Music Monday: The production of indie psychedelia

He’d done this before. Kenny Becker had the process down to a tee: noodle guitar ideas or piano progressions, figure out a gibberish singing melody, fill it in with syllables, get to producing, add grit and finally usurp that “gibberish” with lyrics. This process bore his songs. 

When you’re a creative, you know when it “works,” he said. Nontraditional studio access and divorce, however, tend to change things. 

Since 2015 he’d been writing and producing for his then solo-project: GOON. 

“That’s tight,” Becker said. “It’s one word, one syllable.” 

Becker, in a video interview with WDCE, said he always wanted a full band sound. He emulated this style with his debut EP, “Dusk of Punk,” released only a year after GOON’s inception. 

Becker found bandmates in 2019 and together they released the first GOON LP “Heaven is Humming.” It was “ambitious, big sounding, grungy, weird record,” but one that Becker said had notable “first record energy.” 

Afterwards, Becker found another set of bandmates. This ushered in the band’s “second phase” and two albums. 

“It’s been an interesting exercise in finding the power in relinquishing control,” he said. “I’m still a dictator, but at least I’m kind of a nice one.”

Becker used “Dream 3,” released July 11, as an opportunity to push himself. This album, which is not a sequel to any “Dream 1” or “Dream 2,” was a sonic reaction to all that he had previously recorded. It’s a reflection on nostalgia that he hoped would avoid falling into cliché.

This required competency on two fronts: instrumental and lyrical. 

“We didn’t have the budget to go into a nice studio,” Becker said. “But Claire [Morison], who is now my girlfriend, just had a studio. She was just down to work on this record with us, she caught the vision.”

Unlike with past projects, like “Heaven is Humming,” where the band had rehearsed nearly complete songs before entering the studio, GOON adopted a permanent and destructive mode of production. 

“Everything on this record has touched tape,” Becker said. “We would often record it digitally and then bounce that to tape and then back into the computer.” 

Each generation bounced from computer, to tape, to computer, to tape, and back again, and over again would degrade the sound. 

“The best example is probably the synth in the song ‘For Cutting the Grass,’” Becker said. “It’s super gritty and graining and it feels like it’s falling apart; it did not sound like that two generations prior. It was quite stable.”

The guitar part for “Jaw” was recorded normally, then the tape was sped up. This pitched the track up; Becker tuned to match. Then he recorded at this higher pitch. Then he slowed the tape down, re-tuned and re-recorded — layers resting upon each other in one tape. 

Some tapes themselves were nice, others crappy. Sometimes, Becker would physically crinkle them. Takes were not saved over. If something was ruined over a generation, it was ruined for good — there were no re-do’s. It was “intentionally very destructive,” he said.

“There’s intentional grit and grain, it’s not just trying to give liminal spaces or nostalgia,” he said. “There’s something deeply human about a sound that is saturated in a certain way.”

Saturation was married with analogue synthesizers and acoustic instruments to create a full and timeless sound. As an instrumental experience, “Dream 3” lies somewhere on the Venn diagram of Glass Animal’s “Zaba” and Moses Gunn Collective’s “Mercy Mountain.”

By the time the instrumentation was finished, Becker’s marriage began to dissolve and so did his original vision for “Dream 3.” Unwritten lyrics shifted away from joy and into a downward spiral, soft writing remained his constant. 

Use guardrails and write simply, these are his restraints. They signal confidence and spur creativity. 

“I’m just gonna try to make this sound childlike. Not childish, childlike,” he explained. “It puts gutter-lane bars up that prevent you from being too pretentious.” 

At this point, the process becomes something of a game. The melodic singing line already exists; it's just a matter of filling in the “da, da, duh, duh, dah’s” with real words. 

“I try to not be too mushy-gooshy,” he added. “As soon as I feel like I’m going that way I try to say something that brings you back to the present, or something that sounds more curious than like overly, romantically nostalgic.”

Personal strife still bled into the record. 

“‘Apple Patch’ was an attempt to, in the pits of despair, remind my wife, to try to get her to remember that she still loved me,” Becker said. “I didn’t write any of the lyrics until later, once we really broke up, and I was in utter pain. I wrote some really emo lyrics to go over a song that was almost an attempt at restoring the love. It became a meditation on its death.”

With all lyrics penned and songs arranged, “Dream 3” was finished. The storytelling is simple, yet compelling; the melodies sweet, yet distorted. It looks straightforward and pristine, but bite into it and you’ll find something truly unique. It’s like a fairytale — the opening track is even titled ‘Begin Here.’ 

“I really like that concept,” Becker said. “It almost sounds like a children’s audiobook.” 

This was, admittedly, the only track that Becker had a planned placement for.

In the decade since its inception, GOON has taken on new meaning; Becker is still deciding how he feels about it. 

“Stop gooning,” he said. “No, I’m just kidding, I don't give a shit.”

GOON is now on their first real tour — the one in 2019 didn’t count, that was the “character building tour,” Becker said. This tour, which began September 10 and passes through Richmond on Sept.27, is here to promote the mystical “Dream 3.” 

Contact opinions and columns editor Jonathan Sackett at jonathan.sackett@richmond.edu