It’s pretty easy to pile desert or wilderness mythologies onto Peaking Lights; their tapes warble like mirages, all Zabriskie Point-style landscapes and skewed Americana histories. They come in the form of pop songs, I suppose; stretched way out into free noise structures with a distinctly vague retrograde. The weird spaces and skewed mythos of recent album Imaginary Falcons are not entirely manufactured; Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis and live in the woods outside of Spring Green, Wisconsin, in a house that sounds like it reflects this aesthetic way too well.
“It’s in an area called the Driftless Region,” says Aaron, “which has the oldest hills that used to be mountains in the US, maybe even North America. It’s really beautiful green, lush and muggy in the Summer, and in the Winter white, dead and freezing. Our house is part of a complex in which there are two other houses and a massive barn that used to be functioning barn before it was converted to an arts/event centre in the 70s. It lay dormant and literally filled up with animal shit for 30 years until we moved in we cleaned it out last year for our wedding and have been using it since for recording and other things too. There is also a huge concrete silo/personal reverb tank attached to that barn. Our house was built attached to a second barn which we use as an art/music studio in the Summer, it has a real crazy 60s party pad feeling! We’re the only tenants on the property all year round. The Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture school lives.”
It makes a lot of sense given the way the Midwestern mythology glints in both their eyes but obviously, it’s not just their locale that makes their scorched dreams so lucid; the massively image-based sounds are also thanks to Aaron’s college days at film school, not to mention a heavy case of synaesthesia (yes, really).
“The interaction with sound and life, cinema has a big role in making music for me. Actually, for myself, with the writing process of songs has a lot to do with timing and flow, timbre and tune or feel of a song, I imagine the sounds dancing around each other each note or beat of the drum all have a separate colour and shape or wave and when they match up it’s super rad. And then we have a song!”
For Indra, it’s a little more linear: “I think of images a lot while writing music, rather than say, words. Images with mood attached… like the sun rays falling on baby rabbits jumping around in the dark green grass and then comes a shadow and wham! A crack of thunder! I guess I think about dark and light a lot, and their interrelation. there is a constant battle between the two.”
This type of interplay constantly rises and flows through tracks that are very much of a circular feel; they’re often long, but it’s the stoned methodical way they drift that sees the beginning and end blur in a haze of 70s (grounded) outerspace feelings built with reverberated keyboards, wayward vocal echoes and understated guitar experiments. The delirious and immersive wanderings are easy to get lost in, but when they decide to kick it epic-ballad-style at the very start of Side B on Imaginary Falcons, they attain a level of emotiveness often avoided by their DIY peers. ‘All The Good Songs Have Been Written’ is the most concisely structured jam on there and it just lets go, a total burnt out Neil Young-style lament. With releases on labels like the ultra-dark Night People or scuffed up Fuck It Tapes, it feels almost startlingly emotive in the wider context of that lo-fi and DIY adventurousness, where it’s true that maybe weird sonics are favoured over strong sentiments. Indra, whose vocals here peak particularly heartfelt, has a “real love of catchy pop tunes and raw garage-y music.”
“It was an attempt to write something with some pop structure. It’s fun and challenging to write different types of songs, depending on how you feel at the moment. It creates a more interesting journey while listening to the record.”
“We tried to approach writing Imaginary Falcons in a similar way that I think a lot of older groups did,” says Indra, “which is to tie it together somehow, someway, somewhere. Like old 45s there’s the A-side and the B-side, the A-side is usually a hit song and the B-side is the weirder stuff that may not have made it on to record but the limitation of the media dictates the songs to be 3 minutes or so mostly, so whatever you do in that time better totally slay! We wrote that record with this in mind; you flip from side A to side B and you’re in a new world with the same story but in a new town. It’s generally on my mind when we write stuff as how it will fit on a release how the flow will work, beyond just writing a song for a songs sake. I’m way more into the idea of the whole Beach Boys Smile record than I am into that one A-Ha song.”
Given that many of the cassettes and LPs out on those aforementioned labels feature a deliciously off-the-cuff recording approaches with one-take jams often characterised by a distinct immediacy, Peaking Lights’ lo-fi seems much more planned; not overly engineered or sly, but certainly their attention to rough details goes a long way in the moods and textures of their songs.
“It’s really active” says Aaron of their approach to lo-fi. “If we fell into a bunch of money somehow I think maybe in small ways our recording process would change as far as maybe getting some more mics and a larger tape machine, but I’d still want to be building things and trying to record in similar ways for sure. I mean would you rather listen to a record or a CD? It’s like that study Rupert Neve did (I think it was Neve?), where he studied the psychological impact of CD versus vinyl or analogue and that digital media made humans more tense and angry because of the limited range of frequency. You’re dealing with ones and zeroes in a square so as I say this to you now, you can hear the rustle of trees and cars drive by in the background so you can understand that you’re in a space, digital just strips all that subtly away”.
Not Not Fun co-founder Britt Brown was a bit, like, “woah†when mentioning Peaking Lights’ recording set up. Apparently it’s pretty intense, and a contrast to the otherwise loose and “whateverâ€-style approaches of that Californian DIY lineage of which they’re very much a part. It’s thrift store technology all the same, but of a perhaps ridiculously elaborate nature.
“We use two track 1/4 inch tape machines,” says Aaron. “We do a lot of spacial and environmental microphone placement to get sounds, building mics, building tape delays and building filters for certain things. Our style is definitely more akin to early forms of recording like early Motown stuff or Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds or even Smile to the likes of some of the early reggae studios. We bounce tracks down and between tape machines, sometimes just record live straight up. Part of the excitement about recording is trying to make something that isn’t going to be placed in a specific time period, and I think with all this stuff we use it has a unique quality to it. Part of the issue is money and not being able to afford certain luxuries of a studio so we built our own out of stuff we find that is garbage to most people, but then just figure out a way to make it work.”
I figured their affinity for dub music was pretty strong, and not just because all their MySpace top friends are dub titans like King Tubby and Peter Tosh. They love dub, which is a possible part explanation for the building of their own instruments as well as the tonne of reverb that drenches all their songs, there is a super hot and delirious feeling that runs through them too.
“We wrote Imaginary Falcons last Summer when it was quite hot but also it was our first Summer living in the country after leaving San Francisco. So we were thrown into the magic of the natural world, with all the crazy lush plants and flowers and trees and waking up to insane bird symphonies and finding mouse babies living in my keyboard! We used to sit on our porch and watch the hundreds of bats appear at dusk, along with all the sparkling lightning bugs! Then we were also getting hot steamy days, with crazy tornado warnings and rain storms with floods out around our land last summer too. It definitely affected us and our songs, and still does.”
by Richard McFarlane
Imaginary Falcons is released through Night People.
