Altered Zones

(img credit= Weird Magic)

By Emilie Friedlander

Electronic duo Gatekeeper may be self-described perfectionists, but their carefully composed “horror scores for the dance floor” (to borrow a term from Brooklyn music promoter Todd Pendu) feel like flights of macabre fantasy. Informed by Chicago house and industrial music, Detroit techno, ‘70s and '80s library records, and Wendy Carlos’ Switched On Bach, their work combines camp theatricality with skeletal simplicity, soundtracking the eternity of the desert as poignantly as it might "John Carpenter’s New York, silhouetted by a full moon.”

The brainchild of a composition major (Aaron David Ross) and a Baudrillard-loving cultural studies student (Matthew Arkell), Gatekeeper formed at Chicago’s Columbia College, and honed their sound alongside acts like White Car and Salem in the city’s prolific (albeit tiny) electronic music scene. The pair recently relocated to Brooklyn, where they have been headlining bills with Laurel Halo and Blondes, putting the finishing touches on their forthcoming Giza EP on Merok, and collaborating with the artist collective Thunder Horse, who design their signature light-and-fog displays. Altered Zones’ Emilie Friedlander interrupted their work on a collaborative VHS tape with Thunder Horse-- featuring videos for each of the EP’s six tracks-- to ask them a few questions in their Bushwick home.

AZ:  How did you guys meet?

Aaron: We both were at art school and had mutual friends. We didn't have a lot of friends who were into experimental music at that point but we were both personally obsessed with it. We just went to college and started messing in my very shitty home studio.

Matt: We both became friends when we were having our funny intellectual crisis.

AZ: What was the crisis?

Aaron David: Well, just trying to deal with the idea of originality and not feeling like it was possible. That being total fracture in how I approached my work creatively.

Matt: Just existing in this weird, irrelevant, contemporary sphere, where it’s all great but you've just been studying and you have all these idols that come from the modernist canon. In some romantic way, you try to place yourself into it, and then you realize, this all already happened and you're not quite up to snuff even. It was fun.

(img credit= Weird Magic)

AZ: Aaron David, what kind of work were you doing in composition school?

Aaron David: They have some electronic music stuff there. I was privately working with some of the faculty there and then writing music for ensembles and film scores, which was totally like my life passion for a while. And maybe that’s the pipe-dream: to write film-scores for hilarious Hollywood movies.

AZ: What type of film would you most like to score?

Aaron David: A fantasy epic.

Matt: Some multi-dimensional, sci-fi film that has scenes in the desert, in the rainforest, post-apocalyptic cityscapes. We would love that.

AZ: Matt, is it true that you come from more of a dance music background?

Matt: I'm definitely not classically trained. When I was 15, I had this British neighbor who got me really into electronic music. I immediately went to Best Buy and bought one of those beat-generating programs that works on your parents’ PC. From then on I lived in a weird basement world of this funny, awkward, weird techno music I was making. I stayed on that. I was really into electronic music in high school. As I got a little bit older, I got into experimental music. That was sort of the trajectory I was on when I met up with this guy.

AZ: Was there an epiphany when you realized what kind of music you wanted to make together?

Matt: We did have a funny moment when the idea crystallized.

Aaron David: It was cheesy...

Matt: We were in this weird...

Aaron David: ...street punk yoga studio place where I worked at the time. They were doing this weird alt yoga thing, and there were gongs everywhere. It was a really contrived spiritual place, and we were there watching YouTube videos with headphones trying to be quiet and found Mark Shreeve. Early ‘80s synth-rock guy who plays with Apple computers on stage with big light shows.

Matt: We found this really funny video that was just so over the top and intense of him covering John Carpenter’s “Assassin Theme” from Assault on Precinct 13.

Aaron David: It's like MIDI rock, you know? No drums, but it's still rock somehow. He's got a leather jacket, playing a DX-7 like he's shredding on a guitar. We hadn't encountered that before. The code words from the beginning somehow remained intact. "Dark New Age Industrial". That was the genre tag we were trying to go for.

AZ: Visuals seem to be just as central to your live performances as the music itself. Was this aspect there from the outset?

Matt: Yes, for us it's completely inseparable. I feel like sometimes we speak about music in purely visual terms when we're making it.

Aaron David: In order to check something we've recorded, we'll watch it with movies...choose from a 100 different things you could watch with it. Mute the source and then see how it's informing the action or energy of the images. I think that's really crucial, especially since we don't have a singer, and there's really nothing to look at. You kind of hope that people will look into their imagination. It sounds cheesy, but we don't put our personalities in the foreground at all. Foregrounding some kind of imagined narrative is a lot better, an easier way for us to approach it.

(img credit= Weird Magic)

AZ: What sort of environments does your music evoke for you personally?

Aaron David: There are so many. For this most recent EP, we were really inspired by ancient ruins, ancient astronauts. We got really into ancient astronaut conspiracy theories. Not so much the conspiracy part but kind of austere beauty of it, the ideas of it, the unknowability of it. It was really engaging and inspiring for sure. We were watching that Chariots of the Gods documentary. It's this ‘70s documentary [based on a book] by this guy named Eric Von Däniken. He is the primary ancient astronaut theorist and he goes through every ancient monument in the world, every pyramid, Ellis Island, Stonehenge, whatever. And he talks about how there is no way the humans could have built any of it. It's really excessive and over the top, but it's awesome.

Matt: We felt like the desert, in the loosest and most generic sense, was a nice place to draw from. It already has this really bizarre exoticized feel to it, through cinema and popular culture over the past few decades. For us it was an interesting meta-idea or environment to visit for source material.

AZ: I also get a strong baroque classical vibe from your sound, at least on a compositional level. Do you have an interest in baroque?

Aaron David: Yeah totally. I came through the whole 20th century of classical music with the biggest headache. I mean I loved it and got really interested in it, but I took in too much and there was a very specific breaking point for me when I went straight back to the source. Listening to that music, I can't think of superior music. And also the Wendy Carlos realizations, expressing this brittle, novice interaction with technology that was really new, totally unexplored. That to me was really profound.

AZ: Also in baroque art, there is this sort of campiness, extravagance.

Aaron David: The sensationalizing of every sensation. Extreme exaggeration.

AZ: Definitely. Who thought of the smoke coming out of the synthesizers?

Aaron David: It was actually Jude from Thunder Horse specifically. We were all watching these fake fire videos on YouTube of people underlighting smoke coming out of PVC like that, but it would be on the floor. Then we thought, "That is amazing, we should make fake fire!"

Matt: We've always used those kinds of things but those guys are just experts at effects. Sometimes they can be like, "How about we put it here?” And ah, it's amazing.

Aaron David: [The smoke] frees everyone to dance, it just frees everyone. And it goes way back for me.  I was using a humidifier as a fog machine when I was doing magic shows when I was like 13. The Phantom of the Opera opened it all up for me. The absurdity of the drama, the romanticism, those overly dramatized, dark ideas that were caricatures of themselves by that point... thats something we attempt to go for too. It's DARK but that dark is very much in quotes.

(img credit= Weird Magic)

AZ: Speaking of quoting, what are your feelings on sampling? I’m thinking mainly about that instrumental passage at the beginning of your single “Optimus Maximus”, which was lifted from that 1978 Synergy song, "Trellis".

Aaron David: We've gotten called out by a few different people and it's really blatant sample…it's the only sample like that that we've actually ever used. We spent a lot of time doing pitch modulations and creating drum-scapes and stuff like that. In the end it still sounds the same, which is funny. I don't have any conceptual problem with it. It's quoting a melody, or some kind of emotional place. We took a melody from The NeverEnding Story for one of our songs and built a whole song out of that. We didn't sample it, but we sort of basically did. It's a collage of all these different places that we're interested in. I feel like the audio sample, the quote, the adopted feeling are all sort of the same thing.

Matt: The reason that it's the only sample we've used isn't because we don't want to do that, it's because it's more fun to make something. We tried to be really cryptic about it though, just in case anyone was going to be a major nerd about it, because a sample came from this Synergy track from this really awesome sci-fi documentary, The Jupiter Menace. And Optimus Maximus was the Greek temple for Jupiter.

Aaron David: We didn't realize it was on one of their albums, we thought it was just part of this film score. We thought it was super obscure and that if anyone was actually watching that film they'd be excited. Potentially it leaves you to find Synergy, and that's an amazing catalogue to explore. You can find their records for like, 79 cents in bins… Nobody really cares, but there are so many artists like that and that's a world that I've been exploring recently: ‘60s and ‘70s synth music. Bruce Haack, those Raymond Scott Soothing Sounds for Baby recordings, the Frontiers of Science compilation. We're about trying to prove that the present is the future in this weird linear sense.

AZ: Is most of what you play in a live setting pre-recorded?

Aaron David: Yes. The stage show is more about the theatrics than any live interpretation of the music. We're playing keyboards but we don't even necessarily need to be playing keyboards. We could've just as easily recorded those parts. We're playing keyboards to have something to do on stage. It's definitely about the theatrics. Our music is so meticulously composed. There is literally no way. [Plus,] there is something really romantic about having all the gear up on stage, having it playing itself.

Matt: We'd rather go nuts in the studio, then present something exciting in public. If someone wants like a live tutorial on how to sync a drum machine to a synthesizer I guess they can come over to our house… Live, we just want to present this over-the-top-ness.

Aaron: That way, it doesn't feel like you're cheapened out of the experience. Or at least, I like to think so.

MP3: Gatekeeper: "Serpent"

--Previously:

Giza EP is out December 13 via Merok