Navigating A Dream Life

“The moment that Rahm sang this really fast sort of ascending vocal line that contains the album title in it – farawayfromeveryoneyouknow – he originally sang it in gibberish, but they were the words that got fixed to the melody,” begins Mike Haldeman, guitarist of the experimental Avant-indie band, altopalo, before being interrupted by vocalist Rahm Silverglade who is all too eager to give a demonstration of the aforementioned vocal line.

The song under discussion is “lub” – a pulsating tale of uncomfortable tension and insecurity which simmers, swells, and eventually bubbles over towards its climax; making it a consequential moment for the rest of the album.

“As soon as he did that, I jumped around the house and started, like, yelling because it moved me a lot. So, from that moment I was like: ‘oh, this is going to be kind of a theme that appears a couple different times through the record’ and it made sense to introduce it in a sneaky way, in the first song.”

Haldeman continues, explaining the almost clandestine recurring nature of the melody, “It’s like a character that reappears in the story. It’s like an object that you encounter when you’re moving through the same house, and the object appears in a different room sometimes, so you’re like ‘oh, I thought you were in that room, but you’re in this room now.’”

The slow unravelling of a theme isn’t something that is unfamiliar to altopalo, as their lyrics are generally the final piece of the creative puzzle. There’s a subdued air of confrontation that crops up time and time again in farawayfromeveryoneyouknow, despite its raw and contemplative soundscapes.

Where altopalo’s last release frozenthere was a rumination on a world obsessed with digitised escapism, their upcoming album is distinctly more introspective, yet direct, in its lyricism.

In comparing the two bodies of work, Haldeman says, “I feel like we sort of moved into the space of asking ourselves a lot of new questions as opposed to the old record which felt like a lot more issues of relating to people in an age where everything is so digital and mediated. This record is more [about] asking listeners to take a look at moments when they felt in-between things or sort of in transitional phases, you know, moving between spaces and [coming to grips with experiencing the] sort of discomfort and uniqueness of those moments.”

Considering that frozenthere thematically resonated with being paused in time and stuck in an inorganic state, it almost serves as a foreshadowing for altopalo to be releasing a new album into a time where we’re all being forced into that same state of existence.

Expanding on Haldeman’s point, Silverglade continues: “I guess if I were to give ourselves too much artistic credit here, I would say that the album actually has a lot to do with really strange or difficult transitional life moments and, like, the name of the album is farawayfromeveryoneyouknow which is kind of hilariously coincidental. It’s almost – I wouldn’t say this is any worse [of an] environment to consume music digitally, you know. Obviously, it sucks for tour and stuff, but as far as experiencing sounds in this moment, I feel like it’s quite relevant.”

So, it may appear that strange forces are at work in altopalo’s lives. Is it simply a coincidence, or is it premonitory to release the album during a global pandemic? An album which Haldeman describes as being “best absorbed in spaces of solitude and personal reflection, which it seems to be – with the quarantine moment, and everybody being on lockdown – an ideal space for people to be really listening well to things.” The pair burst into laughter as Silverglade adds, “we’re pretty much prophets, am I right?”

Whilst it’s a wonderful thought, unfortunately, it isn’t exactly the case, as altopalo’s somewhat anomalous approach to making music is summed up by Silverglade as being a “constant and arduous flow,” in the sense that a lot of the material that they had used was generated at the start of the recording process of their previous releases, including their first full-length, noneofuscared, which was released in 2015 via Bandcamp.

There’s an element of reckless abandon which permeates the songs on noneofuscared in a way that is indicative of a group of friends coming together for the first time to make some capricious and whimsical noises with their instruments. Whilst the sound may have matured, the process remains the same. Haldeman and Silverglade, along with bassist Jesse Bielenberg, and drummer Dillon Treacy, hole up in Silverglade’s family home in Indiana and essentially banish the outside world for a few weeks in order to truly focus on the music.

“There’s not really a formula or a way we get things done traditionally… I mean, the things that remain the same consistently is that somebody will make a compelling sound in one corner of the house and someone will say ‘let’s record that, that’s compelling’ and then we’ll save that and then, you know, laugh at some other sounds from around the days that we spend together, and eventually kind of sit back down with those ideas and develop them more, but it’s not really like a straight ahead songwriting process; it’s very intermingled with, like, mangling the things all the way through,” says Haldeman.

The majority of altopalo’s creative processes stem from a series of improvisations, and in that house in Indiana, the band tend to keep the tapes rolling in order to capture any and all fleeting moments of genius.

Haldeman explains, “there are mistakes made all the time, and it’s usually through the mistakes that we discover little bits of exciting sounds or things that are completely mangled and messed up in a really inspiring kind of way. I think they’re all driven by taking what each of our respective instruments are capable of and trying to break those expectations, and so there are moments when stuff breaks down or the machinery you’re working with falls apart, and in some way [that] can actually give a lot of inspiration.”

With that kind of insight, it makes sense that making music is an arduous flow for the band. Silverglade mentions that a lot of the time there are scraps of music floating around that are eventually put to the wayside out of sheer frustration and hopelessness, and it’s only “when the spark of hope in one’s heart is rekindled,” that they find themselves rummaging through the hard drives to see what can be salvaged.

Clarifying how they find themselves at these moments of frustration, he explains with a comical tone in his voice, “I feel like some of the most fun times that we have is just generating material, which is just like to sit in a room and make a bunch of fucking sounds. A lot of those moments feel really fun and so you feel confident, like, ‘wow this is such a fun thing, let’s make something out of this’ and then you work with it for like a week or two and it ends up totally disappointing you.”

farawayfromeveryoneyouknow sees altopalo delving further into a world where there is less of a binary between the artist and their instrument. You can tell that the formulaic elements are there, but things are no longer the sum of their parts. From delicate psychedelic soundscapes, to pulsating electronica, disorienting gurgling vocals, and enraptured down-pitched malaise, there is an experimentalism which oozes amorphously from start to finish, which Silverglade puts down to the band becoming a little more fluent in the language of laptop music.

“We generate seeds of songs together, playing with our instruments, but this time around we each had laptop rigs,” he explains, adding that there is a lot more freedom to be gained from working like this as the lines between people’s roles and their instruments is blurred in a compelling way.

On listening to the album without this knowledge, it would be easy to misconstrue the idea that the band focus heavily on post-production in order to blur the lines further, but when challenged with this thought, Silverglade ruminates on the dichotomy between pre and post-production…

“The whole thing is just production. There’s very little time between when Mike plays some noodly guitar part and when it’s pitched up three octaves and, like, had a frequency shifter put on it, you know? It’s all just mangling and generating a sound that just happens in no particular sequence” – almost as though you’re collecting the fragments of something unknown, and then trying to put them into a logical order. Silverglade explains this process in analogies of sudoku and etching drawings onto a piece of paper from a slab of metal.

My interpretation of this is that in order to know when a song is completely finished, you have to be somewhat analytical rather than simply relying on the feeling that the song gives you – especially when you are using fragments of sound that have been ruminated on, and then cast aside, for many years. “The whole thing is just a struggle to, you know, preferably not be analytical about it…” Silverglade starts, before pausing to contemplate his answer fully.

Chuckling as he adds dramatic emphasis to certain words, he continues, “that’s a great question because I have a really hard time not over-analysing things or over-scrutinising the relationship between generating emotional content, like, really deep, truth of the soul content and like EQing out 400hz of these two guitar parts – you know, it’s a really strange thing but both of them have to have a place.” It’s the juxtaposition of these two elements which rings true throughout farawayfromeveryoneyouknow.

In terms of coming up with lyrical content for the new record, altopalo stumbled upon a new tactic, in the form of relying on technology. Haldeman describes their use of the Notes application as “kind of like an idea dump; any time we would stumble across a phrase or a feeling that felt relevant or compelling, we would put it in this iPhone note and slowly over the course of years it became this sprawling humongous document that, I think, when we loaded into a word processor, was almost 80 pages long.”

While the document was used as a touchstone, it was Silverglade and Bielenberg who did the majority of the lyrical brunt work, which is undoubtedly less metaphorical than on frozenthere. Self-described as ruminations on a transitional period, the album feels slightly more ambient and distant than its predecessor – almost in a kind of juxtaposing and protective manner which allows the band to lay bare the bones of their life experiences over the years.

altopalo are no strangers to a little vocal distortion. It is definitely a key element to their sound, but I wondered if there was a conscious decision to strip away the human aspects of the voice whilst delving into more personal topics. The simple answer: no, it’s just a fun thing to do.

“I mean, to be honest with you, when you’re just messing around in a generating and improvising session, and you put autotune on something, it’s like fun as hell, so how could you say no? Beyond that, I don’t know, I guess it feels right to treat the vocals with a similar attitude that we have towards the instruments, which is that they’re all part of this kind of mangled digital reality… I guess it just feels honest in a sort of way to fuck up the vocals, digitally.”

Whilst “mud” – the first single to be released from the album – isn’t the first taste of these so-called fucked up vocals, it is one of the most unexpected of them. What starts off languid, and almost like an ambivalent surrendering to the elements, builds in intensity to the point where you can feel the cogs in the brain unravelling before you. Staggering vocal lines reveal a glitch in the matrix which serves as a reminder that whilst we’re blinded by the softness of the world around us, there are harsh undertones that no matter how much we try to ignore, come and seek us out.

As a group of friends who came together due to the experimental nature of music, it would appear that altopalo have made it imperative to their creativity not to repeat themselves, and to also refine their sound with each release. It’s almost as if the album was made in a state of altered consciousness, the way it fleets between an outpouring of a soporific mood in “partysong” to witnessing a purging and disorientating cathartic release in “hail (lub iii)” which somehow erupts into “powerlines” with its fuzzy staccato drum beats, and rapturous synths which are reminiscent of listening to a party through layers of drywall.

Almost as if to reign it all in, the band throw a curveball in the likes of “funny thoughts, somewhere in the beginning and the end, eat your heart out mh, prelude of light (lub iiii)” which isn’t so much of a song, as it is an insight into life in that house in Indiana.

Silverglade emphasises the peculiarity of the situation in that they had added felt to their piano in order to create more of a delicate tone, but it also meant that it was difficult to pick up on the microphones, so when Haldeman was “munching his cereal; clank, clank, clanking his bowl” in the background, it was all that could be heard when they were trying to track piano – hence Silverglade’s frustrations.

Haldeman adds that these moments of insight are key to understanding how the band works, and allows listeners to gain an understanding of what life is like day-to-day when they’re recording.

“I feel like there are so many little moments of extremely honest interactions between all of us that are, you know, caught in these recordings that are eventually trimmed out and thrown away because that’s not considered part of what your music is supposed to be which is like this super refined, finished, composed thing – but the honest reality is, those microphones are almost always recording in the house when we’re in there and they hear so many moments. It’s a recording of our friendship as well.”

The oldest germinal on the album comes in the form of the somewhat hedonistic and cacophonous “headlock” which was the evolution of an improvisation session which, when it starts to be taken in this direction, generally signals that it’s time for the band to stop playing.

Silverglade describes it as, “when Mike starts screaming into his pick-ups, Dillon starts thrashing, and Jesse starts playing, like, Lex Luger drum samples.” It serves as a reminder that the main reason they play music together, is simply just to have fun.

Haldeman mentions that a really important part of the song coming into focus was Bielenberg discovering that he could map drum samples to a Nintendo 64 controller. He adds that Bielenberg subsequently recorded punk drum beats across half of the album, before himself and Silverglade digress on the relationship between punk and krautrock.

Silverglade divulges, in what I suspect is an air of sarcasm, that by putting “headlock” on the track listing, they intentionally wanted to signal to listeners the kind of shift that they plan on making for record three – an album which is exclusively punk and krautrock. Given the musical trajectory they’ve been coursing on over the years, it wouldn’t be a complete surprise...

In the years that they’ve known each other, each member of the band has often been so busy with other musical projects that trying to get them all in the same room can occasionally feel like herding cats. That’s why it has become necessary to have the house in Indiana as somewhat of a retreat for inducing creativity.

“While we’re working on stuff, you know, there’s a lot of time that we’re spending together where we’re just really getting into the weird, dark, sticky corners of our emotional life worlds, and in the processes of sharing our struggles and sadnesses and fears and excitements with one another, we sort of wind up touching on a set of themes that everyone is collectively experiencing in some way… over the course of spending weeks together in a house we all get a sense of what our emotional zip codes are, and we are able to centre in on a set of feelings and things that feel appropriate for the music that we are creating together,” says Haldeman.

One thing that cropped up time and time again was frustration with autoplay algorithms that are built into streaming services. Discussing the intent behind album closer “now that you’re here, in case you want to stay a while, a warm thing, exit music (kind of)” as a song to allow a moment of reflection, Haldeman says:

“Some random track from an associated artist will be queued automatically, and then the space that is reached by the end of an album will be dramatically disrupted as you’re thrown into a new universe of some adjacent associated artists work, so we originally added this in because we wanted this to kind of interrupt that autoplay algorithm and allow people to sort of stay and sit a while with the crazy ride that we just went on through all these different worlds and allow them to sit in this thing that kind of functions as a warm vat.”

The song itself was an accident of sorts, but the band felt that it was moving enough to become the entity which waves you goodbye and sends you back off into the real world. Talking me through how it all came about, Haldeman sets the scene of the wondrous story by detailing how everyone was in different parts of the house minding their own business, whilst he was playing a baritone guitar; a not-so-uncommon occurence in their world.

Eventually somebody caught wind of his melody and shouted out that they should hit record on it. What they didn’t know was that the only thing hooked up to their computer was a tiny contact microphone which was quite far away. As each of them fell in sync with their instruments and were drawn into an impromptu jam session, that’s when the magic happened...

“Jesse eventually sat down with a Casio keyboard with built-in speakers and started playing a drone, and Rahm across the house started playing some piano, and they all got picked up in this contact mic somehow – like a miracle of engineering! I don’t know, I’m not really sure what the science is, aside from all the sounds resonating through the floor and into this contact mic and then onto the computer. When we listened back to it, we were all astounded that we could hear each other’s bits and it created this warm, beautiful, unique sound object… [we thought] even if it didn’t become a song, it was a thing that really brought us all back to this moment of sitting really quietly in this house for a long time playing with really simple, repetitive figurations together.”

farawayfromeveryoneyouknow provokes a sense of introspection within the listener, and offers a complex deconstruction of what we typically assume to be the relationship between artists and their instruments, and humanity and its everyday experience.

Breaking down the binary between these seemingly concrete things allows us to challenge the social constructs that we’ve fallen into, and question whether any of this is all a necessity. Really, we should be looking inward and using the knowledge we find there, as a way to create a more enjoyable experience that we can project onto the world around us.

By sticking with their original release date, altopalo have offered a soundtrack for rumination which might just bring people closer to understanding themselves and their impact on the world.