Gordon Gallant: An audio/visual collaboration.

For years now I have been thinking about starting a new side project that would be more about just the music I was writing. My current band Kattalax https://kattalax.bandcamp.com/ is a project that I do with my long time friend Wayne Leechford Wayne's web site.  where he writes most of the music and I handle most of the vocals. We have put out one album and are about to put out a second but the project moves at a very slow pace due to Wayne's work schedule. This has always been understood so over time I thought a second project would be good to fill out the rest of my time. ( and this blog :) )

I had not really had the chance to do much of my own writing of electronic music in Kattalax so I sought out to make my own sound in this project. I knew it would be mostly instrumental since I spent most of my vocal ideas with Kattalax. I always liked the way upright bass sounded with sampled beats so I decided to use that as the main instrument to start out with. (See my post about my U-Bass) U-Bass blog. I also knew that I would be using my baritone guitar as well (see that blog post) Baritone Guitar blog.

My wife Ann does a lot of paintings. I mean a lot of paintings. Below is just a picture of one wall in our house. Our whole place is covered.

She has a PhD in art history and teaches for UNC-Greensboro. She has painted her whole life. She does lectures and writes articles and books covering disabilities in the arts. She has posed for photographer Joel Peter-Witkin on two occasions. Joel Peter-Witkin on Artnet.. you can see one of the photographs Here. Ann had done several painting of me and some of my instruments so I thought it would be fun to have her paint visuals for Gordon Gallant.

Ann in her studio

when I started this project I actually made a list of possible instruments and sounds I would use for this. Upright bass and Baritone guitar were the first two. There were two plugin companies I had in mind who make unusual effects and instruments that I knew I would use:.Puremagnetik & Sample Science. I own a Korg Microkorg and a Novation Mininova but I wanted a synth that I could really improvise on and make a lot of controlled noise. I looked around a bit and discovered the Korg Monotron mini synths. These things are gritty as hell and have the perfect knobs for tweaking many parameters. Small video I did below:

A theme for each album was also something I was toying around with. After a few songs in I noticed that these tracks were starting to sound like decent driving music. They also made me think of music you would have in the back round while you work. I decided to make the theme "Musak for Mundane tasks" with the term "Musak" being a slight different spelling then the sound associated with canned back round music from the past. So far my favorite track from the first album is "Part 7" It also is the most listened to track on the Bandcamp page. Not sure what sets this one apart but listen below:

Music and art for the second album is already under way. This time the theme is: "Simple Machine sounds" with the first two songs being "The Pulley Part 1&2" Ann will be doing more collage based art this time around but it won't be constrained to just that. We will see!