Gatekeeper‘s new Optimus Maximus sounds like murder. That’s not to say it’s bad, or even that it’s the kind of aggressive, testosterone-heavy music that seems to actually want to kill you. But all the flavors of synthesizer on the EP—minor-key arpeggios of emulated strings, analog sine-wave groans, washes of white noise—evoke the heyday of the slasher flick in the late 70s and early 80s, when masked maniacs roamed shadowy streets, Ouija boards not only worked but inevitably summoned nameless evils, and vividly red fake blood was spilled by the gallon.
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Surprisingly, neither Arkell nor his musical partner, Aaron David Ross, considers himself an obsessive fan of the genre. “We’re not approaching it at all from the horror-geek angle,” says Ross, a 24-year-old grad student in the School of the Art Institute’s sound program. “I’m approaching it from the classical-music/film-score-geek angle. We’ve kind of been characterized as a horror band. Obviously that’s a huge aesthetic influence, but for us the nostalgia for the horror movie is less than the nostalgia for the horror-movie soundtrack.”
They ended up pursuing a style intimately tied to horror movies because they’d been looking for common ground and it was the first sound they found mutually inspiring. “Before,” says Arkell, “it’d always be like, I’d go over to his house, and he’d play me all of this weird experimental stuff and I’d be like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, cool,’ and he’d come over to my house and I’d play all of this classic house music and he’d be like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, cool.’” They initially bonded over YouTube videos of Mark Shreeve, a British composer of quintessentially 80s electronic music, replete with cheesy orchestra stabs, popping synthetic slap bass, and artificial hand claps—and though that was hardly enough real estate to build a band on, it led them in short order to their present aesthetic.
Gatekeeper are also among the first wave of artists to bring the ongoing revival of early digital synths and drum machines out of the rarefied realm of the gear obsessive and into the popular consciousness—it looks poised to become the next new thing in dance music after the chiptune fad, which was inspired by nostalgia for eight-bit gaming consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. Ross says that Gatekeeper gets a lot of its distinctive sound from his “major synthesizer fetish,” and he’s especially fond of mid- to late-80s instruments, whose flexibility and technological advantages (like MIDI programming) endeared them to Mark Shreeve types even as their cheap-sounding samples, ungainly digital emulation of analog sounds, and perceived “unrockness” made them objects of scorn. Those limitations make old instruments seem quaintly charming, though, compared to modern synths—and however terrible some people consider their sounds, they’re intimately associated with an era when serious, classically informed electronic music—Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream—was strangely popular.
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