Is it All a Dream? Gold Gazebo Meditates on 2020
When history is written, 2020 will not go down as a great year for musicians. But, as we’ve been learning month by month, it’s not all bad. New connection, new discoveries and ideas that wouldn’t otherwise have emerged - these are all counter-themes. Gold Gazebo is one of the exceptions. It’s a project of, for and about these times.
>> Gold Gazebo is featured in episode 20 of the Right Brain Music Podcast: listen here.
Christopher Sean Williams is the anchor of this experimental rock trio. He calls the group “Experimental music by experimental souls. Email jam band of friends and faceless Craigslist strangers who are also friends.” Gold Gazebo collaborated remotely before the pandemic came, and had a smooth workflow for exchanging files and ideas already in place when the lockdown hit. The lockdown itself added free time, motivation and—this is the least expected part—inspiration. The result is Please Fall Awake, a blissfully weird new album of stream-of-consciousness audio scupltures commemorating a year that seems like, and may ultimately prove to be, a dream. It’s the newest relase by Right Brain Records.
Williams, based in Portland, Orgeon (the epicenter of this year’s social uprising), is a master of something called the Linnstrument, a strange 5-dimensional midi controller that gives him a wide range of expression with synthesized sounds. He’s more inspired by the painting of Jean-Michel Basquiat than any musician. His cohorts are Mike Basil, a New Mexico-based guitar wizard who fuses minimalism, alt-jazz and post-rock into a subtly dextrous palette of ethereal timbres, and trombonist/multi-instrumentalist Matt Hotez, who draws inspiration from the psychedelic landscapes of his Arizona home. Together they craft surreal soundscapes that defy easy categorization. More open than “prog rock,” more active than “ambient,” more gritty than “experimental,” Gold Gazebo inhabits its own coordinates in space-time.
Please Fall Awake is actually about the isolation of the lockdown. Chris describes it: “The state of being ‘room stoned.’ Your soul stretching thin, staring at the ceiling as the hours pass by. Watching shadows crawl along the wall. Almost falling asleep but random loud noises keep you half-lucid, like waves crashing as the tide rolls in. A living soft nightmare, where you're in a fight but the air is thicker than concrete and you can't throw a punch. Oppressive comfort, on the razor-thin edge of drowning. Someone screaming at you while you're in a coma. An old friend approaching you after years but you can't recognize them. Waking up from a daydream and not knowing where you are. The anticipation of doom to come. Busy stillness. A memory unrecalled. Forgetting your own birthday. Living in America in 2020." He also assembled a set of videos around the album’s 11 tracks.
Take a listen for yourself, and sweet dreams. See you on the other side.