Less Bells Interview: “The desert makes suggestions”

Less Bells are practitioners of the beautiful noise.

The duo, featuring multi-instrumentalist Julie Carpenter (Eels, Spiritualized), and Dain Luscombe (Marjorie Fair, Bell Gardens) are constant providers of those hymnal-like passages that excavate beyond the modern-day surface levels many artists and listeners persistently inhabit.

Through their stirring compositions, Less Bells evoke the sort of feeling that we should all experience through artistic expression; reaching that vital core by asking questions and illuminating an emotional intensity that now continues to be swallowed up by world hell-bent on immediacy and instant gratification.

Initial investigations led me to believe that Less Bells didn’t hold much concern for that particular world, however The Drowned Ground – the duo’s follow-up to 2020’s Kranky release Mourning Jewelry – sees Carpenter and Ludscombe investigating how we all fit into the context of it. Sonically shaped around the locality and vast spectrum of their Joshua Tree base, The Drowned Ground marks a new height for Less Bells.

Combing fantastical landscapes, The Drowned Ground begins with Drowned Ground. A shimmering string-heavy composition that finds balance with sparse, syncopated rhythms. Carpenter and Luscombe manoeuvre through the milieu on A Failure of Horses – a dark, knotty composition that shifts the listener slightly off balance, very much in tune with these times.

We are soon guided into calmer waters, with the richly cinematic Feral Ghosts of the Golden West and Scheele’s Green, while the dreamscape echo of Frozen Charlotte Tends the Flame pulls us to a place where Less Bells have never been before. So too with the heart-wrenching closing encounter, A Half Hour with the Stars in June. A captivating end designed for churches and those life-altering moments such environments often bring.

Sevens compositions that are graciously transcendental, The Drowned Ground is the most accomplished work Less Bells have produced so far, and last week in the lead-up to Friday’s release, Carpenter and Luscombe answered some questions about the album and the ideas behind it.

Sun 13’s Albums Quarterly #10

Sun 13: How long have you known Kenneth James Gibson, and how did the opportunity to release the album on Meadows Heavy Recorders come about?

Dain Luscombe: “I met Ken in Austin years ago when my band opened for Ken’s first band, The Furry Things. We were both part of a Texas ‘space rock’ (for want of a better word) scene that spawned bands like Bedhead and Stars Of The Lid. It was an exciting time to be playing music as we really felt like we were making music that had never been heard before. Then, years later, I heard that Ken was looking for a keyboardist for Bell Gardens and visions of reclaiming some of that early excitement and experimentalism led me to tour with them for a while. We’ve kept in contact since and, being a fan of Meadows Heavy’s output, it was a no brainer to put something out with them.”

S13: Can you tell us the about the process behind The Drowned Ground?

Julie Carpenter: “We began recording it during the pandemic years, so there’s a surreal quality about those memories. There was a lot of experimentation, and focus on detail, because it seemed overwhelming to think of it as a whole. Usually I start recording a suggestion, and pass it over to Dain to work on, then he passes that back and we have this musical conversation until it seems the final form is revealed.”

DL: “Julie politely phrases it as a ‘musical conversation’, but it’s actually pretty brutal. There is lots of deleting of tracks and muting of things that probably took days to record. For every song on the record there is probably an album worth of material on the cutting room floor. We both have pretty strong ideas about what this music should be so, for me at least, it seems so easy to just delete something that shouldn’t be there (despite the fact that someone else worked for weeks on it).”

S13: Did you have concrete ideas before working on the album, or did you let the creative flow take its course?

JC: “At the beginning, I take in a lot of other media: books, films, music that is nothing like what I’m working on. I like to find a seed to crystalise around. For Drowned Ground, it was a few books especially. Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, and The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales. Everything I was reading was about placing humanity in a larger time scale and geological context, which is both infinitely depressing and yet comforting.”

S13: What was the most important that you wanted to capture with the album?

JC: “As humans in the Western world, we were brought up on technological progress as this eternally forward marching force. Of all the species ever to exist on earth, 99.9 per cent of them are extinct. To believe that we’re somehow different because we have iPhones is lethal hubris. We may benefit, emotionally and practically, from reflecting on where exactly we fit into the scale of the natural world history. This album is our inquiry into that.”

S13: It’s a lovely progress from Mourning Jewelery. There’s a real spareness to the record, which is surprising considering how many instruments are involved. How much emphasis do you put on space within your music?

JC: “We made a conscious decision to sonically clean house on this one. We wanted these sounds to have space to shine. It’s still far from minimalist, but it’s about finding grandeur on another scale. Like the difference between a landscape painting versus a Dutch master still life. The lemons on the tree in the landscape are barely noticed, but in the still life they glow with meaning.”

S13: With something like Frozen Charlotte Tends to the Flame, there feels like a real spiritual vibe that comes through that I’ve never really noticed before with Less Bells. Was that something you thought about?

JC: “I certainly feel awe when I think about the complexity and beauty of the natural world, and the scientific endeavours humanity has undertaken to understand and exploit it. However, I’m a pretty staunch materialist at heart. There’s very little about me or Dain that is ‘spiritual’ in the traditional sense. We’re very much focused on appreciating the wonder of the real.”  

DL: “Julie will never admit this, but I really think we are both believers in some sort of magic. At the very least we both want some sort of magic to be real. I think that is what draws both of us to experimental music, whether it’s conscious or not. For example, most of the instruments we use in Less Bells are old and have histories outside of our time with them. I find a huge functional difference in an instrument that is 100 years old and one that I just bought from Guitar Center. The second I handle an instrument that has lived before me (and will make music long after I am gone) I feel different. I play differently. I have different ideas. Whether or not that is spiritualism I don’t know, but it’s something real and I’ve seen it work. As an aside this is why I don’t use software instruments, I totally believe that computers are not capable of magic. I realise they are useful and efficient but they are magic killers.”

S13: A Half Hour with the Stars in June is such a beautiful finish to the album. How important is emotional intensity within your music and is it something you think about?

JC: “Extremely important. I’m hoping that for each individual, this music feels like the soundtrack to a very personal moment. Without that emotion, what are we even doing?”

DL: “I come from a background of dance music, and growing up I went to a ton of raves and parties, I have seen music literally move people and, for years, I concentrated exclusively on getting people in a certain state on the dance floor. It was the most exciting thing I could imagine doing. I still think dancing is one of the most important things humans do, but dance music has become a little too restrictive and repetitive for me. I tend to think of Less Bells (at least my part in it) as being functionally the same as dance music but to a different end. Creating musical structures to create and shift energy around. Building up and breaking things down. It’s building emotional rollercoasters for people.”

S13: Can you tell us about the idea behind the artwork?

JC: “We came across the coyote sculpture on the cover at a local art show. It’s called Chrysallis Coyote and a local artist named Jamie Ferguson created it using ironwood downed in a storm, and a mummified coyote he found on his property out here. I can understand people finding him a little eerie, but I think he’s gorgeous. The perfect symbol of our desert.”

DL: “Julie is dismissing the magic again because I really feel that that mummified coyote showed up at a pivotal time in the recording of the record and acted as some sort of weird talisman for us. I was equal parts horrified and enamoured of this poor dead animal and that really sums up so much of what Less Bells is for me: Equal parts horror and beauty.”  

S13: A lot of artists have different emotions when they finish a project. How do you generally feel after finishing an album?

JC: “There’s a moment of satisfaction, then a sinking feeling…that’s when the real work begins. Promoting and get it out there is 10,000 times more difficult than making the records.”

S13: How much does Joshua Tree and your general surroundings influence your music?

JC: “The desert is quite literally a part of the music now. Feral Ghosts of the Golden West was inspired by what we call the ‘murderwind’ out here, featuring field recordings of that howling wind and packs of coyotes that melt in and out of our yard like ghosts. Wherever we end up, the desert was the right place to be for the last few years of creativity. The conflict between the fast-moving monsoon that’s gone in a day passing over creosotes that can be 500 years old is a really pleasing dissonance. The desert makes suggestions.”

DL: “I feel like it’s such a terrible old cliche to go to some off the grid shack in the middle of nowhere and say you were inspired by ‘the space and the emptiness’ or whatever, but I have to say we’ve been commuting into LA a bit more in the last year and it really makes an incredible difference. The speed at which people communicate in the city affects everything they do. The crushing amount of information we absorb makes a difference. The desert has very little rush…there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’m quite positive we could not have made Less Bells albums while we still lived in Los Angeles. we couldn’t have slowed down enough. I still feel like we are slowing down from our years in L.A. before we moved out here. Eventually we will just be playing one note stretched over six hours. This is my secret goal.”

S13: Do you plan to tour in support of the album?

JC: “We certainly hope so. I don’t have a concrete schedule yet, but stay tuned. We’re playing Late Breakfast in Los Angeles on July 14 to celebrate the release.

The Drowned Ground is out via Meadows Heavy Recorders. Purchase from Bandcamp.