Electronic music always gets pegged as being easy to make. For most of ntts subgenres, that’s not the case. At all. Brooklyn duo Beacon would be the first to tell you that. 31-year-old Jacob Gossett and 26-year-old Thomas Mullarney formed the band in 2010 as a way to create something visceral. Their newest record, L1, puts that goal to the test.
Beacon craft up cerebral electronic music, capturing both the smoothness of R&B and and the glitchy tones of electronica. With one listen, you feels like you’ve taken a sleeping pill and are undergoing a goofy dream of displaced, atmospheric pop and dark, expanding shadows. Thunderous bass and Mullarney’s vocals guide most of the tracks. It’s the flourishes of synth and analog equipment, though, that give it its shine.
Before the duo play Great Scott this Thursday with Grammar, they sat down to chat with us about their beginnings, working with producer Al Carlson, and why an old physics concept of gravitational pull is so pertinent to their new record.
Allston Pudding: When did you two first meet? Was it to make music?
Jacob Gossett: We met each other at Pratt in 2004 or 2005. At the end of school we started making music together, a couple years after knowing each other. I studied painting and video. I was into fine arts but focused more on those two.
Thomas Mullarney: And I was studying sculpture. I was doing performance and sound and video art.
AP: What made you want to switch into music? Were they sounds that paralleled the art you were making?
TM: I don’t think we ever thought of it as a switch. Thinking back on the conversations we had in 2010 when we graduated, for us, art here is part of a DIY Brooklyn scene. Playing music and doing our version of performance art, live music, is our way to stay active after school. It’s our way to continue working those muscles and use our skills to recreate it.
JG: Yeah, we both have always done creative things across the board. As we grew into this project, it allowed us to utilize everything we were interested in. Beacon itself encompasses all these different things, including the album art and live setting.
TM: It’s not supposed to be a “Bands Growing Out of Art School” story. You just want to keep growing and creating and that narrative has shifted a lot over the last 30 or 40 years.
AP: So how did you find your specific sound, this downtempo, chill dance?
JG: It was a mixture of things. There’s the music we listen to, individual influences, and a natural progression of writing and performing. Some happened organically and more was a conscious thought, not strategic but definitively intentional.
TM: It’s really, really organic, the process. Who can say how we started making music? It just happened. We did a video recently with FACT Magazine where they came to our studio and filmed us making a song in ten minutes. That’s pretty close to how we’ve made music the past five years. We kind of just jam. We get excited. It hasn’t changed that much. I don’t know if it will ever change because that’s where those ideas come from.
AP: When I first gave your record a listen, it reminded me a lot of Atoms for Peace or Ultraista. I guess I hear a lot of Nigel Godrich. Was that an intentional nod to his work?
JG: Definitely. As a producer, he was a part of records I really liked early on. We aren’t engineers or producers in the way that he is. We usually bring in a third party to help us in the studio to mix, so I don’t think we’ve been directly influenced in that way, but he’s produced so many influential records that it’s hard not to be.
TM: Yeah. It makes sense that a connection could be made there.
AP: Which bands make you want to go into the studio or meet up with one another to go make music?
TM: It’s a tough question, especially because there’s so much electronic music right now. When we were making this record last year, I was listening to Jon Hopkins‘ new album a lot. I was super blown away by the production on that. That guy really knows how to produce a record. It’s incredibly well-produced and clean.
JG: I think technically, people who are producing will get into it. I got really into the Border Community artists and people who love that. It gets me excited to go mess with my instrument and get something out of them you’ve never heard before.
TM: Yeah, and we’ve gotten new analog gear in the last few years. Hearing artists who tap into that same difficult space and the sounds they pull out of it is really inspiring. It makes us want to learn the technical side of things a lot more. It can be rewarding when it comes time to actually record.
AP: There are a lot of layers going on in the songs, which raises the question: what’s the secret to keeping things minimal but still layered? It’s hard to decide what to remove, even moreso than what to add.
JG: It’s often a process of deciding what to strip away. A lot of songs start out, for lack of a better word, cluttered. Then it’s about making space for Thom’s vocals and making sure those can breathe in a song. It leads us down a road of opening up the song’s more. It’s hard to find things that work best, especially to emphasize them and work about them.
AP: In the press release sent out about the record, it says Lagrangian points were influential in this record. What are those and what do they have to do with the record?
JG: They’re a concept in physics that is pretty out there. It can be broken down and simplified where you’re thinking about two objects that are orbiting, one is orbiting the other, and there’s these weird gravitational pulls that can occur as a result of that. On a chart, it looks fascinating because it’s all of thees hidden gravitational things that are pulling these bodies indies out and sticking them in place or sending them backwards. It’s very strange. The theory itself has a standing in science fictional and physics. We saw it as the way that some of these ideas have relationships between people and how these crazy orbits can spin out of control. It was a nice bed for us. The music should be challenging in some way. What is it about? What is it doing? That’s continuing on with this and what we hope to achieve in our music.
AP: What kind of conflicts did you have in mind regarding this pull between things?
JG: In the end, we chose it because it can relate to the music we’re writing. There was a kinetic motion in the studio and about how we would play this live and bring our fans with us into this faster space. A lot of our songs sound like they’re on the edge of falling out of control. That’s why we ended up going with this L1 idea because it fits the music so well in addition to the music.
AP: When it came time to mix, did you seek out Al Carlson? Did you know him beforehand?
JG: We didn’t know him personally but we knew the projects he worked on. We both live about a few blocks from the studio he works out. We started a conversation about working on the album, sent him demos, and he was interested. We were fortunate to get him on board.
AP: What was it like working with him?
JG: Amazing. He’s a masterful guy in the studio. We learned so much and carried some of that over to the new recordings to our own.
AP: Did he have suggestions when mixing that you would not have thought to do on your own?
TM: Totally, totally. I’m really protective of my vocals when I’m working on them. It’s like useless perfectionism. I never really let go of them. he was able to do these quick moves that basically was a lot less precious with them and let them spin out of control and change pitch. It was really liberating. I was just like, “Oh, shit. Damn.” It was awesome. When it’s with your best interest, it works out well in the end. That goes for other things apart from my vocals, too.
AP: Were you beside him while he did most of the mixing work? Some bands hand their music over, peace out, and check back in every once in a while to not interrupt.
JG: We were definitely there. For all our records, we’re always super interested int he process. It’s not us trying to linger over what’s happening but also just to watch people work. He was incredible to observe. He makes huge things happen. So we were definitely there the whole time.
AP: How do you think it compares to the past stuff you’ve put out now that it’s done?
JG: We hope it’s a step forward. The production hopefully is better and the writing and energy. In terms of growth, this was us figuring out how to make a record we truly wanted to make. What do we take from the last experience and bring to this?
AP: Of course, that’s something not everyone can pick up on. What’s something you think goes overlooked in your music?
TM: This would be an awesome opportunity to be like, “Everyone misses this.” [laughs] We don’t write with an expectation, really. WE don’t hope people find secrets. You can’t write that way. You have to let go of those feelings even though you definitely do have them. We feel privileged to even be able to do this.
JG: The fact that people take interest in what we’re doing in the first place is pretty crazy. It feels rewarding. We try to make the best work we can and hope people respond the way they have been.