Ryan Sullivan invites me into the Fulton Market loft he shares with a couple roommates and an art studio and pours me a vodka tonic. Then he shows me where he recorded the first Golden Birthday album, Infinite Leagues. It’s not a studio but a table—a long work table that fills most of his cluttered, warrenlike living space. It’s strewn with keyboards dating from the Reagan years, effects units like an 80s Korg phaser and an entry-level Danelectro pedal, and, most significant, a Tascam eight-track cassette recorder. It’s been more than a decade since this rig was the premier piece of home-recording gear for musicians on a budget, but Sullivan has only had it for a few months—he recorded Infinite Leagues, which comes out December 19 on the local Rainbow Body label, on an even more primitive Fostex four-track.
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It looks like the workstation of a man whose first consideration is keeping costs down, but once you listen to the album it’s clear that Sullivan’s equipment choices go hand-in-hand with his aesthetic choices. Recorded with modern gear, the backing tracks of his subdued and darkly romantic pop songs might sound like a throwback to the crystalline, ethereal goth of the late-90s 4AD catalog—especially the last couple Dead Can Dance records—but scuffed up with tape hiss and analog overdrive, they have a murky basement-punk feel. Though his music shares the swooning, mopey melodic sensibility of English postpunk like Echo & the Bunnymen or even Joy Division, from a production standpoint all they really have in common is a profound love of reverb.
The opening cut, “Something, Sometime, Someshine,” starts with a droning guitar chord that sounds like it’s coming out of a telephone earpiece, then unfolds into fuzzy, syrupy psych-pop that could pass for a long-lost Jesus and Mary Chain demo. It’s dense and full, but there’s not actually a whole lot happening: its only component parts are drum machine, that droning guitar, another guitar repeating a short lead, and Sullivan’s vocals, which give way to a chirping analog synth during the instrumental bits. The simple arrangement gets its heft from his loose hand with cheap effects pedals and the particular kind of warm, overdriven compression you get when you push a cassette tape into the red. In fact it’s only toward the end of the album that he tries bouncing tracks, a method of compiling takes that makes it possible to record more layers with a simple deck.
Early this month Golden Birthday recorded in Oram’s bedroom, demoing some of that new material and redoing a song from Infinite Leagues that they all feel is better in the version developed by the live band. They used the Pro Tools setup on Griffin’s computer, but that’s not to say they’ve suddenly outgrown their taste for cheap analog sounds, though—at their record release show at AV-aerie this Friday, they’ll be selling the new recordings exclusively on cassette tapes.v
Fri 12/19, 9 PM, AV-aerie, 2000 W. Fulton #310, 312-850-4030, $5. A
