Premiere: GANGI, ‘Animals Figure 427’

Kevin Bronson on July 21st, 2022

0

Much has happened since GANGI last bent ears and mangled convention with their experimental psych-pop. The duo emerged in the late 2000s with beat scene-adjacent sound collages spiked with samples and neuroses. “A soundtrack to cognitive dissonance” was one description, which was apt for the albums the duo released in 2007 and 2012. Ditto for their residency nights at Spaceland in 2009 and appearances at Low End Theory.

A decade later, Matt Gangi now goes by the name Mahadev, having “found Sanatana Dharma and the traditional yoga,” he says. “My main Guru gave me the name Mahadev.” He and collaborator Eric Chramosta dug through their “digital dust” to unearth some recordings that were made around the time of their 2012 album, “Gesture Is.” The three-song suite, “As Fake Estates,” will be out Aug. 5 — and introduce the new name for the project, Fake Estates. One hundred vinyl copies of “As Fake Estates” — pressed then stored for a decade — will be released via GANGI’s own Office of Analogue and Digital label.

Says Chramosta: “Two men’s trash can be the same men’s treasure.”

“Animals Figure 427” is revelatory — imagine if 2008 visitors from a distant galaxy got just close enough to Earth to pick up warped snippets of the song “Animals.”

“‘Animals Figure 427’ is a re-recorded and then ‘mangled’ version of the song ‘Animals’ from our debut album ‘A.’ We sampled our own re-recordings to deconstruct it,” Mahadev says. “The only sample that we didn’t record on instruments is a from the band POWERSOLO, friends of ours from Denmark who found ‘A’ through Seb Doubinsky, an amazing sci-fi writer.

“We thought ‘Animals Figure 427’ was a fun title, as in ‘See figure 427’ in a book, i.e. ‘See this map to tell you how to understand the previous iteration of animals here. See figure 427.’ I thought I chose the number at random, but I was born on the 27th and 27 has always been my favorite number, but I don’t understand 427.

“Eric and I played the original ‘Animals’ live at many shows. It’s a song where we would go really ‘out’ sometimes. I remember a show where Eric was playing synth during ‘Animals’ and I went out into the audience and started reading out interesting things that I found in the local paper for quite a long time.”

The song is an eye into their creative process, which incorporates feeding the music through hand-built circuits and using noise from revived reel-to-reel tape machines. “I was building circuits when we were recording this material and we passed sounds through all kinds of things,” Mahadev explains. “Eric grew up around Otari reel-to-reel tape decks. In middle school, he recorded a mangled symphony to his dad’s Otari deck.

“We were inspired by all the glitch music that was happening in L.A. at the time that we recorded this material. GANGI performed at Low End Theory during those days. The experimental electronics that were happening there influenced these sounds.”

||| Stream: “Animals Figure 427”