M. Geddes Gengras Interview: Happy Accidents
Photo by Gabrielle Valenti
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Producer M. Geddes Gengras has taken advantage of quarantine to release music at a breakneck pace. Living among the nature (and Brooklyn spillover region) of Hudson, NY, he’s got six distinct releases on his Bandcamp this year alone, half under the moniker PERSONABLE. The most notable is the full-length album Time Makes Nothing Happen, a propulsive, techno-heavy record released in May but filled with many tracks that date back years past. (Thumping, clattering, glitchy opener “Dragging My Feet” is from the Aughts!) “I put it out there and wasn’t really sure whether anybody was gonna buy it or listen to it,” he told me over the phone last month. Indeed, as much as Bandcamp Fridays have helped, self-releasing still carries and inherent risk. “It either does really well or disappears,” he said. Plus, Time was far different from the material he had been working on and releasing under any moniker.
As it turns out, the album caught the ears of Max Allison, co-founder of Chicago bonkers experimental label Hausu Mountain. It wasn’t out of the blue; after all, Hausu had released Gengras’ I Am The Last of That Green and Warm​-​Hued World last year. But they had been long talking about doing another record, and while something never-before-heard is still in the works, Gengras and Hausu decided to physically release Time on CD and cassette, with a bonus track for good measure. It’ll be out November 13th. Most importantly, the record fits nicely within Hausu’s increasingly wonderfully sundry catalog.
Below, read my conversation with Gengras about the original record and the rerelease, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: What was the inspiration behind the aesthetic of this record?
M. Geddes Gengras: For the past few years, I had been putting out music at a much slower pace than I had been in the past. I wasn’t working on as much stuff and wasn’t recording as much. My process had gotten a lot more layered. My last record for Hausu I had made pretty quickly, but it was very dense. A lot of going over and over and changing things bit by bit. Lots of editing, micromanaging of sound. This one, it’s all live, with maybe a single overdub. I had a couple old tracks I never found a place to put out, and they had never really fit in with the straight techno stuff, but it was also a little too rhythmic and beat-oriented for what I had been releasing under my own name. The division between those two things had just been sort of pushed out to the extreme in a couple ways. So this was something where I was trying to bring it all together in a playful way, making decisions really quickly, first take-best take, and not obsessing over every contour and curve of each track. Trying to do something that felt a little more impulsive.
SILY: That impulsiveness speaks to the spirit of Hausu Mountain, which is funny, because you didn’t even make this record for them.
MGG: Absolutely. But I feel like it was inspired by them, even if indirectly. The last one I put out on Hausu, there are certainly things in their catalog that go along with it, but so much of what they put out is hyperactive, hyperkinetic off-the-wall. Max’s stuff is so crazy. It’s so bonkers. He’s one of those musicians where I’m just like, “I don’t know how you come up with that.” I don’t know how his brain works. It blows my mind.
When I’m working on something, I think about people. I think about an audience, even if it’s just one person or a couple people. It helps my mind file my way through decisions that might take longer otherwise. [laughs] Max and [label co-founder Doug Kaplan] and Hausu, we had been talking about doing another record together, and this wasn’t intended to be that, but that sort of ethos and spirit pervaded its way into this. It was also pretty early in the whole quarantine thing, and I wanted to do something that was fun, that wasn’t dour ambient music. I wanted something that felt like what I needed to hear at that time.
SILY: The notes on the back of the CD say “composed for/by synthesizers.” It speaks to the randomness inherent in synthesis and improvisation that was how this record was recorded.
MGG: Definitely. I know some people hear something in their head, and they make it. I don’t work like that most of the time. Sometimes, things like that happen, but that’s usually well down the road into the project, and I’m like, “I can hear this part over that.” This is just setting up machines, laying around with them, and being influenced and inspired compositionally by what they are doing. It’s a little more like riding a horse than driving a car: You can tell it what to do, but it’s not always gonna do what you want it to. That’s the fun part for me.
The things that I love when I listen to the recordings is the stuff I didn’t necessarily do but emerged out of these processes and systems I built. Those are the things that really excite me. It feels more like collaboration and less like sitting alone in a room and plugging wires into things.
SILY: Tell me about the bonus track. Was that just added on when you knew it was going to be rereleased?
MGG: When we talked about doing a physical release, I wanted something that was a little value add. [laughs] I was really happy with the way the original record flowed from beginning to end, so it was a practical thing. We were playing around with the order, and it felt a little lopsided. That was a good excuse. I had a couple things left over from the sessions and a couple earlier things I slotted in there, and what I ended up putting in was a year or two old. Something I made and forgot about that sat on my hard drive. I started digging for tracks for an appropriate length. It’s not really an exciting story now that I tell it. [laughs]
I have a handful of tracks that don’t really fit in with the kind of aesthetic I want to do with the PERSONABLE releases because they’re slicker and stripped down. But they haven’t really fit with other releases I’ve done. One thing I’ve done a lot during quarantine is go through a bunch of old stuff. I have a lot of finished recordings that have for one reason or another never found their way out there. In a time when I’ve been feeling particularly productive, it’s been good to clean that stuff out. Find something I like that I want to get out there.
SILY: How did you come up with the track titles of the record?
MGG: Coming up with titles is probably my least favorite part of making a record. [laughs] It’s always the last thing that I do. Maybe that makes it harder, because I’m attempting to put words on something that has existed in a wordless space for a while. I started with the album title, which I stole from a book by Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, which I was thumbing through. The title caught my eye, and I was thinking a lot about time--I think a lot about time in general--and my music plays with the concept of time, whether it’s distorting your perception of time, or this release, different rhythms, which are expressions of organized time. I started with that, and then I went through the tracks and listened to them over and over again and wrote down words and imagery that came to mind. I started using that as a launching point. Some of the track titles are descriptive of what the sounds sound like to me, and some of them are more playing with the imagery I get when I hear it. It’s not a terribly deep process. It’s usually done in kind of a panic, and sometimes it’s okay. It’s one of those things after the fact I’m like, “It’s fine, I guess. At least I did it.”
SILY: So the album art got the Hausu treatment, too.
MGG: Oh yes. Max asked whether I wanted to do that, and I said, “In fact, I demand it.” Any time I can see a new piece of Max’s art, I’m excited to. His aesthetic is so deeply up my alley as a lifelong gamer from the Super Nintendo generation. He somehow makes the most psychedelic 16-bit dreamscapes and gets things perfectly, and it’s never what I expect. Both this and the last one. I love the aesthetic of Hausu. It’s so fried and beautiful and fits the sound of the label. They’ve created this visual umbrella: You can spot it from a mile away.
SILY: Are you doing any sort of release show with them?
MGG: That remains to be seen. I think it would be fun to do something. I’m a little intimidated about performing this kind of stuff live because it’s out of my comfort zone. I’d like to do something. It’s probably a lot easier to do something like this now that we’re trapped in our houses than it would be to [coordinate] from our respective cities otherwise. I’m gonna say yes, and then I’m gonna talk to Max and Doug. [laughs] I’ll be like, “I told the guy!”
SILY: Yeah. “In fact, it’s already published.”
MGG: That’s how you get things done. You start with the media and work backwards. But I haven’t done a performance since the first or second month of quarantine. I’m kind of itching to do something.
SILY: What’s next for you?
MGG: I’ve got a few really cool collaborations I’m working on right now that I’m really excited about. I’ve got a record with Miles Seaton from Akron/Family. I played with them for about a year. We made a record and did the basic tracking here in Hudson a little over a year ago. I’m right now going through the mixing and overdubs. It’s a strange record: a lot of weird instrumentation and operating in zones we don’t normally work in. I’m working on a project with this guy from Los Angeles that’s a video game-themed band that’s happening via WeTransfer. And I’m doing a record with a friend of mine who records as Psychic Reality that we made three years ago. A few solo things. And a few other things I can’t talk about yet.
I find it helpful to put something down for a long time, come back to it later, and see what makes sense. Coming out of a long period of inactivity, I’m trying to poke my brain cells a little bit, and one way of doing that is to work with amazing musicians.
SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching lately that’s caught your attention?
MGG: I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King. I had been already, and it just seems extremely appropriate right now. It’s nice to curl into something where you could blast through a few hundred pages at your leisure. I haven’t been listening to a ton of music except for a lot of Imaginary Softwoods. That’s been my go-to recently. A lot of Keith Jarrett, too. I’ve been feeling really melodic, beautiful things. And the other side of that is I’ve been revisiting a lot of my favorite hardcore records from the late 90′s. As our world descends into chaos, I feel like it’s more relevant than ever.
