ALOFT_Dark Energy

Marc and I started this adventure a good while back based on an inspiration from a 20-second interlude in Luna’s song City Kitty (Pup Tent 1997). This sunny little bit of music (in the middle of a fairly dark song) is a wonderful Spaghetti Western melody over some fairly modern sounding stringy synths.   It seemed (seems) to us that the World could use more of this, so we started off down the road trying to write Spaghetti Westernish melodies in a more modern context.  A bit of this original theoretical basis actually survived and made it onto Dark Energy (mainly in a snippet of the song Kosmos —  the first we wrote for the record — in the record’s opening and in the traditional Spaghetti Western exercise called the Devil’s Advocate, which is a bonus track on the digital version of the record).

Over the two or three years we’ve been working on Dark Energy, things evolved.  I think we learned that unless you are super disciplined (or obsessed), which apparently we’re not, when you do something like this, all of the influences from all of the stuff you have listened to in your life basically take over and do what they want.  Sometimes, you don’t even notice it’s going on.  So, instead of there being a bunch of Spaghetti Western melodies, there is a bunch of psychedelia, some English folk, Brian Eno, Hawkwind, post- rock and a bunch of other stuff that has inculcated itself into us without our necessarily knowing it (some of it maybe played in a slightly Spaghetti Westernish way).  In this regard, some gratitude/blame should probably go to my brother Greg (Marc’s Dad) who has had a major influence on the music we have both heard throughout our lives.

And then there is the space thing . . . .  Somehow the record took on a generally space-oriented subject matter and that led us into a wealth of real audio from the early history of the space race, most of it Soviet.  Somehow that created a crack that allowed a lot of noises of various kinds (and I mean a lot of noises) to creep onto the record.  A lot of them we made with strange devices.  A lot of them we found out there.

Along the way, we got a lot of amazing and inspirational help from our bandmates.  My nephew (Marc’s brother), Neil, transformed a number of the songs on the record with his brilliant, intuitive bass playing and gave us his ultra-cool song Shepard.  Drummer Eric Setter, who plays with Marc all the time, digested a bunch of fairly odd songs and played them wonderfully onto the record over a long couple of days at SPACE in Austin.  Our friend, Rob Needham voiced a couple of odd characters that seemed to want to speak on Glassing Effect and Dark Matter.

ON TO THE NEXT . . . .

Wayne Byers