Daiana Feuer on December 15th, 2017

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Orpheo McCord describes “Ghost Ship” as “a sonic journey for a peace of mind,” something we could all use right about now. Considering the Ojai-based musician’s town lit up in flames last week, he’s surely culling all the serenity he can. “Ghost Ship” is the first single from his debut solo album. A collection of ambient music, “Recovery Inhale” will be out Jan 26. Best known as a member of the Grammy-winning group Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, McCord has also toured and played as a drummer and percussionist with The Fall, Cass McCombs and Fool’s Gold over the last decade or so. After all that rocking and rolling, he found catharsis in the freedom of making an album unconstrained by groove and verse/chorus song structure.

A few years back McCord acquired a marimba with a built in amplification system, and began experimenting adding effects pedals, developing a unique sonic palette that he recorded in his home studio. He also incorporated an OP-1 synth, chimes, triangles, a bass drum and a homemade kalimba his friend Sal created with a pickup made from the speaker of a smoke detector. While the album is heavily influenced by reflections of his experience since moving from L.A. to the countryside of Ojai in 2011, his understanding of music has a worldly perspective. McCord graduated Cum Laude from Berklee College of Music, where he studied percussion and discovered a passion for the heavy and sacred rhythms of Africa and South America. This drove him to deepen his studies in Ghana, Mali, Cuba and Morocco, where he played with Touaregs on the rooftops of Timbuktu and participated in all-night trance sessions with Sufi masters in the mountains of Morocco. Let’s take a moment to imagine how cool that was …

Here, McCord answers some questions about the album and how he created the sounds.

What does “Ghost Ship” say to you and how does it relate to the album?

The intention of the entire album is to allow the listener an easy way out of the daily chatter that inundates us all. I had a hard time choosing a piece to release as a single because the album is intended to be experienced as a whole. I felt “Ghost Ship” is a good intro to the meditative experience of the album. It is a slow-evolving piece that starts with the effected elements of the marimba and gradually introduces the organic wooden nature of the instrument.

What role did improvisation play in creating the songs?

Improvisation is a huge part of the process. I spent a lot of time in my home studio in Ojai experimenting and developing this sonic palette. Through improvisation, I’d come up with themes that found their way onto the album. Some of the elements of the album are pure improvisation that were a part of the magic in real time I could not recreate.

Did you add effects after recording or were the effects part of the live process?

Almost all of the effects were apart of the live recordings. Most of the sound is the marimba and kalimba running through a pedal board. There were some plug-ins used and at the end of “Ghost Ship” we added an ’80s Ibanez Analog Delay.

What was the instrument setup like?

I have a custom made marimba that was built back in the day by James “Bird” Loveless for a group he was in called Diga Rhythm Band with Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain. He crafted a Piezo pickup system so he could amplify the instrument in larger venues. I took it a step further and began running effects and opened up an untouched world of possibility. The marimba was designed to break down into two sections for touring and I keep the two sections separated and run specific effects to upper octaves and different ones to the lower octaves expanding my palette even further. There’s also kalimba, chimes running through effects with a contact mic, triangles and a very boomy bass drum mounted underneath the high marimba.

||| Stream: “Ghost Ship”

||| Live: Orpheo McCord celebrates his record release at Zebulon on Jan. 30 with special guests Mikael Jorgensen, Joel Shearer and Oliver Kraus. Tickets.