Sonic Router

Gorgons: Making Modern Sounds As Antiques

Posted in Interviews   

If mid-summer seems a somewhat incongruous time to be channelling wintery dronescapes into your ear canals then I’m afraid you’ll just need your fashion yourself new hats. Fashion dictates that the new seasons’ lines always start trickling out when the weather opposes the relevant attire, so it is with the mysterious Chicago based producer Chris Voccia, aka Gorgons, whose recent steady stream of tracks on his soundcloud page are all in thrall to a time of breath suspension, that we’re looking up through a chilled air to whited out skies.

Appearing out of nowhere with a new track every few days, and having gathered an instantly enthusiastic fanbase within just a few weeks, the twelve tracks (at time of writing) of Gorgons’ claustrophobic snowstorm beat ambience have been a bright bolt of icy freshness in this humid and grey English summer. Sounding something like a collaboration between Burial and Alva Noto, or a Deepchord/Echospace inspired soundtrack to Guy Maddin’s surreal portrait of his hometown in the film My Winnipeg, were it not for their distinct presence and ability to define atmospheres of unarguable conviction you might overlook the intricate detail and measured production. We were so struck by the quality of his Gorgons material that we caught up with Voccia from his native Chicago to find out more.

“A lot of my sounds come from recording ambient events as a source track to then be virtually ripped apart where only faint traces of are left,” he tells us when asked if he’s been working to any kind of theme. “I liken them a lot to a Rothko painting. The same canvas has many paintings that have been washed and reworked over and over. I’m doing the same thing musically on many levels as far as technique is concerned. For me, what could very well be a finished song often gets buried in a track as a single gesture. I do a lot of re-sampling, tinker with that, and then resample again until it feels right.”

Gorgons – Ambergris

Gorgons – Red Cloud

There’s a very stately aesthetic inherent to his work, it’s elegant in the face of its very present fracturing and yet all the pieces have distinct characteristics. ‘The Midnight Trail’/‘A Dark Token’ is built from a huge swelling wall of steadily creeping noise that consumes the beats rolling in front of it, ‘Red Cloud’ threads a breathy ice-queen vocal through the liminal spaces of its shadowy groove and ‘Films at 11-02’ tracks the sub-bass trail of a midnight drive through an urban landscape cut off from operational electrics, beset by muted explosions of beats that sound like boots tramping through snow into the blinding wilderness of Fennesz-style white-out drone. ‘Atlan’ folds a collapsing two-step beat into closing walls of snowbound drone, ‘Tantalum’ has a really dirty kind of subterranean feel to it, tweaked with contrasting flourishes of classy basement R&B and ‘Desperate Resolutions’ is a pulsing crawl of hypnotic granite that eventually overflows with snare tattoos.

“I guess you could call my songs demos in the form they are now although,” Voccia admits. “I am a fan of lo-fi production as a more direct and immediate form of release. I come from a history of that, having D.I.Y. ethics from my younger punk days, when friends would pass around cassettes and CDRs. I want to have at least fifty tracks at hand to work through,” he reveals when pressured on whether he’s working to a project deadline; “I want to maybe dump a few tracks to 2 inch before mastering and re-asses. I’ve been working out some new (they’re all new really) songs and will post four or five more in the next few weeks.”

Lining the track descriptions with short quotes and brief phrases of naturalistic wisdom, Gorgons amplifies the wonderment his tracks might pose listeners. ‘For the greening Earth a pleasantness I make.’ ‘Half the universe has sent voices.’ ‘A sacred voice is calling you. All over the sky a sacred voice is calling you.’ The spiritual ruminations he includes push you subconsciously to get lost in the music.

“The quotes are from a book called Black Elk Speaks.” He offers, “It could be likened to a native American type bible. I love the stories and connection to the planet and how they translate in modern society in that there is a sense of ever-present calamity that seems is here for good, at least in the crumbling of our infrastructures and cities here in the states.”

Gorgons – Films at 11-02

Gorgons – Crowns

There is a similarly tranquil sense of catastrophe present in Gorgons, the same kind that underlies the recent Ravedeath album from Tim Hecker, which Chris agrees is ‘brilliant stuff.’ There is also that elemental force that personifies the albums of Ben Frost too, a geological kind of organic feel – one thats endlessly being shaped by its surroundings and the bombarding force of the weather. The comparison to Frost runs in rich seams through the textural terrain of the pieces, with Gorgons’ music laying connecting beats across the surface, his is more of a rhythmic narrative rather than a spatial one. But why the emphasis on the wintery sounds? Is it from geographical influence or is there a deeper affinity for seasonal textures?

“Those snowstorm sounds and textures were not necessarily developed with the idea of winter in mind,” he offers in his most lucid explanation. “They are coming from the process, some of which are beating sounds up with the intent of creating a new sound from it, as if it emerged from an imagined historical time. More to the point, I like the idea of creating a bit of degradation, imagining a flaw in an archival process, making modern sounds as antiquities. I don’t want to think of it as merely casting a filter over something and calling it old or dirty. I want the reworking process of certain gestures to find a balance between what you exactly hear in your head while creating and the serendipitous events that occur to reach that sound or feeling you want a sound to impart. I want there to be a certain unearthed quality that is literally a part of the environment that speaks to it as it was, as it is, and as it will be.”

Words: Meatbreak

For more of Gorgons work check: soundcloud.com/VOCHILLY.