Gage Gilmore maximizes minimalism with ‘Five in Three Parts’ demo
A conversation with deadCAT bass player Gage Gilmore on minimalism, pop music, and his budding solo project.
Earlier this week deadCAT bass player Gage Gilmore released a new demo of a solo piano piece he’s working on titled “Five in Three Parts.” It’s a layered number that’s built upon intersecting rhythms that push minimalism into maximum overdrive, and the naturally occurring distortions of so many simple parts crashing into each other add just as much to the more compositional aspects of the piece. Balance is an essential theme here, and the human sway of his hands trying to keep a tab on so many rigid working parts adds an element of imperfect spontaneity to the music’s structure. Just when it seems like it’s all going to fly apart under the stress of its own design, he reigns it in. Gilmore took a few minutes to shed a little more light on “Five in Three Parts” and how he sees it evolving from this demo recording.
Chad Radford: I saw you perform an early version of this piece at Mammal Gallery not too long ago. Where do you see this taking you as a solo artist?
Gage Gilmore: I see this as the first side or perhaps just the first piece of solo record that encompass a bunch of music I’ve been working on for the past year or two. What you saw at Mammal Gallery a few months ago was basically where I was at with this piece at that time. It has grown a lot as far as melody and structure, and that’s the great thing about recording in the studio. So much of this piano piece is based on the distortion of overtones that you need a really clear sound to hear all of that. I don’t know if my performance at Mammal Gallery necessarily reflected what I hear at home when I’m playing it with no extra noise, just the pure acoustics of what I’m doing definitely come through more clearly in the studio.
So it’s less a matter of minimalism than it is maximalism?
Yeah, in a sense, I end up getting the overtones from excessive repetition. Charlemagne Palestine called himself a maximal minimalist …
Is it appropriate for me to think of what you’re doing as something that follows in the footsteps of Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley?
I think so. They are all very big influences for me.
Philip Glass?
Not as much. Not necessarily because of taste as much as familiarity. I haven’t listened to as much of his material. I have a lot of friends that dig him but his stuff just hasn’t stuck out as much for me as a lot of Terry Riley’s music.
Glass is often associated with minimalism but he moved on many years ago.
He seems more to be like a potent and original new composer rather than somebody who’s strictly a minimalist. He’s composing with full arrangements. What minimalism does for me is it tries to expand on what you’re not doing. There’s this spirit of experimentalism to it where you’re trying to go beyond what you consider music, typical form, or typical melody. It’s striving at this other-ness of music that is sort of cloudy. It’s not definite, it’s not defined, and it’s not the same every time. This week in the studio with Ben Price, I recorded six or seven takes on the piano and we picked out the one we thought captured the energy and felt the best. It wasn’t necessarily free of error or human quality but it felt the best.
In a lot of early minimalism you can hear the mistakes because it’s a sort of non-human to lock yourself into such repetitive music for an extended period of time.
Right, the urge is to keep changing; music want’s you to play changes. In minimalist practice, you lock yourself into something not hoping you’ll make an error but counting on something unplanned to happen. You want to hear the struggle to maintain this meditation.
What kind of feedback have you received from “Five in Three Parts?”
I haven’t made anyone listen to it that isn’t necessarily into it yet, but then again I haven’t really shown anyone yet. The recordings on Soundcloud are the first I’ve shown anybody. I haven’t seen any negative feedback yet. I’m certainly asking for some patience of my listeners. Sure, there are parts that are slow but that is an important part of the headspace; to wait for the action.
It seems like a lot of younger listeners are into experimental music, actually. Pitchfork has an avant-garde column, and Tiny Mixtapes is all about it.
Yeah, it seems like this year they’ve posted a lot about albums that are avant-garde or outside music, which I like, but they also cover indie albums. I love the review they did of Taylor Swift — from the perspective of Taylor Swift. She’s thanking all of her fans for buying the new 1989 album. I like how they flipped the story.
Did you go to music school?
I went to music school and studied bass guitar at The Atlanta Institute of Music. I can read music, I studied theory, I know all that stuff, but I wasn’t really into ’60s minimalism, drone records, and Tony Conrad back then. That’s just been in the past year or two. Now that I’m older I get kind of sick of pop records and want to listen to something that’s completely engaging and engrossing. I love pop and dance records but it’s not the music I want to write.
When I was a teenager, punk rock changed the way I listened to music. Minimalism did the same thing but in a more subtle way later in life.
It’s the part of music that you only experience with your ears, whereas with pop music or music with regular rhythm, you feel it with your body also. A lot of people are sort of listening physically and not mentally. It’s the way you absorb the music in your head.
And like with anything else there is good drone music and bad drone music, but it can be difficult to make that distinction if you haven’t really steeped yourself in it.
Absolutely, because it can all sounds the same. A lot of stuff with the biggest impact for people seems to lean toward the dissonance side. Even though I didn’t experience a direct punk movement in my generation because it was pretty much dead, the book Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad got me where I am today. A buddy of mine gave me that book and that’s when I knew I was going to play music for the rest of my life. I’m sure some people would consider Dinosaur Jr. to be too mainstream but they were there, they were the first shoegaze band in Europe before the term was even there; just this wall of sound and garage rock.
What do you have in mind for an end product with this piece?
I’m doing a record for Mission Trips. Chris White is working with me to help mix it because I paid for the studio recording out of pocket. But the other stuff I’m going to do on my own. For the piano piece, it really needed a real piano sound that was professionally recorded to hear all those different layers. It was great, I’m gong to go back and do some more tracking. Ben Price has recorded Faun and a Pan Flute, Spirits and the Melchizedek Children, and Little Tybee.
Are you going to have other musicians on the record?
Yeah, I’m hoping to have Turner Williams of Ramble Tamble come out and do an improv piece with me. He lives in Birmingham. Chris White might do some stuff, but mostly I plan on playing the instruments. I have a few compositions that are solely rhythm based that I’ll be playing drums on. I started going back to school to knock out core classes, but this is my last week so I’ll have all of December to focus on my record. I have this piano recording that I’m mixing: Ben put like seven different mics on the piano so there’s all kinds of stuff I’ve yet to mess with. The recording that’s online — I played it, we got it sounding even, and I think it sounds pretty good. There’s no compression or reverb; there are literally no effects on it. I think it’s a really good starting place.
What’s the title mean?
It’s called “Five in Three Parts.” That’s my tentative title, but I think it’s going to work. The whole piece is in 5-4 even though the tempo changes frequently and some of the themes are like groups of five, but they’re not in 5-4. That basic rhythm is where all of the harmony comes from, so rather than call it something based on inspiration or melody it’s almost like the whole thing is a rhythmic exposé with some harmonic color. It’s almost like rhythm is the cake and harmony is the icing that I adorn my rhythms with.
There’s almost an implied science to the title.
I didn’t know how to do it without sounding douchey or trying to make it seem like I take it too seriously, like I’m a hardcore composer.