Golden Brown – “Ghosts”
Stefan Beck AKA Golden Brown is proving to be truly prolific with the announcement of his seventh full-length album and – the third since October. “Ghosts” is a gently droning saunter through a pacific landscape, pastoral but modern, a much-needed balm for our current era. Beck’s 1936 aluminum lap steel does the heavy lifting while ambient electric guitar adds subtle decor. Luminous is out April 8th via Inner Islands.
This was the first of these tracks that I started with the intention of building the song around the field recording. I really liked this recording with the stream and chattering bugs, so I knew I wanted the song to be fairly minimal in order to highlight it. I have a favorite moment around the 4:00 mark where a cicada or something like it pops up unexpectedly. I used my lap steel first for a kind of drone track and then recorded the melody on it. The last element is some sparse electric guitar with delay to add a little color. This was definitely a track where I had to restrain myself from adding on more and realize that it was complete in its simple, elemental form.
Stefan Beck
Luminous, the sixth full-length release from Golden Brown finds Stefan Beck taking new routes to arrive at his signature blend of cosmic and arcadian soundscapes. These pieces grew out of a desire to find new liberties and expand the range of the Golden Brown lexicon, rather than fall back into the familiar domain of past endeavors. Maintaining a sense of freedom and discovery was paramount to the process of writing and recording the pieces that became “Luminous”.
Tracing the grooves of our accustomed habits can keep us indefinitely locked in, until we intentionally break the pattern. Part of the road to realizing “Luminous” was deciding to only use guitars to generate the tracks, foregoing the mandocello, keyboards, and his wife’s cello playing that graced last year’s “Gems and Minerals”. Out of that limitation emerged a focus on re-imagining Beck’s guitar practice, abandoning his usual tunings and picking patterns, with most of the songs coming out of a daily improvisation practice. He even experimented with a prepared guitar approach on Mammoth Star, ala early twentieth century extended piano techniques from the likes of Cowell and Cage. He also wanted to highlight the unique resonance and idiosyncrasy of a Harmony cast aluminum lap steel from 1936, which provides the leading voice in Ghosts, to haunting effect.
Another important piece of creating “Luminous” was establishing a connection, through music, to the local Colorado landscape and trails where Beck has found much inspiration and respite. Beck made most, if not all, of the field recordings along a particular favorite trail in Boulder County and later composed several of the pieces in dialogue to the rhythms and textures captured in those recordings. A synergistic effect is perhaps most notable on the album’s closer, “Safe and Somewhat Sound,” where a couple of guitars mingle on the periphery with a creek, insects, and birds, coalescing into a new imaginary version of that landscape, while Beck’s fingerpicked acoustic weaves in and out of the bubbling chorus.
