A PLEASANT DROWNING – SWALLOWED BY THE WAVES OF GLOGA

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In terms of gear I have a synthesizer, a few pedals, a mixer, kaos pad, other stuff. Generally a contact mic that grows incresingly less responsive the more I put it underwater or into spinning fan blades.

Songs tend to come together very visually. I often imagine a place or person and try to experiment with different texture/melody combinations in order to capture the same feeling. As the layers come together, the songs sometimes take a turn into another direction, but it’s a great starting point. Dregs in Bloom deals with feelings of fear, rejection, love, and the desire to escape the pressures of adulthood. I use a lot of oceanic imagery in my artwork/song titles because, to me, the whole thing is basically a pleasant drowning of sorts. A temporary escape, but also the added stress it creates amidst the relief.

I do. They’re relatively easy to make with like 7 dollars worth of shit from Radioshack. Which is cool because you can get some of the best sounds from destroying them.
I love my synth. It’s the piece of gear I know my way around the most and I still discover new things about it to this day. It has these great string synths that sound huge through a distortion pedal and create really haunting atmospheres through an overdrive.

Dregs in Bloom will be out (hopefully) in early 2013. It’s about one song short of where I want it to be right now. There’s no label releasing it or anything as I have no idea how to go about getting things like that to come together. I feel weird sending my shit to people and being like “Hey do you like this? Put it on your label maybe?” So I’m planning on having it be the first release on my little tiny label Plush Organics, which will basically serve as a way to release the Gloga stuff, as well as side projects. I’m going to start work on a project called Korean Jade once the Gloga album is out, so that’ll be on there eventually. Dregs will be out on cassette and of course digitally. In the future, I’d like to put out some stuff from local artists too. That’ll be a ways off, though.

The mood of the song comes primarily from the melodies. I like to have strong, emotion-inducing melodies and spice them up with different textural elements (feedback, field recordings, effects, etc.) There’s also the contrast of laying cleaner sounding synths on top of crumbling, destroyed ones. I basically tweak things until the image in my head gets less blurry and the sound matches the visual I’m trying to associate with it.

I’m unsure how to gauge the success rate. I have a habit of pushing things I disagree with along for hours and hours trying to make them sound good and then spending a whole day on something I later decide sounds like shit. It can get very frustrating considering I only have so much time to work on music with the day job and all. I do it to myself, though. I have these high standards for what I want my songs to sound like, but I’ll still spend an entire day making a shitty one. It makes the better ones better, I guess.

Feedback creates a very unique atmosphere in music, whether it’s heavily manipulated or completely unfiltered. Since my music is very melodic, I like to use feedback to provide the textural element. I like my music to be almost overloaded with texture, as it adds to the immersion aspect of it, and in that respect I definitely see a connection to images of the sea, waves crashing, etc. Soothing and abrasive at once.

I’ve been creating things in one way or another for as long as I can remember. It’s extremely important to me to express myself creatively, and when I go for long periods without doing it I start to get extremely tired and resentful toward other aspects of my life. So the desire comes from keeping life interesting. I love making music. I love spending all day doing it, drowning myself in it, sharing it with people, and coming out on the other end feeling good about what I’ve created.

 

Gloga is meant to be this crudely stitched together mess of everything I love texturally and rhythmically about noise and industrial music combined with all the melodic elements I love in sad love songs. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to accurately expressing myself creatively. It makes me feel so incredibly inadequate, and yet constantly motivates me. I guess the aim is to keep that going for as long as I can.

Des Moines is weird. It’s not quite “small town” but very far from a big city. You definitely feel sheltered growing up here. When I drive out to Chicago or Minneapolis, or even just Iowa City for shows I always feel somewhat uncomfortable. Like everyone there is living this thing and I just stumbled in like an idiot and everyone can tell I’m an outsider. Those cities have these amazing, diverse music scenes and always get good shows. Nobody worth mentioning ever really makes it to Des Moines. Yip Yip played here not long ago, and I was one of like 10 people there. And they’re fucking awesome. So even the good shows get ruined because nobody goes to them. Some bland indie rock band will play, though, and the place will be packed.

I get frustrated, because I feel like Des Moines has a lot of potential. I want to dig up the weirdos and put on some really great, challenging shows here. And once this record is done and I finalize my live setup, I’m going to try. The sheltering aspect of this place I feel provides the perfect opportunity for a pure kind of creativity that only comes from being stuck in a small city inside your own head all the time.

Gloga released a fantastic mixtape on his soundcloud, and you can follow his ever ebbing shores here.