LAST RESORT: Michael McDermott and Megan Cauley of Gemini Wolf drew inspiration for their new album from a North Carolina shore town abandoned for the winter.
[ experimental/electronic ]
In the dead of January, Michael McDermott and Megan Cauley headed toward the ocean in a car filled with gear: a circuit bank Casio, an omnichord, an autoharp, delay pedals, loop stations and a laptop. Their destination was Jockey's Ridge State Park in North Carolina, a 400-acre expanse of sand dunes on the Outer Banks; their plan was to soak up some inspiration and get started on the next Gemini Wolf album.
"Nobody was there, it was completely desolate," Cauley recalls. "We set up our gear in the hotel room, hiked around the sand dunes all day and made music all night."
Typical of vacation towns in the off-season, the surroundings were placid, but unnerving — the exact vibe they were going for — and the improv sessions that resulted were more fruitful than the Roxborough-based experimental music duo could've hoped. Hours of audio were recorded, then harvested and embellished upon once they returned north. This week, Infinite Sand Dunes, their third album, is available in vinyl LP and digital editions.
The record's glitchy tempos pitter and patter like static on a dead broadcast signal, then give way to thumping war drums. Cauley's voice phases in and out, as if we stumbled across an announcer on an old transistor radio dial. (Trade secret: That's actually what we're hearing, thanks to one of those iPod-car stereo transmitters.) If the music on Infinite Sand Dunes had a counterpart in recent fiction, it would be the bleak, desperate, uprooted landscape of The Road.
"Y'know, the apocalypse is coming," Cauley laughs over lunch in Rittenhouse Square about a week before the recent failed doomsday. "But in all seriousness, people talk about global warming, say there could be resource wars in the future. But that's actually happening right now. Eventually, maybe the landscape will totally change. Maybe we will be living in totally different times."
"We didn't want to do an environmentally conscious album," McDermott begins, then pauses. "Well, it is that. But we didn't want it to be really obvious or literal."
You could never accuse Infinite Sand Dunes of being overly topical; the album is cloaked in mystery. Intense, beat-heavy songs fill out its first side, guiding Cauley's tense, breathy vocal melodies and deadpan, Laurie Anderson-style spoken word. Whether she's singing or talking, her lyrics — often written on the spot during recording — are cryptic. "They had semi-automatic machetes/ I just left," goes one line on the opener, "Thirst."
Lifting a page from David Bowie's Low, the second side is instrumental and atmospheric. "That's one of my favorite albums of all time, so that was a big influence," acknowledges McDermott. "But I also like the older records where a side is a complete thought. The first song means something and the last song means something. I know The Beatles were really into that, too, really specific about what song closes side A and what song starts side B. It's like two different chapters."
The barren, icy vocal piece "The Hum" echoes the mewling, meditative atmosphere of closing number "War of Fog" in its Autechre-esque hums and drones; the latter's title bounces back to "Doppelganger Walk," where Cauley raps, "It's foggy in the morning/ and clear at night." Everything is densely intertwined in some future where nature has fallen to the toll of mankind.
Aesthetically, Gemini Wolf has a long-standing predisposition with the outdoors. For its last release, Synchronized Eyes, Cauley and McDermott were photographed in formal clothes, waist deep in the Wissahickon Creek. Environmental field recordings often provide the sonic beds for their songs. Last year, Cauley DJ'd in Rittenhouse Square, backing up vocalist Attia Taylor and composer Joe Hallman; our interview takes place just down the path from where that happened, interrupted by chirping birds and blaring car horns.
That juxtaposition is apt for the band's fusion of the synthetic with the natural. It's not as unusual a pairing as one might think (just ask Brian Eno). Cauley points out that most of their electronic musician friends love the outdoors, while McDermott sees electronic music as the new folk. "It's become really personal, something that's just you, by yourself."
McDermott discusses tribal beats a lot — in reference to this album, to past work, to an opera called Pangaea he and Cauley are working on. I ask what his fascination is. "I like the looseness of it," he responds. "A lot of times, tribal beats have this jerky, organic flow to them, whereas a lot of electronic beats are very mechanical. I think it's a nice contrast."
In other words, switch on and let the rhythm guide you, but wrest control and see where you can guide the rhythm. "Even when he's playing keyboard, Mike is like that," Cauley laughs. "He plays them like a drum."
Gemini Wolf play Thu., May 26, 9 p.m., $10, with Shawn Kilroy and Warm Ghost, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 877-435-9849, johnnybrendas.com.
