., the second last track and that was really old (fashioned)
MM: 'M.I.N.D.' was my favourite track
Geoglyph: Me too!
Globular: It’s the weirdest one
MM: It’s definitely less forgiving than the other tracks. ‘Observatory’ was like an introductory space, like you’re stepping into an observatory to observe the rest of the tracks from afar.
Geoglyph: The samples we took from the old films sit in this kind of music very well for some reason. There’s something about that old tape saturated 1950s B-movie sketchy wobbly sound. It does fit with the album so well. I couldn’t tell you what that is, but as soon as we put the samples in, we were like, “that’s it!”
MM: We’ve got a couple of them in there, right?
Geoglyph: THREE of them I believe
Globular: One of them is STAR TREK, right?
MM: Is it? I didn’t recognize it
Geoglyph: That’s probably a good thing
MM: Yeah, usually I get too microscopic about these things, but this time I decided I wouldn’t deconstruct the tracks too much, at least not that soon
Geoglyph: Oh there’s another one I was watching today, which is unrelated to the album. It is by another novelist we both have been interested in for a while, OCTAVIA BUTLER. She’s quite a popular sci-fi novelist, African-American science fiction author writing from the 70s to 90s/2000s. And she never got that famous in her life, she’s sort of famous..but nowadays she’s getting really famous in the sci-fi scene, and the film that inspired her, it’s a great fit. It’s called 'Devil Woman From Mars.' And it’s terrible, but also classic 1950s sci-fi, you know, way before Star Trek and all that, It’s what people thought aliens might look like
MM: I still hold on to that belief, that’s what aliens should be like
Geoglyph: Yeah, people in silly costumes coming down… That’s a great film, check that one out
MM: Yeah sci-fi will save me from my current binge streak of Jason Statham - Transporter-like movies
Geoglyph: The one that I want to watch on Netflix is, TALES FROM THE LOOP, which is based on...Morison might know this...do you know Simon Stalenhag, the artist? He’s a Scandinavian artist who does pictures of robots, spaceships and stuff. It’s set in like 1990s Norway or Sweden, so you have beautiful pine trees, Volvo cars and Ikea looking houses, with alien spaceships over the top, and they just made that into a sort of Scandic-Noir sci-fi
MM: I’ll take it, give me aliens landing anywhere except New York City
Globular: We both watched 'Arrival' (2017) as well recently
Geoglyph: 'ARRIVAL’ is a big influence for both of us
Globular: In fact, I just realized this as well: ‘Arrival’ was based on a story by Ted Chiang, who is a short story writer. He writes really philosophical short sci-fi kind of stories based on the implications of time travel and that kind of stuff. They are all like small parables rather than a long story. There’s a classic story that got me into his work, which is the story of someone that discovers a brain enhancing drug. It’s a great story, it goes to the complete extremes, goes very full-on with how far they take their intelligence. It’s also one of our favourite directors as well, DENIS VILLENEUVE. He also did the new ‘BLADE RUNNER’. Check him out. He’s also doing ‘DUNE’ next year, like a trilogy or something. Oh, did you watch ‘Annihilation’? I didn’t like it at all.
Geoglyph: It’s a Netflix sci-fi film, set in a jungle/forest, kind of like Alien, It’s quite cool. It’s not perfect, the script doesn’t work at all, but the visuals are good, very trippy.
MM: ‘Temple Of The Pollinator', 'Up The Xylem Elevator', ‘PLANCK!', 'Dance of the Logarithm', 'Escape Velocity Dub': what’s your relationship with science: biology, chemistry and physics? Did you guys study science?
Globular: I left school when I was 16. Science is just awesome, though. My main relationship with science was since I was 16 or so, I would watch a lot of Youtube videos, and I always used to like watching the World Science Festivals, Conferences, Asimov Conferences, and just watching highly intelligent people talking about things they really really know a lot about, like the universe.
Geoglyph: We both love podcasts as well, the podcast culture is really good. There are a lot of good science podcasts. A great one to start with is MINDSCAPE by SEAN CARROLL.
Globular: He does go a lot into politics as well, But that’s not what the podcast is about
MM: Yeah these days it’s almost impossible to stick to just one thing to talk about, it inevitably goes into other subjects, and ends up as an interdisciplinary discussion
Geoglyph: My pathway is a little bit different because I didn’t do science at all. I studied music, then I did arts, more arts, and then I went into the social sciences. I did anthropology, for music, so no science at all. Social Science perhaps.
Globular: So the way that we met was through your studies right
Geoglyph: Yes. I was writing a thesis on independent music and musicianship. I was interviewing psytrance musicians around Bristol, and I interviewed Morison. It was fun, I met some really cool people doing that, and worked with a few people as well in psy-dub and forest psytrance, the faster, more underground. Forest psy is mostly in cold places. I come from Scotland, and it makes more sense up there, it’s cold and dark, and the forests are big.
MM: That sounds like spooky psytrance, We also have some lovely forests here in India...
Geoglyph: The original forest psytrance was also kind of Goa trance wasn’t it
Globular: It’s a whole different thing in the UK
MM: It’s like what you guys had as cricket and then what we made of it...
Geoglyph: I guess it’s a bit like football here
MM: How has electronic Music from Bristol and The UK influenced you?
Globular: Bristol’s been absolutely huge. I had no interaction with the Bristol Music scene whatsoever, especially with my music. I went to some psytrance nights a few times, and there’s one night called 'Tribe of Frog' which Chris plays at. I’ve played there a few times, but I’m not into psytrance. Bristol is an amazing city with so many fundamental sounds that came out of it, notably Dubstep. Same with TRIP HOP, which is almost exclusively Bristol.
Geoglyph: There aren’t that many of them actually. Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky, are the famous ones who came out of Bristol. After that, it depends on what you think counts as trip-hop. I would call ‘Bonobo' trip-hop, for example. I think trip-hop turned into Neo-Soul at some point, so the whole Neo-Soul movement like Andreya Triana, Erykah Badu, Zero7, that for me is trip-hop.
Globular: I think 'Ancient Astronauts' was a big one for me. There’s only one album for me, it’s called ‘We Are To Answer’. It’s so good, really broad musical styles, that’s consistently trip-hop for sure
MM: See these are the kind of artists I would just check-out cause of their name.. 'Ancient Astronauts’? I’m sold! So which other genres…?
Globular: Drum and Bass, Jungle. Bristol is very crucial to these sounds
Geoglyph: So we’re in the South West of England, and the psy-dub scene is also sort of focused down here as well. Ott lives very close to where Morison is. Who else lives around here, Spatialize and Quanta. Merv Pepler (Eat Static) lives about an hour away. Then we’ve got Tom - Wolftech.
Geoglyph: So let’s start from the bottom of Cornwall, We’ve got Ishq who’s very important
MM: Do you know what ISHQ means?
Geoglyph: No, but I do know it’s a Hindi word...
MM: It means 'LOVE'
Globular: He’s more ambient, but I think most psy producers would cite him as an influence
Geoglyph: He’s been doing this for ages as well. There’s Neil from Spatialize, who isn’t very widely known but is also an OG from the 90s, and of course Ott in the South West
Globular: I guess Simon Posford is in Dorset
Geoglyph: Oh, is he? So Simon Posford is quite nearby. And we’ve got a few up and coming artists in Bristol as well. We’ve got Illusive Tuna, who’s fantastic. There’s a psy dub night that started in Bristol a few years ago, and there’s this record label called ‘Psychedelic Jelly’. I released my first record with them. It’s new and small scale. They only do a couple of parties a year now, and they were all travelling. Now they’re all in Lockdown, So the next one won’t be for a while, but they’re a good crew
Globular: They do good local releases, which is quite nice. So if you want to check out the scene here you could check them out.
MM: Let’s talk about genres: dub, trip-hop, psy, downtempo…what do these mean? How do we use these different sounds to express ourselves?
Globular: Chris has been writing a paper on this very subject
Geoglyph: I’ve published a couple of papers, and the one that I’m trying to get published for a particular EDM journal is about genres. Genres have really changed since the internet came about. Back in the day, genres used to be a way of organizing your CD shop, magazines or radio channels; so all the genre categories that we inherited from the 90s were from CD shops, radio channels, magazines or for your car stereos. They don’t have the same kind of meaning that they used to. With the internet, we have a really different way of labelling stuff, and I think the key development is TAGS; we now use TAGS to describe things. We put lots of tags on an album when we release it or upload it to Youtube. It means that we can be subtle and do much more clever things than we used to. So you said glitch, dub and trip-hop, those are tags now really, that you can attach to something. You can attach it with some measure of subtlety and ambiguity and don’t have to fit it in a particular box, We don’t do boxes anymore.
MM: True. Whenever I try to understand music, I try to understand it through people. It’s like saying I know Chris from this place and he speaks this language, but that’s all you can understand with tags. You have to meet and listen to him to find out what he’s about. That’s when you know him as a human being.
Geoglyph: And not a collection of tags
MM: Yeah, it’s a complex classification, and once you know it well enough, you know. For example, Shpongle is Shpongle. You can siphon various elements into your own sound, like if you use a steady 4/4 kick its a hallmark of techno or a one-drop is drawing from reggae
Geoglyph: Then you can vary it up. Yeah. Where is it going to go next...I don’t know. I feel like we don’t really come up with new genre terms anymore
MM: I think we should! Astro jazz…? The new Mindex album is tagged as #catjazz
Globular: He’s so multi-talented he doesn’t need genres. I feel like in an ideal world, genres shouldn’t even really be a thing. You should be able to make music and find the music that you want to listen to. But you have to be able to find music, and you have to be able to identify things. I think when I’m making music specifically, it’s advantageous not to think about genres. But there are genres where you definitely want to think about it. So, for example, I follow a Facebook group called ‘Drum and Bass Producers’, and they are obsessed with how to make ‘Drum and Bass’! They don’t want to make some fresh music that is kind of drum and bass… they want to make ‘Drum & Bass’! So there’s still genres like that which have a very specific thing, like psytrance: people on psytrance forums want to know exactly how to make standard psytrance. And that’s the reason why I love Downtempo or psy(dub). It lets you do whatever you want as long as it’s vaguely psychedelic, and that’s something I do with my music anyway.
MM: A friend of mine, who is a footwork producer told me that about 10 years ago, there was a lot of rigidity and gatekeeping in the DNB scene
Globular: Yeah and I think that’s why you hear quite a lot of the experimental DNB lately
Geoglyph: People like 'Culprate' have really blown that wide open {experimental trip-hop psychedelic drum and bass}
Globular: For me, Joe Ford is a big one
Geoglyph: And Amon Tobin
Globular: I played a gig in the States last year and saw Amon Tobin play. He’s got another project called ‘Two Fingers’. Seeing Tipper and then him doing his Two Fingers thing was interesting because Drum and Bass just doesn’t work in the states, They don’t get it at all. You see people trying to dance to it, they’re just like….”What is this?” He was mixing in all this, (Bro)step, Tipper Trip-Hop kind of stuff while there was DNB and people just went wild.
MM: In American EDM, the DNB thing is used more as a ..drop part or section, not as a whole song... Like what Netsky does, though he has changed his sound
Geoglyph: Yeah that’s like hard, big synths
MM: Have you heard ‘Breakage’? What would you classify that as?
Geoglyph: He used to do dubstep, he did neuro for a while, I think. I have to see what he’s up to these days
MM: What about ‘Subfocus’?
Geoglyph: That’s liquid. ‘Koan Sound’, they’re big from Bristol
Globular: They released a new album or something, or a 4 track EP
MM: Let’s talk a bit about glitch. I see the relevance of glitch in/for humans like this: it’s defined as a small nonfunctioning or flaw…imperfection, and the whole meaning of being human is being imperfect but striving nevertheless
Globular: For me, the main thing with Electronic music is an obsession with PERFECTION. Making music so precise by making it on a computer. I mean it depends on your skill level, but you can make EXACTLY what you’re trying to do
MM: Then you realize the limitation is only you, and not the machine
Geoglyph: Another thing is that the reason why the glitch sound, the ‘Mr. Bill’ sound is so popular is because of his tutorials
Globular: That’s how I found Mr. Bill for sure
Geoglyph: And also there’s a guy called ‘Dash Glitch’ who does excellent psytrance tutorials. I’ve learned a lot from him. So what Bill does is he takes Ableton Live and bends it way out of it’s comfort zone in a way that others wouldn’t think to do. He shows you how to get rad sounds
MM: It’s so rock n’ roll right..like what Jimi Hendrix or Jaco Pastorius did back in the day
Geoglyph: I think the modern equivalent now to those guys in Ableton Live specifically, is ‘Flying Lotus’. FlyLo is our generation’s Jimi Hendrix. I think he is the best electronic producer out there, and he pushes Ableton Live in directions you can’t even begin to imagine. Morison doesn’t like him much
MM: Yeah I will admit that I too don’t “get” everything he does, but I doubt he makes music to be gotten, especially with his lineage and all. I cannot imagine what’s going on in his head. So it’s his own catharsis and musical expression
Geoglyph: His last album went over my head
Globular: I find it very hard to engage with something I feel uncomfortable with. I know you say it’s a valuable thing to do but...I just don’t have that much time to make myself listen to something that I don’t like
MM: Bringing it back to the personal equivalent of this, this would be the kind of person you’d meet very few times in your life, and you’d be like, “Okay this kind of a personality exists too…cool. I can’t resonate, but that’s okay, you do you.”
Anyway, that’s why I see glitch as an important genre, relating to humans and imperfection
Geoglyph: Glitch has deviated from its origins. The aim of modern glitch is to create very precise sounds that are very organized and structured, that sound like something malfunctioning. Whereas back in the day they use to make glitch differently. Oval from Germany did it I think in the 1990s. They invented it by scratching up old CDs
MM: So, who were some older Glitch artists?
Geoglyph: Oval is the main one I think, and Autechre
Globular: I guess you would say that Aphex Twin is too
MM: But he’s just Aphex Twin
Geoglyph: He tends to invent a genre 10 years before anyone invents it
MM: So, I see the dichotomy between Glitch and Downtempo like this: glitch is how I feel when I wake up in the morning, and downtempo is how I feel by 5 or 6 PM, hopefully, once I’m in the flow of the day. So they are both expressions of the human condition, you could be glitchy, cranky perhaps, or in the most chill and harmonious state
Globular: There are a few people that mix the two really well, like Ott. There are parts of his sound that get a bit jagged, and I know people get annoyed with it in the more organic sound scene. I remember having a conversation with Spatialize a while back, and he was just so pissed off that the downtempo producers are making glitchy noises “(Make) pure organic sounds!”
Geoglyph: He makes the most mellifluous music I think, no one makes leads that smooth. He is the most you can go in that scene what you can call evening psy dub flow sound, no glitches at all. Actually, that’s not true he does have some glitches
Who else does a sort of crossover? The big one that everyone was talking about last year was Grouch. He is a glitch artist who made a dub album
MM: Grouch in Dub
Geoglyph: Yeah, check it out. It’s not my thing, but it’s cool. I don’t like the vocals so much, I don’t tend to listen to vocals in psy dub
MM: Let’s attempt a 'rapid fire round’ :- What’s the peculiar mission?
Geoglyph: Make an album and finish it
MM: ‘Triplicitous’ - What does it mean?
Globular: It’s got a few different meanings, one reference is to a local festival that we both play at and really dig, ‘Triplicity’
Also, Triplicitous is one step up from being Duplicitous. And there was one more reference
Geoglyph: The track is in triplets, and then the word popped into my head
MM: So it’s a three-pronged, three-sided figure of sorts
Geoglyph: Yeah, and also, Triplicity is a sign in astrology or something? It’s a group of 3 signs belonging to the same element. So in the zodiac, you have 12 signs, and there are 4 groups of 3, 3 fire, 3 water, 3 air, 3 earth and those are called triplicities
MM: 'Take Down everything' is very cool! There’s a bit of hip hop in there? A bit Tipper-ish, Algae Bloom in Seven, or something. Psy-hop?!
Globular: We weren’t sure what people were gonna think of this track
Geoglyph: Our main influences for that track were early Tipper and early Incubus
MM: Early Incubus was really good man, they really laid shit down. ‘Fungus Amongus’ -1992
Globular: ‘Fungus Amongus’ blew my mind! So the (influence for the) 'Take Down Everything’ track came from those couple of songs they do which are like little extras on the album, slightly hip-hoppy, which was always cool
Geoglyph: I reckon Jamiroquai is in there too, I like Jamiroquai. Early Jamiroquai, when they were really psychedelic.
MM: So this track gets a bit playful even, at 3:00 mintes, with a jazzy/hip hop MC Vibe
Globular: It’s like a 70s porno kind of vibe
MM: Yeah, anyone would mess with that vibe. 70s porno was the vibe to fuck with. After late 2000s, not so much, shit got too cutting edge…the human element was lost.
Geoglyph: Again we weren’t sure who was going to like that track, we kind of put in a jazz thing and I played the flute like the Anchorman sound of Jethro Tull, and it worked out...okay
MM: People liking it is just a matter of making them believe they like it, isn’t it? Or convincing them that they do
Globular: The thing with this album was, we told everyone,”It’s kind of strange, I don’t know if you’re going to like it at all, it’s not like either of tour projects.” That was the context we gave, and people still seemed to enjoy it
MM: You don’t have to do the convincing, that’s our job. Maybe you could add a ‘Psy-Hop’ tag
Geoglyph: I haven’t used that one, gotta write that one down
Globular: It’d be ‘Hip-Dub’
MM: Some new ground being broken here...
Geoglyph: ‘Hip-Psy’, Psyc-Dub -with a C
MM: How do you get the psy turntable scratch?
Globular: It was kind of accidental, we were playing around with some synth patching Serum and came across thing sound and thought, "Yeah this could work." We should have some fun with it. It’s fully synthesized. I mean, neither of us can scratch so...
Geoglyph: I still haven’t heard the album on Vinyl yet, have no idea what it sounds like. In the lockdown, I haven’t got access to a player
MM: A general benevolent presence: please explain yourselves
Geoglyph: This is my favourite one. But in this one, I don’t think anything survived from the original track that we wrote. We replaced every single part of it. It’s got a quiet middle bit, so this is the one I thought you were talking about when you mentioned a “Middle Eastern interlude”. This one is, probably the trip-hoppiest one weirdly, because it sounds a bit like Zero7, according to a lot of Youtube and Bandcamp comments, and Boards of Canada
MM: I haven’t checked out much of Boards of Canada...
Geoglyph: They are weird, really weird. They are a very saturated analogue tape kind of sound
MM: Anyway, what is the ‘general benevolent presence’ you’re mentioning here?
Globular: If I was reading that from the outside, it would definitely look like it’s about some kind of God or something, but I don’t think it is. It could be the feeling that is... it’s just one of the titles that came from my list, and we thought "Ah let’s chuck it on this track." It feels like a benevolent track to me, super happy and uplifting
MM: I got an ’80s or ’90s prog-rock vibe almost, Have you heard Porcupine tree’s older stuff?
Geoglyph: I’m a big Porcupine Tree fan
MM: One of my favourite bands, and favourite drummers
Geoglyph: But the first 2 albums, wasn’t with a band, it was just Steven Wilson pretending he had a band and playing all the instruments himself
MM: That was way before, even before the albums
Geoglyph: Did he have a drummer for the first album?
MM: He did, but it wasn’t Gavin Harrison. You can totally hear the difference
Geoglyph: Oh, I know why it reminds you of Steve Wilson, because we found a Mellotron patch and used it in the chorus. Also, a band I really like that Morison doesn’t listen to so much is Opeth
MM: Ooh OG...in fact, funnily enough, the album that got me into them was their acoustic album
Geoglyph: Back when people used to buy CDs, I used to buy people this album and give it to metalhead saying “Listen to this, this is a metal band." Pretty funny cause there’s no metal in that album. What other band did an acoustic album? Megadeth did a pop album, didn’t they? Did Metallica do an album that didn’t have any metal in it?
Globular: I imagine 'Slipknot' have done an acoustic album
MM: They made a few acoustic tracks
Geoglyph: Yeah I love Damnation, great album, and I love Mellotrons, I wish I could get one. I’d use that sound, a sort of scratchy tape string, impossible to synthesize. I think you can sample it. Maybe there’s a Mellotron instrument out there that you can download.
Globular: A Mellotron is the original sampler right
Geoglyph: Loops of tape, or I think it’s actually a straight length of tape, can’t remember how it works though.
MM: ‘Flight Stimulator’ : Another one of the names from your list (notebook)?
Globular: Haha yeah
MM: Reminded me of Microsoft Flight Simulator’ 98. There’s some really nice synthesis in this song. I like it when nothing pops out from a track, cause I tend to be very dissective as a listener. Then you can enjoy the track as a complete listening experience.
Globular: This track is definitely that for me on the album, it’s just a wash
MM: It’s like taking off in an aeroplane, you don’t want there to be any…thing. It just needs to be smooth
Geoglyph: Yeah! This is the festival track, whenever I hear this track I’m like I want to play this at a festival, it would be amazing. But I haven’t had the chance yet.
Globular: It was much inspired by the ‘Hallucinogen in Dub’ album
Geoglyph: So to give an example of our process, we were trying to copy ‘Hallucinogen in Dub’ for this track
Globular: Doesn’t sound like it at all…
[Notes : * In “Hallucinogen in Dub” by Simon Posford, Ott used the record “Prince Far I - Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1(1978)” as his sonic blueprint]
Geoglyph: We both listened to the Entheogenic remix as well, and also the Shpongle Remix, ‘Around the World in a Tea Daze’. Fantastic remix.
MM: Since you mention it, have you got a lot of Ott comparisons?
Globular: I get that kinda thing quite a lot, yeah.
MM: So you know this phenomenon, that whenever you see or hear something new, your brain tries to equate it to something you already know. So when I listened to your music for the first time, I likened it to Ott’s music
Globular: In my case, it’s definitely a fair comparison. There’s no point trying to hide it.
Geoglyph: There’s a younger generation of producers now that sound like Morison, that don’t sound like Ott anymore.
MM: It’s a domino effect of sorts that happens right. So I thought about this comparison, and since it’s all about the references, I came up with this:
MM:If Ott is Batman, you’re Batman Beyond or Robin. And Chris, you could be Nightwing.
Geoglyph: Hahaha I’ll take it
Globular: Nightwing is way cooler!
MM: I mean, whatever…you can be the third Robin, Damian Wayne. He’s probably cooler than even Batman. Almost.
Globular: Or I could be like Azrael or something
Geoglyph: I would say, Simon Posford is like Mozart, Ott is like Beethoven, and Globular is like Schubert, if you know your Classical music
Globular: Did you quote an Instagram comment?
Geoglyph: If it was, it was me that commented. It was a comment on…Simon Posford’s page, I think. And then somebody said something about Debussy, and I was like “Eh it doesn’t work”. I like Classical music, and I didn’t think Debussy was a good comparison. There’s more continuity here and passing of ideas to the next generation.
MM: I think by virtue of the genre and the music itself, it happens in a much more organic and smoother way, that passing down of information.
Globular: So this is actually the thing that Chris has been studying right, how people have completely different learning methods in the psychedelic and electronic scenes, by virtue of the internet.
Geoglyph: That’s a really interesting thing, cause in Classical music, in Jazz you learn from a teacher and I think even a lot of Rock musicians they learn from teachers. They might have guitar teachers when they are young. Then you have Rock music where people start teaching themselves the Guitar, like Garage Rock, so that’s different. By the time you get to Electronic Dance Music, everyone’s teaching themselves. But often in EDM, and this is something I’m really interested in, people already know how to do a different kind of music before they start. So maybe they play the guitar, or the piano and then later they learn to play synthesizers and drum machines and with laptops. So in a weird way EDM almost comes out of other musical languages. You can’t just suddenly become an EDM producer or a psy-dub producer. You already need to know how to play a musical instrument, whether it’s bass or guitars.
MM: Yeah, totally, I get that. What you said is true. Most of the artists I’ve spoken with have all been influenced by metal and rock. So there’s totally concrete evidence for that. But on the other hand, contrary to what you said, there’s a whole bunch of younger producers for whom the DAW is their first instrument, and that’s where it gets interesting. If you look at all the modern music (teaching) programs or courses for Electronic Music Production, they teach music theory, harmony and all that stuff differently because these producers are not going to use that knowledge of harmony on a guitar or a piano but rather a Midi Roll in a DAW
Globular: I get a lot of music sent to me like, ”Hey man check out my track, I just started making music”, and something I get quite often is people who, like you’re saying, they don’t know about music at all. They don’t have prior experience, but they know that you can get a program and you can make music. And I’ll often get a track sent to me that sonically is really quite good. They have got the production process down quite well, but there’s like no musicality to it. Hence, I find it really hard to listen to it.
MM: Then there are freaks like Bill, who even in the DAW, when you see his writing process, the way he writes melodies and chords, it’s not like someone who conventionally knows music theory. It’s a different approach. But even in that process of his own, he has found a really great sense of musicality.
Geoglyph: I think a good counter-example to what I just said is Aphex Twin. He does not play a musical instrument. His music doesn’t sound like he plays a musical instrument. But there’s a lot of musicality. And I think he’s taught himself musicality in the studio. He’s very unusual. He’s the niche-est of the niche cases, because you can hear while listening to his music, that he doesn’t understand chords. But he’s very good at them.
MM: Even Bill is a lot like that. If you see him writing stuff, moving notes around, it’s like an AI program, machine learning thing going on.
Globular: Another weird example of that which you wouldn’t guess from the music at all is Kaya Project. I spoke to Seb a few years ago. He knows how to play music and make good music. He doesn’t necessarily understand why and how it works.
Geoglyph: He’s a very accomplished guitarist though. I think he was a death metal shredder guitarist. It doesn’t matter if you know music theory, but you need to know how to improvise
Globular: I don’t know music theory at all
MM: M.I.N.D. was My favourite track of the album. I thought it could just be the ‘Mind’ but knowing the kind of shenanigans you guys would pull with the track names I googled it and found this: Magnetic Integrated Neuron Duplicator: ‘duplicated portions of the human nervous system and….’
Geoglyph: Wait, did that come up on google?
MM: Yeah, and then I went into this whole tech/AI, electronic brain experiment rabbit hole. It was definitely my favourite track of the album.
Geoglyph: Yeah, it’s the weirdest one cause it keeps going from one style to another to another
Globular: Yea we just went with whatever the hell we felt like with that one
Geoglyph: There’s a bit of drum and bass in there that’s really good
MM: The melodic DNB bridge break kinda thing right…it was very cool.
Geoglyph: It’s pretty much all Morison. I think where the drums are just skittering away and the bass: (mouths fast bassline) that’s Morison on Bass
MM: There’s also quite a lot of subdivisions going on in the track. I like the way you transition between subdivisions
Globular: I like the cascading melody with the bells, it’s my favourite part. It took you a long time to make that work, sonically.
Geoglyph: We had to layer them up quite a lot in the end
MM: It’s like what Ott said to me,”Just take whatever sounds you like, smash them together and make it work”
Geoglyph: I’ve been listening to a lot of ‘The Prodigy' recently, I love their first 3 albums.
MM: Track No.8 Due to Special Circumstances: What are these special circumstances..that enabled the creation of this album?
Geoglyph: Well it’s from the series of books we mentioned earlier, ‘Iain M. Banks - 'The Culture’ series. The Culture is a utopian galaxy-spanning civilization who live in harmony with their AI, a very powerful AI that kind of looks after them. This is partly what we were thinking of when we named the previous track M.I.N.D., cause they are called ‘MINDS’ in the series. The 'Special Circumstances' is the sort of Black Ops Division of the utopian societies. They're the spies, the infiltrators, they cause mischief. They’re doing their best, they are trying out to make things better for the civilization, but they don’t always get it right. But they still have very exciting adventures. And the title of that track comes from a novel called ‘Inversions’…Do NOT read this novel until you’ve read all the other ones! This should be the last one that you read, because, ah I can’t give it away. Anyway, it’s got major plot twists to it, and one of the final lines of the novel is..."Due To Special Circumstances"
Globular: The album was originally going to be called “Due To Special Circumstances”. We were thinking about calling the project “Special Circumstances”, right from the beginning almost
Geoglyph: We decided not to though, we decided to use our own names. Not everyone does that, most people change their name for a collaboration.
MM: Like slipping into a new outfit...
Geoglyph: I think we did it for marketing reasons, we wanted people to know that this was our album
MM: After all, you’ve got to be practical right; that is the main premise of things. So, there is a call and response thing you did with the voice..male/female... Is that Hindi? African? or alien?.. the universal human, sentient voice
The female part sounds enunciated like Punjabi...
Geoglyph: Could be, what Library did we use for that?
Globular: Wait, there was a female part? I thought it was all-male vocals
MM: Maybe you pitched it up, and also those vocal samples, those singers tend to sometimes sing in a naturally higher octave
Geoglyph: It’s a pitched up male voice yeah
Globular: I will confess when I use vocal samples, I don’t know what they’re saying. I think a lot of electronic producers think the same way. I don’t like to have a story fed straight at me. Otherwise, I would use English vocals as well
MM: I think that adds to the psychedelia of it
Globular: If you don’t understand it, yes, but if you do understand it, it must be a very different experience.
MM: Yeah! So, Ott didn’t let me give him a spoiler by revealing the meaning of the lyrics in 'Smoked Glass and Chrome'. It’s a very famous old Hindi song
Geoglyph: It’s something about going into the stars isn’t it?
MM: Absolutely
Globular: I will say that I do feel a bit weird about that you know, crossing onto a cultural appropriation and just refusing to acknowledge a certain aspect of the vocal
Geoglyph: I’ve been thinking about this a bit. It’s something I really really want to write about, which is Downtempo Producers using vocal music. And we’ve been doing it for a long time, since the late 70s, early 80s. It’s not a new thing to use vocals or instruments from other cultures. And it’s strange to me that people, folk musicians generally seem to really enjoy hearing their compositions used in different contexts. So I guess the main question is: What do people who understand Punjabi feel about the track?
MM: I think most people would not understand the context or feel that it doesn’t gel together, that kind of fusion. But that’s a matter of your taste and sensibilities, and how much of a purist you are. Otherwise, I think it’s totally legit and cool to incorporate stuff and cross over. And that’s another whole conversation about how indigenous music from one part of the world influenced pop music from other parts of the world, like swing or disco influence in Bollywood for example. Also, have you heard of acid house and 'Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat’?
Geoglyph: Love that album! It’s amazing!
Globular: I think you showed me this, Chris
MM: So when one artist got a specific musical influence from outside or particular piece of equipment and used it to stir up the pool of what was existing as Bollywood music, that changed the face of it throughout. Like the whole Bollywood Disco/Pop Era.
MM: How do you work with (exotic) vocals in psy like the Spanish vocals in The Chalice [meshing bossa/flamenco with downtempo, glitch] ?It’s quite a play on the emotions and human psyche! How clear is that sonic vision? More importantly, what does that mean to you? To me, it denotes, a universal human. Imagine if all humans could understand all languages for example, or we didn’t even have to speak; dissolution of the egos/identifications.
Globular: I don’t really have a trick, but I will say quickly that Chris was heavily involved in making that track the way it was because he helped me make that breakdown with the piano and all that stuff.
Geoglyph: Yeah, you said you had a Bossa track and I put Latin American piano in the middle. The Latin-American thing is very much in Shpongle
MM: Yeah the Flamenco thing
Globular: For my part, the vocal thing, there’s no method about it. I have a huge crazy library of random samples and sounds, and if it fits, it fits.
MM: So it’s like immigration, kind of when a Punjabi goes to London and then settles down and does his thing. And the next thing you know, he’s a Londoner
Geoglyph: Cosmopolitan
Globular: I guess it comes from the whole thing of me not worrying about styles or genres, things like that. I just want to hear a beautiful voice, wherever it’s from, whatever it is, it’s alright.
MM: It’s like, on the one hand, you could consider World music as a Flamenco guitarist, with a Tabla player, and a Jazz bass guitarist, and a Flautist or Violinist. And then you could consider World music within Electronic music, which is a whole different world, and psychedelic in a lot of ways, because there are so many possibilities. It’s like taking all these influences and then putting them on an alien spacecraft to see what happens...sending them to the moon perhaps…
You did that on a couple of tracks, the (Hindi) in 'LUCA Unfolding', Punjabi or Rajasthani reggae/dub in 'One Step Beyond', where there’s also like an OM chant at the end.
Globular: The human voice is I think the most amazing instrument there is, and the only thing that sets it back for me is hearing the actual meaning behind the words. If I had a resident vocalist who could sing just complete gibberish…
Vocals are my favourite thing, especially at the end of a track, when you’re really trying to elevate the situation.
I would see myself as a collage artist in that sense, just checking A/B and see what works.
MM: What’s your take on global culture, and people from around the world?
Globular: I like to treat all people as one. Travelling around the world and seeing new cultures, meeting new people is always fascinating and an incredible experience
Geoglyph: I think its definitely in our scene, like we were talking about using folk samples. And then you have people like Seb who actually work with these musicians and singers and records his own samples. There are some odd little things in the world psy dub projects, this has been an old thing in the scene, Sons of Arqa from back in the day, anything that Greg Hunter has been involved in, (Dub Trees) and all that’s the world music scene...
MM: It’s like how Columbus set sail to find new lands, beyond the horizon, or trade with other people and cultures. The current equivalent of that would be “I’m going to go across the seas to record an album...”
Globular: These days the world is so much smaller, right?
MM: And this kind of music is an expression of that very thing, which is why it holds a special place in my heart, and also why I feel it has a long way to go, to propagate that whole feeling of a small(er) world. Like mixed cuisine...and speaking of cuisine, what’s your relationship with food and cooking?
Geoglyph: We did a lot of cooking when we wrote this album. I use to go to Morison’s every Friday where I would stay all day, so we would always make lunch or dinner. So we did a lot of cooking, or Morison did a lot of cooking.
Globular: Just to get me out of the studio man
MM: It’s a great parallel activity to producing music
Globular: I love cooking, I love being in the kitchen. It’s massively cathartic
Geoglyph: Morison’s a very talented chef
MM: What do you like to cook?
Globular: Anything, everything! I’ve been vegan for a few years, vegetarian all my life. I love food from everywhere really. I guess, Eastern-ish, European...
MM: I think just short of music, food is the common denominator right. RHCP said,” music the great communicator”, food is also one of the universal bridges
Geoglyph: There’s a big baking thing, in the psy-dub scene
MM: Yeah? What’s that about…?
Geoglyph: This was especially before lockdown, everyone makes a lot of bread. Another person is Tom Wolftech - he is a good baker. Everytime we meet at a festival or something, he always brings a loaf of bread or something that’s baked. I think it goes further. I think a lot of downtempo producers really like making food. Especially SLOW FOOD. If there’s one thing that we should connect up with, it’s that the SLOW MUSIC scene should connect up with the SLOW FOOD scene, Similar aesthetics. It takes a long time to make, like sourdough bread or whatever
MM: SO, commercial music, mainstream EDM is like the KFC or McDonald's of Music?
Geoglyph: Yeah Yeah!
MM: I’m going to quote you on that
Geoglyph: We need a Slow Food, Slow Music Scene. We need Mid-tempo food as well, I don’t know what that is
MM: That’s just Psy-Hop right?
Geoglyph: Yeah, that’s your mid-tempo cuisine
MM: Brian Eno talks about Parasympathetic vs Asympathetic music, music that stimulates you versus music that helps put you in rest and digest mode.
Globular: His whole thing was the idea of having background music. He wanted to make music that helped you to concentrate. I mean, he coined the term ambient, didn’t he?
Geoglyph: Yeah, he’s a cool guy. The other person I’m thinking of who is into food and music is John Cage, just in that scene.
MM: I haven’t checked out his music enough
Geoglyph: He was well into mushrooms, not just magic mushrooms but just mycology in general, fungi. His books are about all kinds of weird stuff to do with mushrooms. Really really fun to read. Not much to do with food, but definitely mycology.
MM: Cool! Very Cool... I think we’ve covered all of what I wanted to go through. Learnt about a lot of new stuff as well
Globular: Likewise
Geoglyph: It was lovely to meet you.
MM: I will let you know when I get this piece up on the page
Geoglyph: What’s your page called?
MM: Mister Mime
Geoglyph: Like the Pokemon
Globular: There’s also the idea of MIMETICS, with Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins: it’s like the genetics of ideas. We have like internet memes, but they are a bastardization of the concept of memetics... How information transfers from people to people
MM: Hmm yeah, I see. Well I’ve got a lot of homework to do, and listening of course! All the comic book stuff and sci-fi films as well
Globular: Iain M. Banks, that was the main driver behind the album, so read the Culture series from the start
MM: Most certainly.
You Can Follow Globular on:
https://globular.bandcamp.com/https://soundcloud.com/globular
https://www.facebook.com/Globular/
https://www.instagram.com/globular_mori/?hl=en
and Geoglyph on:
https://soundcloud.com/geoglyph
All Images courtesy of Globular+Geoglyph
