Kevin Bronson on August 20th, 2015

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Chris Lynch has just installed a toilet and he’s damned proud.

“Wanna see it?” he asks a visitor to “Space Command,” the name he and Gardens & Villa co-conspirator Adam Rasmussen have given to their new work space, a 1,000-square-foot rectangle carved out of a re-purposed industrial building in Los Angeles’ Frogtown. The place has cement floors and a corrugated metal roof, and Lynch weaves his way through stacks of construction materials and band gear to a dark corner of the room. There it is, a shiny new functioning commode. The bushes and trees of Frogtown are safe.

Around them are similar spaces inhabited by artists and creatives of all stripes, making for a cool enclave where folks gather in a common area on a recent evening to swig cheap beer. Beyond the back fence of the compound is a verdant stretch of the Los Angeles River, a spot where some occasionally weird things go on (the “666s” on the outside fence have been painted over) but pretty enough to add to the bohemian ambiance.

Here, where Lynch and Rasmussen recently relocated from a similarly boho warehouse in Glassell Park, the duo writes songs every day. They are partitioning off a room to convert into a recording studio. They can nap on the couch if they aren’t too particular about bugs crawling on them while they sleep. One thing for sure: This is not Santa Barbara, their headquarters until about a year ago.

Their move to Los Angeles and full commitment to the adage “work is art is life is work is art” have yielded the new album “Music for Dogs,” Gardens & Villa’s third, out Friday via Secretly Canadian. Arriving a year and a half after “Dunes,” “Music for Dogs” is a synth- and (yes) wood flute-spiked, avant-pop torrent on coping with the technology Zeitgeist and all the paranoia, voyeurism, nihilism, disconnectedness and regressive behavior it breeds. “But it has its benefits too,” Lynch points out with a smile.

The album, featuring the rhythm section of Dusty Ineman (drums) and Shane McKillop (bass), was produced by Jacob Portrait (Unknown Mortal Orchestra), who poked and prodded to force the duo into some uncharted territory. After enjoying a sunset over the L.A. River, Lynch and Rasmussen talked about it:

||| Stream: “Fixations”

Sunset over the L.A. River is pretty and all, but it’s no Santa Barbara.

Adam Rasmussen: Those pristine sunsets in Santa Barbara are really overrated (laughing).

Chris Lynch: A lot of stuff in our lives kinda collapsed after “Dunes” — relationships and our whole way of life that we’d been maintaining for four or five years. “Dunes” came out, and it wasn’t received very well, and the label wasn’t happy about it, and the drummer ended up leaving, and our girlfriends broke up with us. We were kinda homeless and we thought, “Should we just give up, man? Was that our last record?” And then we got this crazy second wind. Adam and I were like, “We have to go out with a bang. Let’s make something we really believe in. Let’s move to L.A. and have some fun.” We immediately found the warehouse in Glassell Park, and we left all of our current lives at the time. We came down here with the sole intention of getting away. I’ve always hated Los Angeles because I grew up in Orange County. Now, I actually really love it. It took moving back down here to find what I really loved about it … you know, the stuff from my childhood, like the smoggy sunsets.

The new environment got the creative juices flowing again?

Chris Lynch: We fell into this crazy community that was really accepting of us. It was a nonstop creative circus in the nine months leading into recording music.

Adam Rasmussen: We worked. You come up for air every so often, have a cigarette and then go back in the studio.

So after the previous disappointment — which I confess I didn’t realize was a disappointment — what was your mindset?

Chris Lynch: We thought, “What was the record we wanted to make when we were 14?” We’d fallen out of touch. The modern musical world is so overpopulated, and you have to try so hard to break through walls, which then lead to more walls. We were really burned out. The process we had writing this record and the fun we had writing it made us fall back in love with music. We had to reach rock bottom to realize that. We were out of money, the label was ready to drop us, and then we started sending them demos, and they were like, “Oh, here’s a little more money.” At the end of it, they believed in the demos so much that we went into even more debt to pay for the record.

Adam Rasmussen: We had toured that first record for 18 months …

Chris Lynch: We didn’t want to do that ever again …

Adam Rasmussen: But when you’re a young band, the tour is so exciting and you’re so green, you want to keep going. It’s the first time you’ve ever had an adventure like that.

||| Watch: The Gardens & Villa mini-documentary, “Maximize,” directed by David Del Sur

I remember seeing you guys at the Silverlake Lounge, winter of 2010-11. It was like, ‘Hey, look a nice indie band with a wood flute.’ How do you go from that to writing a song like “General Research?”

Chris Lynch: I don’t know, we had some weird stuff on our first album too. And “General Research” has wood flute.  But it started out with us wanting to write a song like “Paperback Writer,” a song as if we were a blog writer. And then it became more of a reality check — the first line is “Emails coming through the night / the next one sounds like shit again / the next one blows your mind.”

You’ve captured my whole life in a verse.

Chris Lynch: Yes, but the first verse is as if I’m a blog writer, and the second is me as a musician looking through the blogs, going “down the rabbit hole,” looking for ideas. “Cultural modulation” — oscillating between all these different cultures. Because that’s what internet culture is.

Adam Rasmussen: It addresses several themes about the 21st century. Like the fascination over what’s trending …

As a creative, are those trips down the rabbit hole encouraging or discouraging?

Chris Lynch: They can be both. For us, that song is just stating the obvious. No one is really exploring these huge changes that are happening the past 10 years, these things that are changing the core of how we communicate. … There’s a lot to suggest that it’s negative. But it’s a lot like everything — is modernity negative or positive? We got atomic bombs, we also got surgery and penicillin. We got some rad stuff and some bad stuff. We got solar power but we got bad stuff in the ocean. But I do think it’s the responsibility of artists to help people navigate through this new age.

Aren’t there algorithms for that?

Chris Lynch: (laughing) We all need to wait for the quantum computer to give us the directions …

Adam Rasmussen: To the Messiah. He will come to us through the quantum computer.

They’re in control, you know. Computers.

Adam Rasmussen: From our side, we think about that all the time. There’s gonna be an algorithm where you tell it, “I want it to be a little bit like WC, and some Kinks and a little bit Roxy Music,” and the app is gonna go whoooosh, SONG. And then we’re out of a job.

Chris Lynch: It’s like Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.” In the future, machines will just be able to do  a lot of things better. … Yet I think a machine will never play real punk, or be able to strum a guitar in the subway and make people’s eyes well up with tears. The human element will always be powerful, regardless of how complex machines get.

||| Stream: “Everybody”

“Maximize Results” is rather dark too.

Chris Lynch: It’s about voyeurism, a lot of “1984.” It’s about the near future, with dystopian episodes that deal with technology in the different ways. I thought this was really what our record was about. “Maximize Results” is about a love story in the not-so-distant future where a camera is watching you while you watch it — surveillance and modern sexuality.

Adam Rasmussen: Voyeurism is encouraged. Like, swipe, like, swipe, like swipe. … And all the time we’re behind this veil feeding the whole world information. We’re still living and breathing in the real world, and then there’s this other whole world of that. While we’re trying to maintain our humanity.

How valuable is all that information?

Chris Lynch: It’s mostly shit. … I feel like a lot of younger kids are thinking, Eff my phone, I wonder what it was like before this. But I feel like there’s a certain group of millennials who look at you like you’re nuts if you talk bad about Facebook or Instagram or anything. They’re like, “You’re being weird. You’re making me feel bad, and I never wanna feel bad.”

With all these ideas bombarding you, how did the songwriting process work?

Chris Lynch: Like always, we play separately for a while. One of us will play “bah-bah-bah, bah-bah-bah, bah,” and the other guy will go, “That’s amazing.” Pretty much every song I write I get to a certain point and then I think “I have to talk to Adam.” He connects the dots. We both just finish each other’s stuff.

Do you guys ever need a referee?

Chris Lynch: I feel like we had one in Jake, who we recorded our album with. He kinda shredded some of our entire songs and pushed us to get into a whole new style of writing. He’d say thing like, “This part sucks” and “I know you can do better. Go into that room and don’t come out until it’s better.” And every time we would come out with something that was better, and Jake would go crazy about it.

Adam Rasmussen: As much as some of that is deemed unprofessional now, it’s really valuable to have somebody who knows they can push you. If you trust them. A coach figure. People who don’t take criticism like that end up making shitty art.

This record sounds more experimental than the last …

Chris Lynch: Our first record was done all to tape, all in two weeks. The second one took 10 times as long — all quantized and drum machine and synthesizer. We didn’t believe in it. We felt it was too gridded out.

Adam Rasmussen: Every note under a microscope.

Chris Lynch: That’s why we did this one all live in seven days at Kingsize (Studios). Maybe the sonics of record reflect some of Jake’s wizardry. We wanted this record to be meticulously thought out. We didn’t want it to sound totally retro or referential — we wanted it sound like a modern record. … And it’s jarring. The sonics are abrasive.

As abrasive as wood flute can be. I’m waiting for the “Enya-O” record … you know, Enya plus Eno.

Chris Lynch: Hey, the next record might be new age. We’re working on a dub EP, and some experimental ambient things. There’s going to be a whole mushroom cloud.

But back to the new one a second — the major theme of “Music for Dogs” is disconnectedness, right?

Chris Lynch: Yeah, like [adopted his stoner voice] “Hey, we’re good, we’re chill, we’re disconnected …” But the question is how are we still so happy being disconnected? That’s the modern riddle. At the end of the day, the answer to all this shit that we found was really obvious from the beginning. It was do it yourself.

Adam Rasmussen: And you could apply that to anything. You could standing in line and wait somebody to find your band and like your record, or you could just build your own studio like we’re doing. And set up some gear and just make songs every day, without worrying about people coming in to give you the thumbs-up. You make songs like you would make a garden.

Chris Lynch: It’s all about resilience. Just genuinely trusting yourself as an animal. Try to find the beauty and the happiness in things. Our response to it is: Quit worrying about your fake social relationships that don’t even really exist, and build a fucking bathroom.

||| Also: Watch the video for “Fixations”

||| Live: Gardens & Villa headline the Roxy Theatre on Nov. 12.