As Gonerfest heats up this week, and fans, bands, and friends catch up throughout the city, there’s another universe unfolding as well, a zone where musicians hear other musicians and some kind of alchemy occurs. Any resulting collaborations can cause great new works of art to blossom. Case in point: the new LP by Optic Sink, Glass Blocks.
The group’s 2020 debut took the bold step, not often heard in Memphis, of pairing Natalie Hoffmann’s dry, disaffected vocals (more restrained than her work in Nots) with her ingenious old-school synth lines and drum machine beats from Ben Bauermeister (Magic Kids, Toxie). “I really like the tension of a more human voice that is sounding pretty machine-like, but mixed with these actual machines,” Hoffmann told the Memphis Flyer at the time. Meanwhile, it turned out a band in faraway Boston was simultaneously treading adjacent territory.
“Sweeping Promises are amazing!” says Hoffman today. “When that first album came out in the middle of lockdown, I heard it on WYXR and thought, ‘What is this? This is phenomenal.’” As it turned out, Sweeping Promises were also a duo of sorts (bringing in a drummer for live sets), its principal members being Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug, both focused on their own variety of post-punk minimalism. Their debut, Hunger for a Way Out, was “written and recorded with a patented ‘single mic technique’ just before quarantine,” as their Bandcamp page states.
Hoffman wasn’t alone in her love of the band’s debut. Jenn Pelly of The New Yorker recently wrote, “Though written before the pandemic, the record’s anthemic title song became a timely underground hit last year, bursting at its own taut edges.” Finally, at Gonerfest 18 in 2021, Hoffman was able to see Sweeping Promises live only hours after Optic Sink played. That, in turn, led to the two bands sharing a bill a year later.
“We played a show together last August at Growlers and they stayed at my house,” Hoffman recalls. “We had a really fun time and all became friends immediately. And then they asked if they could record the next Optic Sink album, which we hadn’t even started writing! Of course I said yes.”
By then Mondal and Schnug had resettled in Lawrence, Kansas, and after some time well spent cooking up new material, Optic Sink made their way north in the heart of winter. By then, the Memphis group was a trio, with Keith Cooper (Sheiks, Tennessee Screamers) on bass. He leapt into his new role as the group readied material. Unlike many synth artists who construct beats and skronks “in the box” of a computer screen, Optic Sink composes and performs on actual hardware in the moment, as three humans, and record their basic tracks live as such. That makes preparation crucial.
“We were working so hard to get all the songs on the record almost finished before we went to record it,” says Bauermeister. “Yeah, but we didn’t,” he laughs. “There were still one or two that were not fully fleshed out. But those might have been the best ones in the end. That’s a good strategy. Going into a studio to record something, and having only 70 percent of the material ready. If you only have some of it done, that leaves more room for magic.”
Being in Mondal and Schnug’s new space encouraged that magic, not only due to the choice gear of the studio, but also via the charms of the Upper Midwest in January. “We knew it was freezing cold up there. So we knew we were up there just to record. It was snowing and we were away from home. And the room we recorded in was previously a painting studio, a beautiful window-filled room that had this amazing energy.”
On the end result, with Schnug producing, engineering, and adding the odd part here and there, Optic Sink seems to have achieved a new level of cohesion and richness in their sound with Glass Blocks. With the new LP out since last week, and a new Sweeping Promises album, Good Living is Coming for You, out as well, this year’s Gonerfest sees both groups coming full circle when they each take the stage at Railgarten this Friday. And who knows what other alchemy this festival may yet conjure up?
Gonerfest 20 runs from Thursday, September 28th, through Sunday, October 1st, at Railgarten. For details, visit gonerfest.com.
