LABRYYYNtH
In a labyrinth, every turn that doesn’t lead toward the exit is a trap. But what if each turn actually means something bigger, even the ones that got you lost and the ones that led to echoing dead-end corridors? LABRYYYNtH, a new studio project from members of Dr. Dog and Golden Boots, is a sonic exploration of all those paths that don’t lead outward, reveling in what’s beautiful about the wrong turns and reconsidering whether there even needs to be a way out in the first place.
“This is not an offshoot or side project. It was a long process of digging into different ways of thinking about songs and different ways to enjoy time in the studio,” says Dimitri Manos, Dr. Dog’s multi-instrumentalist. “It was fun to get a little reckless, hanging out late at night, finding weird reasons to record and following every rabbit hole we found.”
With songs about out-of-body experiences and the end of the world (as well as a little of the here and now) the album’s sci-fi subject matter aligns well inside the realm of a labyrinth. Recording haphazardly in different studios and homes – and at one point the first walk-in icebox to exist in Tucson – Manos, Nathan Sabatino and Ryen Eggleston (all of the warped alt-country band Golden Boots) worked bedroom-taper style, together as well as individually, usually in the absence of the right equipment, during frazzled late-night sessions.
LABRYYYNtH mixed the self-titled record at Mt. Slippery, Dr. Dog’s Philadelphia studio, stitching together the months and months of tapes, songs that had been started at various times, songs that didn’t fit anywhere else, but that all had something in common. The deliberate studio approach is in contrast to the way the musicians usually work, says Sabatino, who has co-produced Dr. Dog’s last two records and produced or engineered on dozens of other projects (White Rabbits, No Bunny, Harlem).
“What you hear on the record is more stripped down. The intention was to go for less of the live band sound and make things more heavily manipulated, with lots of moog synthesizer and way more sonic treatments,” Sabatino says. “We took the sort of abstract sounds that would generally be in the background and put those at the forefront, erasing a lot of the things you’d expect to hear so what’s left is this artificial sense of space around things.”
For the recording, the band came up with deliberately restrictive concepts and then stuck to those limitations. For example, they’d remove the cymbals from a drum kit and then set up microphones to deliver more of a mechanical sound, pack drums with fiberglass insulation, use old speaker cones as drum mics and hit cassette cases in lieu of hand claps.
The deconstructive recording process forced the question of what exactly are the elements that make up a song. How can songs exist in atypical ways, in the absence of their more traditional aspects?
“The songs themselves really run the gamut. There are straight-up love songs, lust songs, at least one heartbreak song, material that speaks about the destructive power of greed that is stealing our individuality and our very world from us, as well as strange tales from everyday weirdness, and of course death in apocalyptical futures,” Eggleston says.
RIYL: Dr. Dog, Golden Boots, Delta Spirit, Zeus, Foxygen
TRY: #1, 2, 4, 5, 10
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